At 6pm today, the interstate I35W over the Mississippi river collapsed, both north and south direction, about a 1/4 mile of bridge. Are all the other Minnesota Dopers ok?
I saw it at Culvers as soon as we sat down. Some idiot old guy wanted to watch something else. He was told tough crap, the channel stays on this. How does the whole bridge come down like that? Anybody with links post them. The school bus stopped and the children all were ok. Some kind of bridge repair was being done. It may have been why this happened.
Great Minds Think Alike.
lno and I were home and not headed in that direction when it happened. Glad we don’t commute in that area. So far, most of our friends have checked in.
CNN has live video at their website. They’ve also got a picture of the collapsed part in the Mississippi:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/01/bridge.collapse.ap/index.html
More video here (click on alert box at top):
The whole thing just fell straight down it looks like.
My twin brother goes him under that bridge. I haven’t been able to get a hold of him because the cell towers are jammed.
WTF happened?!? How does something like this just happen?
–FCOD
I know, right? One article I read said the bridge was under construction. That so? Don’t know if it’s related or not.
twin brother is okie dokie.
it is hard to believe this bridge came down.
they seem to be speculating that construction set off some sort of vibration and the bridge came down. from what survivors said, there was a rumble, then a thud. buildings in the area were shaken as well.
glad to hear your brother is okay. major relief!!
There was construction on the bridge at the time. They don’t know that’s the cause, though. It was also a single span across the river, with no pilings in the water.
Please tell us the SECOND you get hold of him!
Homeland Security is saying it doesn’t appear to be terrorism. It doesn’t look like any explosives went off, just a straight collapse…but holy cow! How did it happen?
From what I’ve heard, they were just doing surface work, although there were some construction guys using jackhammers.
I can’t believe jackhammers would be the cause…
An officeworker nearby says what he heard wasn’t like an explosion – he described it as a “big dumptruck going over a big bump.”
It’s been going on for over a month and just the other day, we were commenting that it was some pretty impressive surface work. There’s been large amounts of debris under the bridge - softball chunks of rock falling and such. Part of my work is at a U lab facility immediately under the bridge on the east bank and everyone has been parking in a different spot to avoid it.
They’re interviewing a woman who was on the bridge at the time, she says she felt a freefall, saw workers flying through the air, and heard a big crash, which was a car landing on the back of her car (they showed a picture of her car). She says traffic was stopped or nearly stopped at the time.
She says she saw another guy who was hurt badly by getting out of his car while it was happening (so it must not have been all at once…).
Just in from CNN, one person is dead in this collapse.
Wait, just in, three.
This is awful. I can’t believe that this sort of thing can happen in 2007. It’s inconceivable. Someone on the news just said, “Certainly there will be tons of engineers coming to figure out what happened.” I guess they have to come to close the stable door. :rolleyes: :mad:
ETA: I found the bridge on Google Maps because I was curious as to the size of the bridge. Here’s a link. That’s a pretty big bridge.
–FCOD
Okay, I will! (see post #9)