Writing about the President’s visit on Saturday to the site of the 35W River Bridge collapse, Jeff Fecke of the Minnesota Monitor wrote:

Bush will be in town Saturday to survey the damage caused by the deadly collapse of the bridge, and to attend the Republican Party’s summer meeting, which is being held in Minneapolis.

Michael Brodkorb left two comments:

Have you confirmed with the White House that Bush is speaking at the Summer RNC meeting?  Have you confirmed this with the RNC? I haven’t seen this reported anywhere. 

[and…]

According to my source, the meeting has adjourned. President Bush did not attend the meeting, nor was he ever scheduled to attend the meeting.

The President landed in the Twin Cities (I watched it on TV) around 9:30, and got to downtown Minnepolis within the following hour; the RNC had reportedly adjourned about the time the President landed.

So – Jeff Fecke?  Where did you get this little tidbit?

To be fair – we have no indication that the statement was plagiarized, per se.

But what is the source of this apparently utterly-fallacious statement?

…that failed Air America host-ette Randee Rhodez took the same pro-forma shot at Governor Pawlenty that every single other liberal pundit, activist and media figure (and instant civil engineer) has taken this past few days…:

What you’re watching, should have the chyron underneath, instead of it saying Governor Tim Pawlenty, or news conference on bridge collapse, or recovery or whatever, you know what it should say underneath there? ‘Your tax cuts at work!’ That’s what it should say.

…as I am to hear that she’s still on the air at all.

Who knew?

Paul Schmelzer – one of the good reporters at the Minnesota Monitor – points us to an amazing story of survival.  Or, really, two:

One of the most amazing images — of many — to emerge from the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge was a photo of a man in a wheelchair staggeringly close to the edge of the fallen-away highway, the ramp of his van aiming like a bobsled chute into the abyss.

 

The image I found on the internet didn’t identify its source, but the Minnesota running blog Down the Backstretch reports that the man is Marcel Ordaz Cruz, a 26-year-old Mexican native who lives in Crystal. In 2005, he  finished sixth in the wheelchair division of the Twin Cities Marathon, and this year he finished ninth in the wheelchair division of Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth.

Left paralyzed after a shooting in North Carolina seven years ago, Cruz was driving across the bridge in his modified van Wednesday when the roadway started heaving. He says he saw as many as 20 vehicles plummet into the river as he veered into the guardrail to prevent the van from continuing down the steep decline that appeared in front of him. When he came to a stop, he said he “felt hopeless because I couldn’t do anything.” Quickly, rescue workers appeared to help him.

Read the whole thing, natch.

Yesterday, I noted that a local backroom politico had blamed the 35W River Bridge disaster on “No New Taxes”; that if the state had only raised more taxes, the bridge would still stand.  Nick Coleman echoed (literally and metaphorically) the same sentiment (and drew the only response that really fits).

Of course, it was BS (via Ed).

So who is accountable?  And what can “the system” do about it?

More later – or Monday. 

UPDATE: Sarah Janecek beats Coleman like a baby seal:

“No New Taxes” has nothing to do with what happened, yesterday.

A few facts for Coleman. In general, the major bridges the federal government has built become the responsibility of states to maintain, and states routinely seek and are granted federal funding to help with the maintenance. The maintenance work being done on the I-35W bridge by Progressive Contractors, Inc., out of St. Michael, Minnesota, was on the list of projects of the 2007-2009 State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) list. Right there on page 116 of the report is the I-35W bridge. The $3.3 million price tag was being paid mostly by the federal government ($2.97 million) and not the state ($330,000).

The National Bridge Inventory conducted by the federal government in 2003 reported that the bridge had a “sufficiency” rating of 50% on a scale of 120. That’s not great, but that’s where about 80,000 of the country’s bridges stand. The significant finding of that Inventory, however, was that structurally, the bridge “meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as-is.”

The federal government didn’t flag structural issues; neither did MnDOT.

That’ll leave a mark.

I watched a bunch of coverage of the Bridge disaster last night. 

I wanted to figure out how to criticize Don Shelby’s unctuous – and eventually revoltingly-politicized – commentary as succinctly as possible.

Fortunately, The Elder – who at least works in the same building as engineers – is on duty, wielding deft satire…:

 The Don Shelby Credibility Bridge–spanning the divide between the local anchorman’s ego and reality–collapsed without warning shortly before 10pm this evening. Preliminary indications are that a massive failure in Shelby’s structural integrity led to the collapse.

