7 Killed in Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

Most unfortunate... I consider myself lucky after having traveled the interstate all day today on my way to vacation.

3 confirmed killed so far :( I hope the school bus occupants are all safe...

I'm sad to see the news media capitalizing on things like this in a way that seems to highlight the deaths and peril...

I live in the area, and I'm following the coverage on the local CBS affiliate. The school bus occupants are all confirmed to be safe.

Of interest to those commuting in the area: as of right now, northbound 35W traffic has been rerouted to 280, using a detour running for a bit on I94. 94 is the one of the main east/west arteries through the Twin Cities area, so it is possible that rush hour tomorrow morning could be particularly bad on 94, in addition to the expected problems on 35W itself. However, I would check early in the morning for traffic reports to see how the detours are being handled at that point.

Another note: airspace has been under certain limitations in the area, due both to severe weather and local emergency hospital helicopters. I am unsure if this effects air travel into and out of the MSP international airport nearby. Check on flight times if you are expecting to leave or arrive in the next 12 hours.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke also said the collapse did not appear to be terrorism-related

WTF??!

Those cars did go into the river

WTF no @!$%# where they just going to float in mid air.

If I would have left work when I had planned without getting stalled up heading out the door, I would have either been on, or pretty damn close to this thing. Talk about pure dumb luck....

My thoughts are definitely with the families of the people who died; such a tragedy. :(

Someone will need to answer for the piss-poor way construction was being handled around this area. Instead of doing it in parts, they just stripped up a bunch of (Interstate) highway over the course of 2 miles. Now, traffic on the quads is bad enough as-is during rush hour, so what do you think is going to happen when you cut half the lanes and block off half the exits? When you cross over the bridge, you are barely creeping along bumper-to-bumper.

Even then, the bridge should have been able to handle the stress. Supposedly it was inspected last year as well as in 2005, and it was found to be structurally sound. So either: it should have been inspected prior to the road construction which they knew would place a lot of strain on the bridge; freak catastrophe; or someone simply wasn't doing their job. This will all be looked into in the near future.

As for the now, I just sincerely hope the death count keeps its ass where it is. Just normal people heading home from/going to work, all dying alone in a mess of chaos. It's heartbreaking...

Again, my thoughts are with everyone involved.

That is sad that this has happened. I now know that I am not crazy for not liking to go over bridges.

Well, the Republican National Convention people are here in Mpls, 200 strong, all worried about Norm Coleman's re-election, and down goes the bridge over 35W by downtown mpls at 6 pm tonite, and Coleman comes on talking like Giuilliani about being there tomorrow to investigate. The FBI is on the scene. And people who lived to tell about it say: just before it collapsed it started shaking, and in fact the Cedar Riverside Towers bldg started shaking. A guy on the stone arch bridge walking said a squib shot up through the bridge two hundred feet in the air. One lady who watched said it shook and then "pancaked" in a cloud of dust, and there was black smoke. Sound familiar?

Ironically, we were watching Terrorstorm, the DVD, by Alex Jones, of Prisonplanet.com, the lead speaker at the 911 Truth convention I went to last summer in Chicago.

Its real scary to see something like this happen. I was in Minneapolis this past week/weekend and happened to have gone over the 35W bridge to the Hennepin Ave exit on Friday all by mistake! Its very unfortunate that people were on the bridge when it happened. Wow I just can't believe the bridge collapsed!

heard that jackhammering was making the bridge shake before hand... would guess it hit resonant frequency and caused collapse

I heard that there was a renovation going on for that bridge, a couple of months ago. All I can say is, the contractor of the renovation is screwed up now, with people from DOT who approved the project.

There are lots of possibilities for such a failure to occur. It can be related to corroded and degraded reinforcement steel, which weakens the overall load bearing capacity. Maybe the bridge was overloaded than its designed capacity. There will probably be a very long investigation, and at the end there may be changes in the current AASHTO bridge design guidelines in the horizon..

Great, the more i dug into the meat of this article, the less I want to travel on road trips. Heading across country tomorrow, lol... should I hold my breath going across bridges now?

I totally hate bridges...this jsut adds to my phoeobia!