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.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 4:20 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.