Reznet

Photos by Mary Hudetz; audio recording by Russel Daniels; soundslide production by Sarah Welliver

View to a Disaster

By Mary Hudetz

Moments before photos of the Minneapolis bridge collapse appeared on television or the nation’s news Web sites last month, a group of maybe 50 or fewer people stood downstream and watched the disaster’s early moments unfold in the Mississippi River.

As a summer intern at the Star Tribune on my way home from work, I was among them.

I didn't expect that I would contribute to the coverage of one of the nation's biggest news stories this summer. In fact, I didn't expect to cover the news very much at all.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis and St. Paul had assigned me to work as a reporter on the newspaper’s features team, writing stories about the arts and other topics related to daily life and style during my 10 weeks of work there. I might be assigned once or twice to work an odd shift on the news desk, I was told before the internship started, but the chance of that happening grew slim as the final two days of my summer job approached.

Of course, that changed in the moments and days following the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

People say expect the unexpected. But like the drivers in rush hour traffic who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I didn't.

I didn’t expect to see metal beams that for decades had supported a mile-long stretch of Interstate 35W snapped from the bridge's concrete foundation just mere minutes before I had arrived.

I had been driving along the city’s 10th Avenue bridge, which gave thousands of drivers a path across the Mississippi River each day. Thousands more drove across the neighboring I-35W bridge daily before the collapse.

Scores of these drivers were on it at about 6:05 that evening when it fell. More than 100 people survived the fall. Thirteen did not. The tragedy has since brought attention to the need for improved bridges across the country.

Some survivors were leaving their cars when I looked down 100 feet below me from the 10th Avenue bridge’s railing. Others were walking across a broken stretch of the bridge now surrounded by debris and destruction both above and below the water's murky surface. Construction workers in neon green vests helped victims climb up the east bank.

But I didn’t see the blue uniforms of rescue workers. And I didn't hear any sirens or helicopters, which meant news reporters probably hadn't arrived yet either.

So I grabbed my cell phone and my notebook, and I called the newsroom.

Did they know about the bridge collapse? Yes. Did anyone want me to describe the scene that I was looking at? Again, yes.

The reporter I spoke with at the Star Tribune, which was about three miles away, asked me questions while he put together a write-up he said would be posted onto the paper’s Web site.

His tone was calm. Mine wasn't.

I imagine I sounded like a cross between a distraught 911 caller and a seasoned journalist reporting from the scene of a breaking news event. I just wanted to be the seasoned journalist.

But asked to give my cell phone number, I couldn't. First I gave my work number; then a combination of my work and cell phone number and then, finally, my correct cell phone number. But, during the same call, I was determined to get some focus, so I started listing what I could see from west to east.

A semi-truck with only its trailer visible; the cab of it looks like it’s stuck between two broken pieces of the bridge. More cars than I can see and therefore count parked on the slopes of the bridge. Five cars on the portion of the bridge surrounded by water; people walking across this isolated stretch of the road, and one of them—a man—grabbing a suitcase out of the trunk of a car. No emergency crews, yet—none that I can see or hear.

The scene seemed to play out in silence. All of the cars had stopped, and two men standing next to me simply pointed and stared when asked if they knew what happened. The quiet in the tragedy's early moments made everything seem that much more surreal.

But it was all too real, especially for those in the water and near the riverbanks.

Moments later, fire trucks arrived with sirens blaring. I scrambled to find someone who had seen the bridge fall into the river. I found Hadley. In the brief interview, she described through tears the collapse that had happened in less than a minute and was eventually viewed by the world in footage captured by nearby surveillance cameras.

"It just dropped," she said, adding that a huge cloud then filled the air for about 30 seconds.

Hadley’s last name? Perhaps Musselureo or Musselura—I'm not sure. Her voice shook like mine had on the phone. When I gave her my pen to write her name herself, I realized her hands were shaking, too, as firemen ordered us off the bridge.

What Hadley was able to scribble into my notebook became part of a larger set of notes and quotes from that evening, which I called into the paper like at least a dozen other reporters.

There’s no competition in events as big as this one, everyone is in it together, one longtime Star Tribune reporter said later that night as journalists roamed the area.

In the hours and days that followed, many told the accounts of survivors and rescue workers, and the stories of the victims, too.

In a newsroom where veteran staffers wrote dozens of articles about the bridge and gave the public quick answers to pressing questions, I was humbled to play a part—however big or small.

Mary Hudetz, Crow, is a journalism graduate student at the University of Montana in Missoula. She is a graduate of the Freedom Forum’s 2006 American Indian Journalism Institute. Last summer, she interned as a reporter at the Star Tribune newspaper in Minneapolis, under the Freedom Forum’s Chips Quinn Scholars Program.