A bunch of us at work were getting ready to head to dinner when we caught the chopper video from Minneapolis. It was difficult to fathom at first. One picture couldn’t tell the story. You needed wide shots and close-ups to understand the magnitude of the situation.
How could the Interstate just fall down like that?
I counted the individual structures down and said to myself, “terrorism.” How could it be anything but?
First impressions can be so misleading.
I listened carefully as I scanned the cable channels covering the story live. No one was talking terrorism. That’s good. It would have been foolhardy to poison the story with speculation. We’re already on edge enough.
The more I looked, the more I realized I’d seen this before. Mianus, San Fransisco, the highway overpasses near the Northridge quake in California – Highways fall down! They shouldn’t. They still do.
Then I thought about that school bus – just a few feet from the edge. What must have gone through that driver’s mind as the roadway beneath his bus began to violently heave?
Over the next few weeks the backstory to this tragedy will dribble out. I can almost guarantee there were signs missed or procedures not followed. There always are.
Geoff,
I was on my way back to the station when I got a frantic phone call from a friend of mine who lives in the cities… She knew I was on duty last night and had probably seen the pictures and wanted to let me know she was at least 4 miles from there when it collapsed. I believe she was at an event or something like that (she works for the DFL in St. Paul). Anyway, seeing as I was in my car, on my way back from dinner, I had not (I didn’t have the TV on at my apartment).
When I got back to the station, I immediately ran into the newsroom where our AND, a producer and a reporter were glued to the TVs with MSNBC, FNC and CNN on them.
-A