By Ruben Rosario
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Copyright 2007 St. Paul Pioneer Press
All Rights Reserved
MINNEAPOLIS — There is no better or more poignant way to describe it: This is our 9/11.
Wednesday’s bridge collapse will go down — as Sept. 11, 2001, did for history and our generation — as one of the Twin Cities’ and Minnesota’s darkest hours.
Disasters like these and their ripple effects scar the collective psyche for years, if not forever. I know I still don’t look at commercial airplanes in the sky the same way I did before the terrorist attacks. I knew that, as I crossed a river bridge to work Thursday morning, I might not look at those the same way after this.
But this catastrophe is also one of our finest moments. These events bring out the best in people like nothing else. And we’ve already seen ample evidence of it these past two days.
There is, of course, the tragic loss of lives. There is the gut-wrenching account, shared by Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan, of dying victims, hopelessly pinned or crushed by collapsed debris, telling rescuers to say goodbye to their loved ones for them.
It reminds me of the heart-tugging phone calls and voice messages to spouses, parents and children by trapped World Trade Center office workers shortly before the twin towers collapsed in lower Manhattan.
There are the anguished faces of family members frantically calling Twin Cities-area hospitals and other sites, praying and hoping that the loved ones who did not return home Wednesday night are not among the missing or presumed dead. All that’s needed now are the makeshift fliers and posters of the missing that lined many lower Manhattan building walls for days and weeks after the terrorist attacks.
There is also the heroism, perhaps best embodied and illustrated by the still-unidentified rescue worker who repeatedly plunged into the Mississippi River, at great risk to her own safety, to pluck the trapped and injured.
There are the miracles, like the school bus full of kids that stopped several feet short of plunging into the river. There are the incredible near misses of motorists escaping from upended and badly mangled vehicles that still teeter at the very edges of the doomed bridge span’s still-standing sections.
There were the small but universal touches, like the flood of calls I received at my home Wednesday evening from folks back in New York, concerned about my welfare. They were among the callers, both local and across the country, who clogged cell phone traffic to a standstill for a time.
It did not go unnoticed that I and other Minnesotans made the same calls and inquiries six years ago to relatives living or working in Manhattan or the Pentagon.
Politicians again buried the party and ideological hatchets and said the right things at the right times. Some could be described as “Giuliani-like’’ in showing leadership in a time of crisis.
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak spoke Thursday at the collapse site about the “tremendous support’’ his city was receiving on many fronts and the need to focus now on “the depths of what it’s like to have a loved one who is no longer here.”
Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman said he was “proud of this community and the way it responded” and vowed, as others did while standing on Ground Zero, to rebuild and “make sure this type of tragedy will never happen again.”
Still, there is a silver lining amid this tragedy.
Like Dolan, Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek is a native son of Minneapolis. To these rescuers and many others who rushed to the scene, the response to the collapse is both professional and intensely personal.
Stanek believes lives were saved Wednesday night because of disaster protocol plans - from rescue to communications - that were fine-tuned and improved through lessons learned from 9/11.
“We have a unified command system now where everyone - police, fire, the sheriff’s office, doctors, coroners, local and state and federal officials - operate under one voice,’' said Stanek, who is in charge of water recovery efforts at the collapse site.
“We all operate now under the 800 (megahertz radio frequency system), which was the biggest criticism after 9/11,” Stanek said, “and to have 50 to 60 different agencies able to speak to each other was just fantastic.’'
Stanek approached the collapse site minutes after the disaster happened. Aboard a Minneapolis fireboat, he saw cars on fire above, cars sticking out of the water and people being rescued or recovered.
“I’ve seen a lot of stuff, but it was a shock to the system,’' Stanek said. “It was something out of a movie, a bad movie.’'
For one day, the world witnessed Minnesota Nice as well as grit and courage and resiliency in the face of chaos, much as New Yorkers did.
“We come together like nobody else,’' U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in a display of hometown bravado. But she also squarely put her finger on the tough and hard questions we all need to ask, and the answers we should demand, as we also grieve and mourn and reflect in the coming days:
“A bridge in America just shouldn’t fall down.”
Indeed. Just as we needed to know why 9/11 happened, we need to know why this happened, what people knew and when, and whether it could have been prevented. The dead, the wounded and the living demand no less.
For now, prayers are in order.