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StumbleUponThe Children!
There was an eerie silence. At first, Bernie didn’t move. He peered through the glasses still perched on his nose but could hardly believe his eyes. The section of the bridge in front of him was as steep as a ski jump. Then he heard a woman and a man screaming. He got out of his car, not quite realizing what had happened. He walked toward a blue minivan tilted on its side, half buried in rubble and half suspended five feet in the air. The screams were coming from there.As he made his way toward the minivan, Bernie walked by a white car. A young woman was behind the wheel, her arms outstretched, her head twisted back and her eyes closed. He went on, hoping to help those he knew were alive.
As he approached the blue van, he could see that the driver was strapped in by her seat belt, which kept her from falling out of the car. “Help,” she called. Not frantic. “Help.” The left side of her head was banged up and bleeding.
He heard other voices above him and looked up. A small crowd had gathered on the ledge. “There’s a guy over there under a car!” They pointed to a pile of rubble. The man seemed to be in greater trouble, and Bernie went to where the crowd was pointing. The trapped man was conscious, speaking in Spanish. His left arm was pinned under an iron beam. Bernie took hold of the beam—luckily, it was light enough to lift. The man’s head was surrounded by chunks of concrete. Bernie cleared the rubble away.
Two young men appeared out of nowhere, and Bernie asked them to try to pull the guy out while he’d hurry back to the woman caught inside the minivan. On his way back, Bernie paused for a moment to call his ex-wife. Perhaps the enormity of what happened hadn’t quite dawned on him. “I’m going to be late picking up Brian to help him move his stuff,” he told her.
Kim Dahl steered the bus into the right lane on the bridge as a big Tastee truck came alongside. The driver honked and waved at the kids. As she neared the end of the span, her son David jumped up and pointed to the water pouring over the dam on the river below. “Look, Mom, a waterfall!”
Then the bus began to fall. Plummeting. The glass entrance door shattered. Screams echoed through the bus. Dust and debris spun in a cloud.
Julie Graves grabbed for support as the bus hit something, stopped for a moment, and then fell again. Hit again, fell again, hit, fell. Then one final lurching impact flung Julie headfirst into the bus’s stairwell.
She managed to get her hands out in front of her but was buried upside down in a heap of shattered glass, metal and suffocating white powdery dust. Still conscious, she thought first about the children. An adrenaline surge allowed her to kick and push herself upright.
Kim was sitting at the wheel, gripping it with all her strength and pressing her weight on the brakes. “Julie,” she said, “turn off the ignition.” She wasn’t paralyzed, but she had no sensation in her legs. Julie killed the engine, then turned up the aisle toward the kids. She saw that the emergency door was already open. Jeremy Hernandez, one of the young counselors, was helping kids out the back escape hatch. Kim held her post at the wheel. No way she’d let the bus roll back onto any kids. Her own two small children were clinging to her, refusing to leave.
Julie started back up the angled aisle, leaning on seat backs and checking to see that no child was trapped. Can’t leave any unaccounted for, she thought. Then she looked down and saw her clothes were drenched in blood.
Rick Kraft was sitting at a red light on University Avenue when he heard an unholy sound. “What was that?” he said. He turned toward the bridge. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Oh, my God, he thought. They just demolished the bridge! I just got off. But there were still people on it.
Then he noticed a white car on top of a huge concrete section of the road, very near the edge. Rick grabbed his phone and called 911. “The 35 bridge over the Mississippi just collapsed!” he told the dispatcher. When he looked back, the car was gone.
Rick drove his van down an exit ramp that had been closed for construction to get as close as he could to the river. Then he jumped out and began looking for a way down. It was difficult. He had to go over a guardrail and scramble down an embankment.
When he got to the point where the bridge normally left the ground to span the river, all he saw was mayhem—a gold SUV on its side sitting on top of another car, dazed and miserable people climbing out of crumpled vehicles all around, someone underneath a fallen piece of concrete. Rick looked up to see that a part of the bridge was overhanging. He called down to the people, “Hey, get out from underneath the bridge!” Then he continued to the river through a line of freight train cars that had been crushed under the bridge.
The riverbank was chaos. People in panic screamed and cried for help. Not knowing where to begin, Rick walked toward what was left of the bridge, which lay across the river in a flat slab.
He saw an Asian woman trying to pick her way toward shore. He helped her across the water. Then Rick scrambled up a steep slab of concrete and saw another young woman, her arms badly cut. She was walking in circles. Her car had landed upside down on a steel I-beam that looked like it had cut through the vehicle between the engine and the dashboard. Somehow she had gotten out. Rick jumped down off the slab to reach her, but once there, he wasn’t sure how he was going to get her out. He couldn’t risk hauling her up the slab and then trying to lower her down the other side. It was too steep.
He saw a two-by-four and took it to measure the depth of the river between where they were and the shoreline. It was only waist deep. “Follow me,” he said, and took her hand and led her to the water. He put her hands on a line of exposed rebar. “Here,” he told her, “hold on to this. You see that man over there? You hold on to this and make your way to him and he will help you.”
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