 …and a fact-checking machete:

The man’s self-importance knows no limits and it was on display for all to see this evening. At a time when the news coverage should have focused solely on rescue and recovery efforts, Shelby almost immediately launched into discussions about the possible causes of the collapse and where blame could be assigned. He was obviously getting all his information on bridge structures and engineering from other sources, but he rarely if ever mentioned them, giving the viewer the impression that HE DON SHELBY knew all about such matters and was able and willing to start drawing conclusions while the rubble was still settling. It was a disgusting display of arrogance with an almost total absence of wisdom.

RARE COMPLIMENT ALERT:  The Twin Cities daily newspapers have, at first glance, done a decent job with their coverage. 

Fraters has an eyewitness account from “Sisyphus”, the normally-hilarious wag from MOB blog Nihilist in Golf Pants, who saw the entire collapse from river level, on an excursion boat just upstream from the bridge, at the Saint Anthony lock.

Go to Fraters to read the whole thing – to my knowledge, so far the best eyewitness account of the collapse anywhere.

Excerpt:

I remember seeing the bridge buckle, and a white vehicle fall into the water. Then, the span of the bridge on the east bank side crumpled up like an accordion and the entire bridge fell towards the river. It was over before my brain could comprehend what I had seen – you just don’t expect to see a bridge collapse right before your eyes with no warning. And not being accustomed to looking at the city from on the river, I didn’t immediately realize that the bridge I had just seen fall into the Mississippi was the I-35W Bridge.The minutes after the collapse were eerily quiet. As we stared in disbelief at the wreckage, it began to sink in that we had just witnessed a major catastrophe. The east bank side of the bridge was bent like an accordion and there was a blue SUV or mini-van and two other vehicles on the downward slant toward the river. It seemed odd that the only evidence of a disaster, as of yet, was the fallen bridge itself – no sirens, no helicopters overhead, no flashing lights. Of course, it was far too early for any of that, but it did add to the surrealism of the moment.

One of the things you learn in concealed carry training is the tricks your mind can play on you at times of extreme stress.  Sisyphus’ account is a great case study:

Time seemed to crawl by, everyone onboard was shaken and we began discussing what we had seen amongst ourselves. Each of us who had been looking at the bridge while it collapsed, remembered seeing one and only one car falling – and each of us remembered a different car. Another oddity is that none of us remember hearing any noise from the collapse at all.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:  Leftyblogger “Noah” from “Blanked Out” lives in one of the buildings closest to the bridge, on the East Bank by the U of M.  He gives his eyewitness account here.  (Via Jay Reding)

My pal and neighbor, Flash at Centrisity, notes the part of Minnesota’s response to the Bridge Collapse that we’d all like to focus on:

Minnesotans have shown their true colors with displays heroism and unconditional support. Through this tragedy we will rediscover the pride we have in our fellow citizens.

What he said; except that there’s no “re”-discovering.  Minnesotans have much to be proud of, especially during crises. 

Not all of us, of course.  After a couple of contentious sessions in which Governor Pawlenty held the line on the DFL’s demand for more tax money, one might expect this disaster to bring out the ugly side of someone.

And indeed it has.  A Saint Paul DFL operative blames the Governor and all Republicans for the disaster (in a Saint Paul politics email discussion forum; I won’t link it or list his name, for reasons that I think might be obvious):

You can all scream at me for being the first to throw stones, but here is
what I know this bridge was inspected in May of 2006 and found to have cracks in the supports. It was placed on the watch category. One only can wonder if it should have been put on the critical list. It had been listed as having fatigue details from as long as 2001 and by 2006 they were able to take pictures of the fatigue cracks.

Governor NO MORE TAXES AND LET THE RABBLE DIE was just on the tube claiming that the bridge was given a “clean bill of health.’ He knows that what he was saying is as full of crap as he is.

This is the result of Minnesota not raising the gas tax in years.

The Governor has now directly killed people by his policies.

Pretty stupid?  Of course.

Worse, in its own way, was my “represenative”, DFLer Alice Hausman.  Girders hadn’t finished falling into the river, and the blazing truck was still on fire, last night when she went on WCCO Radio and hinted – without really coming out and saying it – at basically the same thing. 

The bodies were barely cold, and some (by no means all) DFLers were ready to blame the Governor and the MNGOP.

The NTSB has barely gotten their luggage unpacked.  The engineers are months away from having an answer.  I’m no engineer, but the simultaneous collapse of nearly 2,000 feet of bridge just might be a sign of a major design flaw, as opposed to a deteriorated girder failing.

