It's really hitting me today. If yesterday was a day of "OMG, this is so horrible, well, I hope they were wearing seatbelts!" and "If traffic was bumper-to-bumper, where are all the cars?" theorizing, today all I can think of is how horrible it must have been to be sitting on the bridge and then fall six stories in your car. Those that escaped unharmed or relatively unharmed were truly the lucky ones. Yeah, the death toll is relatively low - right now it's 5 confirmed deaths, but there are more bodies down there and divers can't even get to them. They are stuck in their cars, pinned under tons of concrete. They never had a chance. They died the most horrible slow agonizing death possible.
I used to take that bridge almost every day on my way to the U. I never liked this bridge. Maybe it's because it didn't have a shoulder, so you had to drive close to the side, or maybe because I once almost got in an accident on an icy day. Actually, I didn't like it going north. There was not much of a view, plus I was always late for classes. When driving south from the U, I didn't even think of it as a bridge - on the right you could see downtown Minneapolis, and a little bit ahead on Washington Avenue there was "Steve and Bob's Auto world" with that "Unleaded 99 cents" sign forever imbedded in my mind.
And now it's gone, taking with it dozens of lives. I could have been on it. Any one of my friends could have been on it. In fact, we were on it just a week and a half earlier with the Chicago KVN team. My aunt was on the bridge 6 hours before it collapsed. It's sheer luck that no one I know (so far) was there at the time. Others were not so lucky.
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