.:: Blabbering ChillyJilly ::.

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Thursday, 2 August 2007 @ 11:17 pm

MN Bridge Collapse!!

I hope all is fine there!

News taken from Chicagotribune.com

man, shit happens when you dun wan it to happen, i am glad that all my friends and people around me i know are doing fine over there. Pray for the missing souls and victims.

then again, i will be so cautious when crossing a bridge.

Focus shifts to recovery in Twin Cities bridge collapse
At least 4 killed, 60 injured as dozens of vehicles tumble off span into Minnesota stretch of Mississippi River MINNEAPOLIS - Numerous vehicles caught on fire and rescuers plucked survivors from the water. The wreckage of the bridge was scattered along the east bank of the Mississippi, and a large piece of roadway remained on the west bank.

Peter Siddons was on his commute home north when he heard "crunching" and saw the bridge start to roll and then crumple, he told the Star Tribune. "It kept collapsing, down, down, down until it got to me."

His car dropped with the bridge but stopped when his car rolled into the car in front of him. He got out of his car, jumped over the crevice between the highway lanes and crawled up the steeply tilted section of broken bridge and jumped to the ground.
"I thought I was dead," said the senior vice president at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. "Honestly, I honestly did. I thought it was over.

Chris Breer, 38, of Minneapolis lives in a Seven Corners apartment near the bridge and took off on his bicycle after a television bulletin reported the collapse. Breer said he thought he would see collapsed scaffolding from the repair work under way at the bridge.
"The worst part was walking out there," he said. "It was sickening. I thought it was going to be a partial collapse. ... "When I got out, it wasn't a partial collapse. The bridge was gone.

"He said police officers were climbing over scaffolding at both ends of the bridge to get to victims. He was taking video of the scene from the 10th Avenue Bridge, next to the I-35W span, when an officer ordered him to leave.

Breer's 20-second video, taken almost 20 minutes after the collapse, shows people standing on flattened sections of the bridge just inches over the river, as well as pancaked cars and fires beginning to erupt on the bridge. The only sound was of distant sirens and a gust of wind.
"You could see people on the bottom outside their cars," he said. "They looked fine, like not even hurt. How that happened I don't know." The motorists had fallen about 50 feet in their vehicles, Breer said.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty called the collapse a "catastrophe of historic proportions for Minnesota."
A team from the National Transportation Safety Board was expected to arrive Thursday to begin a forensic analysis and comb through maintenance and inspection records. The safety board team will range from structural engineers to emergency response specialists. A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department said the collapse did not appear to be terrorism-related.
Minnesota transportation officials said the bridge deck was scheduled for replacement as early as 2020, but no structural deficiencies were detected during inspections last year and in 2005. Repairs described as "cosmetic" were made.
An evaluation of the bridge in 2001 turned up no signs of stress-related cracking in the bridge's deck truss. But the Minnesota Department of Transportation study showed several fatigue problems with the roadway connection leading to the bridge.The current bridge work involved concrete repair, guardrail and lighting replacement and work on the joints, according to state transportation officials.Mary Small, who lives in northeast Minneapolis, said I-35W is "not a bridge of strangers." Most of her family live along the corridor and use the bridge regularly. Her son was on the bridge four minutes before it collapsed, she said. "When we heard about it, we had to do a complete head count," she said. "It's a bridge of our neighbors and our family and our friends."People who work near the bridge said it had been under construction for most of the summer with resurfacing work. It is a structure that only carries vehicles, with other nearby spans carrying rail and pedestrian traffic.The bridge is near the University of Minnesota campus as well as the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, home of the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings."The bridge got a clean bill of health three years ago, and obviously something went terribly wrong," Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman said on CNN.Melissa Hughes of Minneapolis was driving a car that ended up under the north end of the bridge. "It seemed like people and things were in the air that weren't supposed to be there," she said.

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