It captures the imagination

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, August 10, 2007

The day after Interstate 35W collapsed in Minneapolis, I got an e-mail from an out-of-state relative asking whether everyone in my family was safe.

It was the kind of question that is well-meaning, but certainly leaves one set up for a sarcastic reply, along the lines of : “We were only 170 miles away, so it was a close call. But we pulled through somehow.”

I’m glad my response was kind, because I have answered the same question quite a few times from distant acquaintances who perhaps don’t understand that there is more to Minnesota than the Twin Cities, and that what happens in downtown Minneapolis does not necessarily have a great deal of impact out in the land of lakes and prairie.

A friend who lives on the East Coast called me about something else this week, but before we hung up, he mentioned the bridge collapse and I, in turn, pointed out that it was a long ways from us. “I know,” he said. “But there’s something about this that just captures the imagination.”

And, indeed, he is right. Everyone who drives, rides a bike or walks crosses brid-ges every day. We hear about airplane crashes or typhoons, but it’s hard to relate those disasters to our everyday lives; most of us have never seen one and most of us never will. They are no more real to us than an episode of CSI.

Bridges, though, are the stuff we deal with routinely. Even here in West Central Minnesota, where the rivers are relatively small and there are no large chasms to cross, we encounter bridges routinely.

Some bridges are so small that we hardly notice they exist. Certainly we flash across many of them when we drive over interstate intersections with surface highways. There are dozens upon dozens of small bridges over creeks and streams, over railroads and gulleys. None of them, in our area, could fall very far. But, nevertheless, there they are: Bridges.

That the collapse captured our imagination is attested to by the number of gawkers at the site of the collapse. An Assoc-iated Press story this week described them as “massive crowds,” and noted that police have arrested 15 people for crowding in too close to the area where divers are still looking for those who are missing and presumed dead.

And there are probably very few Minnesotans who haven’t asked themselves whether they crossed that bridge at one time or another. I had driven over it myself only a week before it fell, simply because I took a wrong turn while trying to get to downtown Minneapolis. In fact, I crossed it twice, once northbound and then again southbound once I figured out where I was.

For many Fergus area residents who worked, or still work, in the Twin Cities, driving on 35W was a daily experience, and they can look back with a little shiver and be glad that the structure held up as long as it did. I know I am.

In any case, we can hope that the silver lining to this tragedy, if there is one, will be a re-evaluation of how we invest in highway structures. If our state – and nation – would put its resources into protecting the existing infrastructure of bridges and roads, rather than simply building new ones, we might all be better off.

Every new road and bridge we build is an invitation to drive more. That does nothing but increases congestion and pollution in places like the Twin Cities, where both problems are already running rampant. But even here in Fergus Falls, where we plan to add a bridge across the Otter Tail River, we are tacitly encouraging more dependence on the automobile — even as scarce fuel and pollution problems suggest we should be doing the opposite.

It’s a wide chasm to cross — the divide between a tragic collapse and the need to rethink our transportation policies — but that gap is one that is actually worth bridging.

Dave Churchill’s column runs Friday.