In any case, I don’t recall Governor Pawlenty making any bones about the fact that he’d rather spend money on roads (and bridges) than on boondoggles like the Ventura Trolley and the Central Corridor. 

Wow.  Imagine how many bridges we could fix if we could get that billion dollars back that we spent on the Ventura Trolley…

Anyway; no more politics for now. 

Leave the tragedy aside for a moment; I never liked that bridge.

It was the product of a dismal age in bridge design, when the Interstate Highway system’s philosophy for bridges was “you shouldn’t know you’re on a bridge”; among all of downtown Minneapolis’ bridges, it never really fit in with its surroundings architecturally; it was like a delivery van in a parade of Dusenbergs.

But on the bridge?

One of the most piercing memories of my life was my first winter in Minneapolis, in 1985-6.  I was driving home down 35W from a friend’s place in Forest Lake one bitterly-cold evening, after midnight.  For the first time, I crossed that bridge late at night going south over the river.  The view was, literally, breathtaking; the lights of the city, looking sharper than normal in the cold, were gemlike in their brilliance; the light reflected off the water and dimly outlined the gorge below, by the Falls and the lock and dam, sparkled off the parts of the river that weren’t frozen.

Minneapolis looked beautiful.  And it was one of those moments when I first felt like I really belonged here.

The view has stuck with me; every time I welcome a friend or relative or newcomer to the Twin Cities, one of the stops on my night-time tour always involved driving south across the bridge, after dark (and thence to Saint Paul, driving into downtown from the south over either the Lafayette or the High Bridge, which is equally stunning). 

The loss of that view is the least of today’s tragedies.  But it’ll stick with me, too.

I have little to add to the news; by now, the world world knows that the 35W River Bridge collapsed last night.  Ed’s done a good job of covering it – there will be much more to come.

I can add nothing to the facts of this story.  Not yet, anyway.

I was ten miles away, up in Fridley at an event with my son.  We walked out at 7:15, and saw the coverage with a group of other families.  Like all such visceral, physical disasters, it took a moment or two to realize it was real, and it was huge; it took longer to sink in that it was here.

As I said before; my thoughts and prayers to out to everyone involved; those who survived, the families of those who didn’t, and all the people working on the site, the hospitals, and on the investigation today, trying to rescue, recover, heal, plan around, and solve, and help the Metro recover from this catastrophe. 

For those of you from out of town, the importance of this bridge to this metro area can not be overstated.  The Twin Cities are famously dependent on bridges, since the Cities are cut into three distinct regions by the course and confluence of two great rivers, the Mississippi and the Minnesota. 

The Mississippi flows like a big “S” that’s rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, separating most of Minneapolis from most of Saint Paul.  The Minnesota River, in turn, joins the Mississippi where the two cities come together, by the airport and the Mall of America, dividing most of the booming south suburbs – Burnsville, Shakopee, Mendota Heights and Eagan – separate from the rest of the city. 

So – if you need to go from south to Northeast in the metro, the 35W Bridge was the main link.  And it was heavily used; the Minnesota Department of Transportation estimated 140,000 cars a day used the bridge as of 2002; people commuting from the north-east ‘burbs to jobs downtown or on the Southtown strip (the huge commercial district along 494 from Eden Prairie to the Mall of America).  All the major detours are bad; jogging across the 694 River Bridge to I94 leaves you with the perpetual mess at the Lowrey Tunnel and the 35W Commons; Minnesota 280 (through Roseville and the Midway and thence to I94) isn’t a freeway (although they’re jury-rigging it today), plus I94 through the Midway back to Minneapolis over the I94 River Bridge and the Commons is already a congested nightmare; taking 35E to 94 via downtown Saint Paul is a 10-20 mile detour (and southbound 35E is already horribly congested every morning, and northbound is even worse at night), and leaves one back to the same bottleneck on 94 at the river; for those working south of Minneapolis, taking 35E to 494 is a long detour, and the traffic there is, yep, already kinda bad there. 

I remember talking with someone with knowledge of these kinds of things when I was at KSTP, twenty years ago, back when “terrorism” still killed people in ones and tens and twenties; he said “if you wanted to shut down the Twin Cities, all you’d have to do is take down the 35W and 94 River Bridges – or even make them inoperable.  This city couldn’t function”. 

We’ll see. 

Please direct whatever form of prayer, imprecation or wish your worldview recognizes to the victims, their families, the survivors…

…and today, all the Fire, Police, Sheriff’s Department, hospital workers who will be untangling this mess looking for victims and (God willing) more survivors.

To everyone who called last night; I was no where near the bridge.  But thanks for thinking about me.

More on that later.