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StumbleUponA Tragedy Waiting to Happen
It didn’t look like a bridge. No towering arches or majestic cables. Just a seamless stretch of concrete. But this section of Interstate 35W connecting Minneapolis and St. Paul was one of the most heavily traveled spans across the Mississippi—141,000 vehicles crossed it daily. Beneath its smooth surface, however, cracks and corrosion and weight and weather had slowly transformed the bridge into a tragedy waiting to happen. On Wednesday, August 1, at 6:08 p.m., at the height of rush hour, it collapsed.For the 54 children enrolled in the Waite House summer program, Wednesdays were swimming days. The kids were bused to public pools or beaches. This particular outing was the big one—a trip across town and into the suburbs for a visit to Bunker Beach Water Park.
After a long, sunny day of getting bounced around in the water, the children were relaxing, singing songs in Spanish and English, playing clapping games, or sleeping. A houseboat was passing below on the river. “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a party on a boat like that?” Julie Graves, the program manager, said to bus driver Kim Dahl. Two of Kim’s kids were aboard for the trip. Julie, sitting in the front passenger seat, glanced out the window. Traffic on 35W was slowing to a crawl. The bus would be late getting back to Waite House. Parents would be getting anxious about picking up their kids.
Julie was 28 and was getting married in three weeks. Her fiancé, Brendan Kelly, was a rock musician who was often on the road. But today, he had a gig in Minneapolis. She checked her watch. It was a couple of minutes past six o’clock: Brendan was about to go onstage.
Bernie Toivonen lost his glasses. He’d scheduled everything to the minute: Wrap up his work painting the interior of a remodeling job in Maplewood, rush home for a quick bite with his father, then hustle to his ex-wife’s house by seven in order to help move their son into a new apartment. And now he couldn’t find his glasses. He couldn’t drive without his glasses.
Finally, after looking for about ten minutes, he found them under a bench, inches from where he’d set them down. He took off in his SUV and by ten of six was on 35W—and stuck in traffic. He was going to be late.
Bernie figured the slowdown was due to the ongoing construction on the bridge. Crossing 35W all summer, he’d watched the progress that crews were making resurfacing the span. To remove the old concrete, they had to use jackhammers to get down to the rebar. They couldn’t bring in heavy equipment like Bobcats and hydro-hammers, but they did have huge crews, with what seemed like 20 jackhammers going on either side of the highway and two or three compressor trucks to power the hammers. And then there were the mud buckets and miniature cement trucks churning out concrete.
The traffic inched up the 4th Street bridge, where crews were digging a trench by hand—that’s what had been holding up traffic. If it hadn’t been for the glasses, he might have missed the jam. Once past it, at 6:07 p.m., Bernie accelerated, heading south on the 35W bridge.
Growing up in Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, on the banks of the Mississippi River, Rick Kraft used to play in the water all the time, until that Fourth of July when he was 12. A man who’d partied a little too hard had jumped into the river for fun and been swept away. Another man dived in to save him, and Rick’s father and uncle went after him in a pontoon boat. The first man was lost. The second man was unconscious when they pulled him into the boat. It took days before they found the first guy. After that, Rick Kraft was scared of the Mississippi: Can’t swim in there. You might bump into a body.
Now working as a cable technician, he had just finished his last, long job of the day and was a little bummed out. He wanted to get home and get out of his gray Comcast polo shirt, jeans and boots. His mother and sister were coming to his apartment, and he’d hoped to get home early to straighten up the place. Now he’d have to hurry. As he entered 35W, he saw brake lights ahead and at the last minute decided to exit at 4th Street. It was 6:07.
Most days, Sarah Mundy used the 35W bridge to get to and from her job at a market research firm in Bloomington. This afternoon, it was hot. She’d rolled her window down and was listening to classic rock. She was casually dressed and was wearing a silver-spoon-handle ring her father had given her.
Her boyfriend, Ted, had called earlier and told her he was going to the gym. He’d be back in time to try the new slow-cooker sweet-and-sour beef that was bubbling in the kitchen.
Now, as Sarah’s red Caprice moved onto the bridge, the ground underneath the car in front of her began to crumble. Clouds of dust flew. A sound as loud as thunder came from below. And then the car in front seemed to be sucked down. Sarah gripped her steering wheel as her car fell, hitting chunks of something, then fell again. Down, down, down. Her air bags erupted. Everything inside the car flew around. This was it—this was her time.
Bernie Toivonen liked the view of shiny downtown Minneapolis: skyscrapers juxtaposed by the old Stone Arch Bridge, the historic mill silos, the Guthrie Theater. Sometimes boats on the river completed the view. Accelerating southbound across the bridge, Bernie kept the city in the corner of his eye—when suddenly all the cars in front of him disappeared. Pure and simple, they just vanished.
He felt the road grow unstable, bending and twisting like a piece of thin sheet metal. Behind him, he felt the bridge falling like the downside of a teeter-totter. He put the car in reverse and backed down the slope to where the section of the broken bridge hit bottom. The front of his car was pointing up at a steep angle. Cars that had been ahead of him higher up the incline slid down and fell into a pile. They now looked like a junkyard stack—crunched metal and shattered glass.
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