UPDATE: It was I-35W in Minneapolis.
MSNBC is reporting that a freeway bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minnesota has collapsed. The whole damn thing. At 6:05 pm on a workday.
UPDATE: It was I-35W in Minneapolis.
MSNBC is reporting that a freeway bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minnesota has collapsed. The whole damn thing. At 6:05 pm on a workday.
Scary as hell.
The pictures are just terrifying, although by some miracle the injury count is relatively low so far. Guess those won’t be definite for a while.
It’s a bit hasty to jump to the conclusion that this incident is a sign of crumbling infrastructure as your post title implies. The news reports I’ve heard suggest that there was construction taking place at the time, which implies the opposite of a neglected infrastructure. A more reasoned conjecture might be that the construction crew inadvertently exposed/created a weakness in the structure. Regardless, it is a terrible accident.
Brian, I didn’t use the word “crumbling”, you did. I would consider a structural weakness in an interstate bridge to be an infrastructure problem, wouldn’t you?
From one of this morning’s news reports:
In 2005, the 40-year-old bridge had been rated as “structurally deficient” and possibly in need of replacement, according to a federal database. The span rated 50 on a scale of 120 for structural stability in that review, White House press secretary Tony Snow said.