When you’re driving, the road suddenly falls from below you.
You may fall for a few seconds, thinking about your family or loved ones, and then there is a hard impact and you are probably injured.
The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge following a ship collision on Tuesday brought back unpleasant memories of their ordeal to survivors of previous bridge collapses.
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“Obviously something was wrong.”
Linda Paul, 72, survived a bridge collapse in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007. The Interstate 35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis without warning during evening rush hour.
At the time, Paul was 55 years old, working as a home-based shop designer for a local company, and driving home in a minivan that doubled as a “store on wheels” loaded with fabrics and sample books. Traffic came to a complete halt and she was stranded on the bridge around 6 p.m.
“I remember looking around and thinking something was definitely wrong,” Paul said. “I looked ahead and saw that the middle part of the bridge was falling in, and at that point I knew there was a good chance I was going to fall with it. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Police later told her that she fell 50 feet down a slope when the bridge’s concrete deck collapsed. She was still inside the minivan when it fell onto debris on the riverbank.
A chunk of concrete hit her, fracturing five vertebrae and shattering her left cheekbone. The collapse killed 13 people and injured 145.
“I felt kind of cheerful.”
Jesse Shelton, now 35 and a New York Broadway actor and voice-over artist, was 18 when he survived a bridge collapse in Minnesota. She was driving from her job to a show she was attending at the Children’s Theater in Minneapolis.
“I started sliding backwards, and it was kind of like a jolt,” she said. “It felt like I was on an amusement park ride. And I remember being 18 and thinking, ‘Well, let’s see what happens.'”
She then suffered a concussion, lost consciousness, and suffered serious injuries, including four fractures in her hip.
“All I remember is the last moments before I got the concussion,” Shelton said. “I don’t remember what happened after that. I woke up at North Memorial Hospital and my mom or my best friend was standing over me.”
“There was a big chunk of cement in the back seat of the car,” she recalled. “I almost lost my life. I think I fell off one of the signs above. So it was really miraculous that I survived because it was cold and I couldn’t have gotten out of that situation. ”
FILE – In this Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007 photo, vehicles are scattered along the broken remains of the Interstate 35W bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul after it collapsed into the Mississippi River during evening rush hour. are doing. The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge following a ship collision on March 26, 2024, brought back unpleasant memories of their ordeal for survivors of previous bridge collapses. (Stacey Bence/Minnesota Daily, via AP)
Escape through the hand crank window
On September 15, 2001, Gustavo Morales Jr. was driving his truck on the Queen Isabella Causeway in Port Isabel, Texas, when his tugboat struck a pillar, sending part of the bridge into the water and sending him into the abyss. Did.
Morales was on his way home from running a late-night restaurant on South Padre Island at the time. He remembers it felt like a rumbling or an explosion. His pickup truck then flew over the collapsed road for several seconds before crashing into the water. His mind flooded with his wife, who was pregnant with his third child.
“Everything goes through your head at 1,000 miles an hour,” he said. “It was his wife, daughters and son who were leaving.”
Morales believes wearing his seatbelt and being able to manually roll down his window helped him stay conscious and get out of the truck. He spent about 10 minutes in the water, but several young people nearby who saw the tugboat hit the pier helped him and others get out safely. Eight people died that day. Morales was among the three survivors.
Multiple surgeries and trauma
Garrett Ebling, another survivor of the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse, was stunned to learn that six people on the Baltimore bridge remained missing and presumed dead. .
“As survivors of the Minneapolis bridge collapse, one of the things we hold onto is that we went through this experience in hopes that others in the future will never have to go through something like this,” Ebling said. he said.
Ebling, 49, of New Ulm, Minn., endured multiple surgeries, including facial reconstruction, and emotional trauma.
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“We don’t know what happened in Baltimore,” Ebling said. “But I don’t want to see anyone go through that, especially unnecessarily. I feel really bad if it turns into an avoidable accident. In my estimation, what happened in Minneapolis was an avoidable bridge accident. It’s a collapse. And if that’s the case.” That’s what happened in Baltimore, and I think that’s even more unfortunate.”
