I remember late in the afternoon on 9/11, talking with my pal and neighbor Flash at the end of America’s longest day in two generations.  He glumly predicted 20,000 dead.  I was more “optimistic”; given it was New York, I figured thousands would be late to the office, stuck in the subway, whatever.  I looked at the bright side, and figured 15,000 dead. 

Both of us, along with millions of other Americans, were astounded, and thankful to be very wrong.

I had the same reaction last week.

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I’m always gratefully astounded by two things;  humans’ ability to survive, and the average person’s ability to rise to the occasion, no matter what the occasion is, and how confounding the “experts” continuously find that to be.

Not everyone accepts human resiliance and intelligence as a given, of course.  Reading official disaster-planning documents, it’s fairly clear that officialdom thinks the average citizen is a helpless sheeple, unable to deal with, much less react to, crisis without government “experts” on hand to do their thinking for them.  While that’s mostly a high level phenomenon, it extends down to all-too-many “first responders” as well, although I like to think they’re in the minority. 

The fact is that, in every major disaster in which people were cut off from “authorities” and “experts”, the average American is perfectly capable of reacting appropriately to the situation.  Examples range far and wide; from the appropriate reactions of thousands of individual carry permit holders who’ve thwarted crime without inflicting carnage (confounding many prominent lefties, confirming most conservatives’ beliefs) to the people in the Twin Towers who, on 9/11, managed to convince themselves to ignore the announcements telling them to stay in their offices and await rescule, to organize themselves, and to get themselves to safety in an orderly evacuation that bordered on the miraculous, to the “kids” on that schoolbus, perched on the edge of the abyss last Wednesday, who stepped up and got their charges to safety without the aid of anyone with a badge.

And while after every catastrophe, the “experts” quickly give up hope of finding survivors in, say, buried rubble within three days of the disaster, nearly every such declaration, it seems, is followed by a story of someone being pulled, alive, from the rubble days later, after surviving on runoff and hope for an impossible time.

As I watched and heard the initial news coverage of the 35W Bridge collapse last week – with stories of dozens of cars in the water, memories of sitting in eight lanes of stopped traffic on the deck in mind, and the jagged concrete and flames front and center – I and most everyone I knew silently braced for dozens and dozens of dead. 

Humans’ sometimes-miraculous resiliency – aided by some fortuitous physics – stepped in.  Thank God:

Although the final death toll is still unknown, doctors and safety experts say that a combination of factors, from physics to shock absorbers, probably helped cushion the blow for those plunging from the bridge in their vehicles.

In general, they say, the cars and the bridge itself helped absorb some of the impact that would have killed someone free-falling from that height.

“I would say over two-thirds of the people walked away,” said Dr. Marc Conterato, an emergency room physician at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, who was at the site. “Believe me, the human body can absorb a lot of trauma.”

Watching the immense cloud of spray and spume thrown up by the falling structure, falling 20-30 feet below the plummeting roadbed, gives you some clue; the web of girders sluicing into the water and then plowing into the riverbed surely absorbed a lot of the impact; the flat roadbed beneath many of the cars must have spread out the energy of the impact over a large enough area to make things more survivable than they appeared at first glance – not just to us gathered around our TVs, but to the experts as well:

“I figured we’d probably have a couple of hundred injured, and 25 or 50 fatalities,” said Dr. John Hick, an emergency doctor and disaster coordinator at Hennepin County Medical Center.

I don’t think anyone minds being wrong about that.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 5:43 am and is filed under Bridge Collapse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.