The Associated Press
MINNEAPOLIS — Just as fast as the Interstate 35W bridge dropped into the Mississippi River, emergency crews, witnesses and even the victims jumped into action. These are among the countless stories of an instant in so many lives and dramatic rescues.
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Melissa Hughes, a 32-year-old warehouse manager recently back from maternity leave, was taking her usual route home, heading southbound on 35W in bumper-to-bumper traffic onto the bridge.
She was not yet over the river when “All of a sudden things were in the air. Things weren’t on the ground anymore,” she said. “I swear I saw a construction worker suspended in mid-air. Then I had that free-fall feeling.”
She stood on her brake trying to stop her Ford Escort as it fell backward but to no effect. In front of her a minivan was also falling back towards her. But luckily, the bridge was low enough over the ground at that point that the bridge section stopped at a 45-degree angle.
Suddenly, her car stopped, and she heard a huge crash as her back window exploded. Only looking over the scene later did she realize the noise had come from a black pickup truck that had flipped and fallen on top of her car.
For a long moment, everything went silent.
“Then I heard people yelling. There was one person standing outside the vehicle just screaming in pain, grabbing his back and just falling to his knees,” she said.
The next thing she remembers is someone approaching her car, asking if she was OK. She was, and walked down to the area of flat ground near where the bridge span now lay.
“My neck and my back are a little stiff today,” she said. “I was really, really lucky.”
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Peter Siddons was driving home to White Bear Lake, Minn., hoping at 5:45 p.m. the construction-related delays on the bridge would have abated by then.
As he headed north across the bridge, “I heard this roar coming towards me almost like a series of explosions,” he said. “The bridge started to shake and my car was literally bucking.”
“Then I watched the sections go down,” he said. “The sections started to fall and it came to my section and I started to fall and the nose of my car went forward and I thought I was in a free fall and I thought that was it.”
As the road slipped away beneath his car, he lost control and hit another car. “I hit a car and then I stopped and then everything stopped.”
He sat still for a second, expected to lurch into motion again because the section of bridge he was on had not fallen all the way to the ground. He dialed 911 but then hung up.
“I thought it was going to collapse again and it didn’t so I debated whether or not to open the door ... but I did,” he said. “I turned off the car, took the keys”
His car was nearly vertical, its back end on a much higher section of bridge than its front. He jumped down to the concrete and looked around.
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Firefighter Raul Ramos was one of the first responders on the scene.
“I jumped into a mustang suit, kind of like a scuba gear, self-floating,” Ramos said. “I swam probably 25-30 yards to where there was a car submerged.”
He found a victim and called for a life jacket. “I took the victim out — handed it to (police) and to (emergency medical workers) that were there, I swam back across to the middle span.”
The bridge was almost the shape of a V, “so we had to manage getting them down,” with no ropes, Ramos said.
“One thing we learned since 9-11, it was how to work together, how to work with each other, between departments and civilians,” he said.
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Falling 60 feet in a car compares with slamming into a brick wall at 40 mph. That meant many “people with neck and back injuries, so there was a lot of back-boarding and that takes time,” said firefighter Tim Dziedzic, 39.
“We back-boarded and got as many people as we could out, I’d say 15 or 20,” Dziedzic said.
It took delicate, but swift maneuvers over chunks of concrete and twisted steel. “The whole time you’re thinking: “Is this bridge going to keep coming down?” Dziedzic asked.
Rescue workers were overwhelmed by the number of injures, the terrain and the disbelief. To their aid came witnesses and even some lucky enough to walk away from their wrecked vehicle.
“I don’t think we could have done it without the civilians,” Dziedzic said. “It was interesting to see the civilians taking over, almost,” Dziedzic said.
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Jeff Cowan, a 32-year-old software consultant, saw a cloud of dust about a quarter of a mile from his apartment.
“I still didn’t know what had happened,” Cowan said. “I thought it might be from the train tracks nearby. And then the dust cleared and I thought, the bridge is not where it’s supposed to be.”
Cowan raced down a service road to the riverbank on the north side of the river.
“There were a dozen people standing like zombies in the water ... just looking shellshocked in all the debris,” he said. “They were all covered in dust and bleeding.”
There was so much concrete in the water, Cowan said, it slowed the flow of the current. Some of his neighbors had followed him to the riverbank, and they began guiding the people to safety over the debris, holding their hands so they didn’t slip, comforting them when they reached the bank.
“We were so focused on the people, that at first we didn’t notice the cars in the water,” Cowan said.
Then he and others realized that there were about a dozen cars partly submerged in the water.
They could see one man, bleeding badly, his head hanging out of the broken window of a maroon sedan. A police officer had arrived, and he and another man used the officer’s knife to cut the man out of the car. Cowan waded in and started searching other cars for survivors, but he could find none. Then he helped lift the injured man to safety.
Cowan didn’t get the man’s name, but he believes that he survived.
“It looked like he had broken his jaw. His face was bloody and he was missing teeth. Someone said he had broken an arm and a leg,” Cowan said. “But at least he was conscious.”
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It was a too close for Capt. Charlie Leekley, who was taking a group of 48 tourists and four crew members out on a paddle boat ride on the river.
“We were southbound coming into the lock to lower it down to proceed underneath the bridge, and the bridge collapsed in front of us — in front of my helm station,” Leekley said. “I got a front row ticket to the show.”
“Well, fate plays strange roles in our lives. We’re all very lucky, but my heart goes out to those that suffered on this bridge,” he said.
“I watched them as the bridge collapsed with the cars on top of it. I saw several cars that couldn’t stop go over the bridge, and so as it sunk in, I think it sunk in as we should all be grateful for the time we have here on this planet, because anything like that can happen at any time and it hits like a lightning bolt.”