I was helping my brother move into his new house in Minneapolis yesterday afternoon. My dad wanted to leave my brothers house and return home at 6:00 since it was a 3.5 hour drive home. My brothers New house is 1 mile north of the 35W bridge that collapsed at 6:05 yesterday evening. Had I not been taking my time talking to my brother and his roommate before leaving we would have been very near, if not on that bridge when it went down. My procrastination saved the day once again. Check out google news for the story. Im not looking forward to moving in with my brother and continuing school in Minneapolis since traffic around the city will be affected by this collapse for the next couple years. -Sammo1999
wow, close call for you fella. as for the bridge, i bet it would be repaired relativley quickly, they would want to get it up quickly if its a major road link. If it was the UK, we would have greenpeace activits arguing how the bridge killed 4 slugs and several hundred ants Take care. Sam
It wasn't a close call, actually. even if you were in the area, the chance of you being on that very bridge at the time of the collapse is VERY small. Just think of all the cars that passed over that bridge at that time. Most of them got away.
Yea, the chance of us actually being on the bridge were small, but we would have been very near there. They are only confiming 7 dead. Thats not counting missing bodies ATM, although the death toll will be fairly low thankfully.
My step-sister would normally have been there around that time but was moving one of the horses and was delayed.
My sister had just crossed the bridge and was able to see it collapse in her rear view mirror. That was a close call.
this is scary, drowning is the worst way 2 die. my heart goes out to the families of dead/missing people
I've crossed that bridge so many times it's unbelievable. I used to fish smallmouth and musky right by it. I called my friend this morning to be sure he wasn't sitting at the bottom of the ol' mississip. 9 confirmed dead as of now. I used to live in Rochester, MN for about 10 years and lived in Minneapolis for 1 year. Someone is gonna get slapped hard for that engineering booboo. Imagine adding two lanes and not any additional support. They said the bridge was just inspected in 2004. LOL. Bridges in Chicago are checked every week! each year in Illinois bridges are fully checked for any rust or corrosion and repainted. I think they need to raise the standards up there. Traffic is getting really heavy in the twin cities now and they are going to have to keep up. I guess I'll have to find a different route to my friends when I go up fishing in September. LOL.
Nope. Although you can hold your breath for a while, and the hypoxia will make you woozy, but then body will reflexively try to breathe something. Water rushing into the respiratory tract seriously messes up osmosis as all that liquid is sucked into the cells of the mucous membranes and alveoli. They swell and burst and that really hurts (ever had water go up your nose in the swimming pool and it felt like the top of your skull was coming off? Now imagine that not only in your sinusses, but down your windpipe and in your lungs as well). The shock combined with oxygen deprivation makes the boy convulse badly. Some bones may break in the process. Then you shut down. In very cold water hypothermia lowers your metabolism however, and makes the whole experience more numb and remote. Depends. Acute burns damage and shock your cutaneous nerves so badly that you may not feel much after the initial burn (if you survive the first 30 minutes of course, the rest comes back on-line and you are in Extreme DeLuxe Pain Hell). When you breathe in the superheated air (kind of hard to avoid as you're screaming), your airways get scorched and close up with acute spasm and swelling. Breathing shuts down. The rest of you follows pretty soon after.
Often not for the first few minutes --shock again. More an overwhelming sense of tiredness and feeling drained. Then pain starts to kick in and uncontrolable shivers of cold.
Nexxo obviously spends a lot of time killing himself and deciding which hurts most. But more seriously - what I've heard about people who almost drowned and were recucitated apparently it wasn't too bad. But... it's possible that your brain just stops making memories at that point so you don't remember. Then again, if you die... then you don't remember anyway, so what does it matter if anything ever happened in the first place? Gunshot wound wouldn't be too bad because of the sock, you probaly wouldn't feel anything. But back on topic, 20 or so people dead really isn't that bad. I'm just curious as to why it happened and how. And are there enough alternative routes to cope with the traffic?
Shocking "A school bus filled with more than 50 children who were returning from a summer field trip was among the vehicles on the bridge when it collapsed." "Tony Wagner, the president of a local nonprofit social services group that organized the trip, said eight of the kids, ages 5 to 14, were hospitalized." Jesus they were lucky. Hard to believe in this day and age that structural failure could happen on this kind of scale. You would expect something like this after an earthquake but not this.
Nothing beats the scientific approach... Possibly, those people were pulled out just in time and hadn't breathed in the water yet. Resuscitation can be quite tricky with water-logged lungs. But as you point out, because of how biological memory processes work, people can experience 15 to 30 minutes of retrograde amnesia following unconsciousness. Why does life matter then? Entropy (or: Everything Must Go). Around 1990 the bridge was earmarked for "future replacement". What seems to have slipped people's minds is that 17 years hence is the future.
