WEDNESDAY NIGHT was another of those times when the ordinary concerns of life recede into the background and an unexpected event sends the nation scurrying to the 24-hour news channels and the Internet to find out just what has happened. It was like that on 9/11. It was like that when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and when the space shuttle left a flaming scar across the Texas sky.
At such times, the television and the computer become the nearest things the country has to a national town hall or courthouse square — places to gather to hear the news and share a common sense of loss.
Wednesday’s event was the collapse of the highway bridge in Minneapolis. Part of one of America’s most important and busiest highways suddenly failed and fell into one of the nation’s greatest rivers. The bridge carried with it dozens of the cars and trucks and — as the television images reminded again and again — one school bus, filled with children returning from a day camp. The sight of that bus, wedged against a burning truck that was nosed into the raw gap between two sections of the broken bridge, seemed to express all of the shock and horror of the moment of the span’s collapse.
In Emporia, the bridge collapse had a bit of extra resonance. It happened on one of Emporia’s highways, Interstate 35. Drivers who get on I-35 at Emporia and head north and east will eventually find themselves staring from the broken brink down into the steel- and concrete-choked waters of the Mississippi River, which swallowed many of the vehicles on the bridge.
The children in the bus were lucky. Their bus stayed on the pavement. Some of the children were injured, but all of them got out alive. But the people whose cars and trucks were thrown into the river were not that lucky. Many of them were killed.
Is there a lesson to be learned from the Minneapolis disaster? Probably. The bridge collapse is likely to have been the result of human failure at some level — in design, construction, inspection or maintenance.
Because the bridge was part of the interstate highway system, it was about the same age as much of the rest of that system. I-35 at Emporia was built only a few years after the Minneapolis bridge. The interstate highways — once a matter of national pride — are growing old. Are they also being taken for granted?
If anything good is to come out of the bridge disaster, it will have to be increased attention to the condition of America’s roads and bridges.
As Paul Simon points out in one of his songs, “Everything put together sooner or later falls apart.”
When that simple truth is forgotten, bridges fall and people die.
Patrick S. Kelley
Editorial Page Editor