35W Bridge Collapse

I don’t really know what to say, but I feel like I have to say something about the 35W bridge that collapsed yesterday at 6:05 pm Central. Though it’s a bridge I travel frequently (drove over it twice on Tuesday night to drive to and from the Mall of America and would have been over it today to attend the [postponed] Twins game if the collapse hadn’t occurred), I wasn’t on it last night. As far as I know now, I don’t personally know anyone directly involved in this tragedy, and for that I am grateful. My prayers are with those who were involved and their families.

There is so much about this that doesn’t seem real yet. Just the fact that this happened here, and is not a news story from somewhere else, is hard to understand. Especially since it’s the lead story at national news sources, such as CNN and MSNBC. Perhaps after I’ve seen it in person it’ll become more real. The additional fact that this is a stretch of 35W that I’m very familiar with makes it that much harder to comprehend. It’s not just any bridge: it’s the bridge I nearly always take in and out of downtown Minneapolis because I live about 10 miles north of there, it’s a very important part of our freeway infrastructure, it’s a bridge that at 100,000 drivers use every day. That is, it was.