I-35W Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis

There comes a point where one senses when another catastrophe has happened. I was walking down the driveway from the mailbox I'm planning to repaint and saw my father walking up the driveway toward me. That sense of catastrophe I'd felt when the space shuttle Challenger blew up filled my mind as we slowly converged. Sure enough, another disaster had struck, Fox News Channel had just broken its regular programming to show the wreckage of the I-35W bridge.

Once inside I watched the confusion and rising smoke evoking memories of 9/11. But I had no sense of menace, it was more akin to what I felt when the San Francisco earthquake destroyed the Bay Bridge years ago. I said a silent prayer and surveyed the scene, keenly aware that lives had been lost. With relief I saw the school bus, emergency door wide open, refuting the rumor of a bus going off the bridge. Still, it was clear that vehicles were missing, others were visibly mangled, and lives permanently changed.

I've been over that bridge and hadn't really paid any attention to it. Unless a bridge is really scenic, I don't think much about it and I imagine that's true for many people. You just expect it to be there and continue standing while you travel over it.

The stunned reaction of people to its collapse reminds me how ill prepared people are for the fact that they are very, very small in the scheme of things. Oddly enough, I expect this kind of thing to happen and just pray it doesn't happen to me. Answers are being sought for, people want to know why this happened, want to assign blame. Perhaps the cause will be found, perhaps it won't.

In the end, I think the stories of the survivors will matter more. Already, we have been told that motorists didn't run for their lives afterward, but checked each car for survivors. If true, that's a good change in our culture since 9/11.

On the flip side, the Democrats are already trying to blame Governor Pawlenty for it, typically playing their rabidly partisan games by using a disaster for perceived gain. There appears to be no depths they won't sink to and I weary of it. There are families grieving, people maimed, people dead, and people missing. They matter the most.