It’s truly one of the most memorable, and dark, days in recent Minnesota news history. On August 1, 2007 just after 6:00p.m., the Interstate 35W Bridge that spans the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis catastrophically failed and fell into the river.
The half-mile long bridge was one of the state’s busiest with around 140,000 people a day crossing the span.
WCCO Radio’s Adam Carter recalls covering the collapse after it was first heard on scanners and via a WCCO Radio traffic report.
“It was such a surreal moment, particularly for those of us working in the news department,” said Carter. “I remember hearing a brief utterance saying, ‘we have a bridge collapse, people in the water’. We turned on the radio and hear our traffic reporter in an airplane describing the scene.”
At the time, WCCO Radio had an airborne traffic reporter, Kevin Plummer, who was the first to spot the bridge in the river. Plummer reported on WCCO, “We’re looking down at a very devastating scene, a complete failure of that bridge. It has fallen into the river. There are vehicles in the river.”
WCCO Afternoon News Editor Jeff McKinney immediately sent Carter, and another WCCO reporter John Wanamaker, to the scene. According to Carter, it was difficult to believe what you were seeing.
“I drove across the river, over the 10th Avenue Bridge I think it was, and I could see as I was looking over just smoke rising from the river where the bridge once was,” explains Carter. “I just remember looking towards the south, back towards downtown and that’s where the angle of the bridge was laying along the bluff at a steep angle. There was a school bus and a tanker (truck). The semi was on fire. The school bus is hanging on the edge.
My first thought was that it looked like the set of a disaster movie. That couldn’t really happen. That’s how my brain processed it.”
Rescue crews went to work immediately, along with civilians who were in the area, trying to get people who were on the bridge to safety. It took around 90 minutes to transport 145 injured people to area hospitals.
There was a massive effort, including using U.S. Navy Divers, to get to people who were unaccounted for, and trapped under the collapsed freeway. Those efforts went on for three weeks. Eventually 13 people were killed in the collapse.
A replacement bridge was designed and constructed on an accelerated schedule and opened on September 18, 2008, not long after the first anniversary of the collapse.
After a study of the bridge, the NTSB cited a design flaw as the likely cause of the collapse, noting that a too-thin gusset plate ripped along a line of rivets, and additional weight on the bridge at the time contributed to the catastrophic failure.
The failure of that bridge led to concern at other bridges across Minnesota. Eventually, after multiple spending bills and overriding a veto by then Governor Tim Pawlenty, there was money put towards updating “Minnesota’s crumbling infrastructure” with the goal of making sure all the bridges in the state were inspected, updated, and safe. The increased spending was paid for by a $0.055 per gallon gas tax.
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