US:Witnesses and survivors speak of a boom as loud as a plane crash when the eight-lane bridge collapsed, write Lynn Marshalland Nicholas Riccardiin Minneapolis
With a shudder and a thundering crack, the eight-lane bridge collapsed during Wednesday's evening rush hour, plunging dozens of cars and people into the Mississippi river below.
The steel-and-concrete Interstate 35W buckled and swayed, creaked and, in a terrifying instant, crumbled as though stepped on. Green girders and huge chunks of concrete crashed more than 18m (60ft) into the water. One portion caved into a jagged V, trapping several cars and drivers. "Boom, boom, boom and we were just dropping, dropping, dropping," driver Jamie Winegar said.
Peter Siddons, a senior vice-president at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, was stuck in the jam on his way home from work when he heard a crunch. He looked ahead and saw the bridge crumble in a rolling wave. "It kept collapsing," he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "down, down, down until it got to me." Siddons's car rolled forward but stopped before falling into the water. He was able to climb over the wreckage and jump to safety. "I thought I was dead," he said. "I honestly did. I thought it was over."
Berndt Toivonen (51) had the same reaction: "The bridge started to buckle. It went up, and it came down," he said. "I thought I was gonna die."
The scene at dusk on Wednesday was horrific. A school bus, which had been transporting as many as 60 children home from day camp, was wedged against the concrete guard rail. (All the children were rescued, with some having minor injuries.) A tractor-trailer had plunged into a crevice; flames and black smoke shot from the wreckage. Cars were piled helter-skelter atop one another. Other vehicles were crushed under toppled road signs.
Witnesses and survivors spoke of a boom as loud as a plane crash, with dust clouds, smoke, sprays of water shooting upward as heavy pieces of the bridge hit the river. They remembered screams, a pregnant woman stumbling, drivers emerging from their cars, bruised and bloodied, bikers speeding to the edge of the bridge to help.
They remembered how improbable it all seemed. "It's like it went in slow motion," witness Janet Stately told the St Paul Pioneer Press. The cars looked like toys as they fell, she said. "And the noise, I don't even know how to describe it to you."
The bridge "started shaking, cars started flying, and I was falling", Catherine Yankelevich (29) told the Star Tribune. After her car hit the water, she climbed out a window and swam to shore.
Yankelevich used to live in California and survived the 1994 Northridge earthquake. "I never expected anything like this to happen here," she said. Heather Munro said she heard a sound "like a wrecking ball hitting a concrete building". Turning in the direction of the sound, she said she saw a plume of dust rising above the tree line.
"It looked like complete, total structural failure," said Munro (40), of Minneapolis. "There was twisted metal everywhere." Gazing down the embankment alongside the river, she spotted an injured man next to two sport-utility vehicles, one on top of the other. The man, his face streaming blood, was struggling to get up, but his right leg was askew as if broken, she said.
About 9m (300ft) away, she saw a woman climb out of the sunroof of her red Jeep. "It was so surreal," Munro said. "She was carrying her purse. She had her arms open in a 'what the heck?' gesture. It was just total bewilderment. She must have been in shock."
Hundreds of rescuers, including, one official said, every firefighter in Minneapolis, scrambled up and down the riverbanks, moving amid half-submerged cars and SUVs in the shadow of dangling concrete and tarmac overhead, their shouts punctuated by the cries of survivors. In deeper water, divers launched themselves into open car windows, looking for victims.
At the Holiday Inn Metrodome half a dozen police chaplains and Red Cross workers met family members or others seeking victims or survivors as huge banks of searchlights illuminated the scene of the collapse.