I35W bridge in Minneapolis

When I first learned of the 135W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, I was stunned. It so defies my concept of the place.

The adjectives haphazard, jerry-built or “structurally deficient” don’t come to mind for Minnesota — I’ve always thought of it as solid and dependable and safe. Maybe this come of having a mother who worked in preventive medicine at the Mayo Clinic, but I think of Minnesota as a showplace for OSHA. For example, until this, I believe the state had the fewest highway fatalities per miles driven of any in the country. Dangerous is not a word that comes to mind when describing the social, political, or psychological makeup of the place — or the physical infrastructure, either.

I think it’s born of weather. When climate comes at you in such overwhelming bellows of God’s breath, from thunderstorms to tornadoes to blizzards, you learn to build things solid and safe so you can rely on ’em.

It so surprised me that at first I had a hard time placing which bridge they meant. I was checking the startribune web site and happened on the front page blurb a short while after the collapse. I confused it with the I 94 bridge, running east / west over the Mississippi toward St. Paul.

And then I realized what bridge it was — in my old neighborhood. I lived in Southeast Minneapolis off and on from 1974 to 1980. I not only drove over that bridge frequently, I worked at a building a block or so away and below that bridge for a while.

I had a pretty good college job as a janitor, excellent pay, and for a year I cleaned the physics building that housed the tandem nuclear accelerator built down on the river flats. A physics student told me it was one of only ten tandem nuclear accelerators in the world. It had been closed down a few years earlier, embittering many of the professors, and was rumored to be sold, perhaps to China.

Walking from the main campus down a long, meandering metal stairway built into the bluff, and then back to my apartment after work, I strolled under the now-collapsed I 35 West bridge many times, as well as the bridge next to it, the 10th avenue bridge, where anti-nuclear activists used to spray paint warnings on the walkway: “Danger! You are passing by the U of M’s nuclear facility! Pass at your own risk!!!”

As if walking by might mutate us all into goblins or give us children like orcs.

But the three mile island disaster had happened a year earlier, in ’79, so people were spooked. I knew that the minute amount of fissionable material on the site was kept locked away deep inside in a lead vault. This wasn’t a nuclear reactor generating juice. I used to laugh with the physics folks about it — their fissionable material was as much like a nuclear reactor as a safety match was like the Chicago Fire.

It never occurred to any of us that the greatest danger in the vicinity would prove to be one of the nearby bridges, high over us.

During the first reports, it seemed miraculous to me that they weren’t reporting any fatalities. Slowly, that changed, and I was sad this morning to hear of how many people are now missing. It’s so awful — you only hope it was quick.

I’ve heard several witnesses interviewed, and a few of them have commented on how it took a few moments for them to even realize it was a catastrophe. The concept of an interstate freeway collapsing is so alien they thought it was some kind of demolition — it just never occurred to them that they were watching a disaster.

If you’ve ever had a breaking news story happen somewhere familiar to you, you know how the facts get garbled. I turned on the cable news channels after I read of the collapse, and followed their coverage. One of the broadcasts got hold of this Minnesota DOT description of roadwork being done on I 35 West at Minnehaha Parkway, near Minnehaha creek.

If you go to Google maps and plug in “minnehaha parkway 35 W Minneapolis” then expand the map out and you’ll see how far away that roadwork is, at Minnehaha creek, roughly five miles south of where I 35 W crosses the Mississippi river.

But the crack investigative reporters at the network had a lead on the I 35 West roadwork being done. And breaking the story and keeping the patter going was more important than verification — no matter how easily it could have been verified.

(As an aside, anyone familiar with Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (once a schoolhouse staple), knows the name of the Indian princess Minnehaha (for “laughing water”) is pronounced with a long E: minn-E-ha-ha. The broadcaster kept pronouncing it like the e in the state’s name: Minn-uh-ha-ha.)

It is true, apparently, that they were re-paving the surface of the collapsed bridge, but I’ve never heard of re-paving causing a structural collapse, have you?

I’ll be curious to hear what did cause the disaster. So far, they say it could not have been terrorist activity. And that’s almost certainly true. The fundamentalist fanatics have not been shy about boasting of their attacks, and have not claimed credit for this.

But there is the tiniest niggling doubt in the back of my head. I’ve been down on those river flats, down the steep leafy slopes along the river, I know how quiet it is down there, dark nights, with that wonderful murky river flowing nearby. It’s not hard to imagine someone working quickly to weaken a structure, a structure that had been inspected twice recently, in 2005 and 2006 and found safe. I’m trying to ignore the little voice that says every time we’ve adjusted to their methods they’ve devised something new.

So, I’d bet it wasn’t terrorism. But there is a part of me that is still in disbelief, like those witnesses for whom it took a while to register that they were seeing a catastrophe. It so contradicts our concept of the place — this is one of those things you watch on TV elsewhere, on exotic, distant and dangerous continents, not stolid, safe Minnesota.