I lived in Minneapolis for 32 years before we moved to Wisconsin. My husband and I have both driven over That Bridge literally thousands of times, as has pretty much everyone else who ever ventured into Minneapolis.
You may have seen the interviews with Ron Engebretsen and his two daughters as they waited and hoped that Sherry, their wife and mother, would be found alive. Here is one from KSTP, the local ABC affiliate; it was on the ABC nightly news tonight, too.
Ron and I worked together for six years at a regional brokerage firm in downtown Minneapolis. He was the manager of EDP auditing, I was the manager of financial and operational auditing. Sherry was also an accountant but worked at a different company. I remember how proud and happy they were when they moved into their new house in Shoreview. We ate dinner there once with others from work. I also remember their joy when they were able to adopt their daughters from Columbia, and how Ron would bring the girls' pictures to the office.
I don't want to give the impression we were intimate friends. Ron was a colleague; I knew Sherry well enough to chat, but none of us were close friends. But she was one of the more alive people I have ever met.
She was one of the four confirmed dead today. Her daughter said that her mom never took 35W home from work but that day for some reason she did.
R, one of Matthew's friends, IMed him today. R and his family live in south Minneapolis not far from where we lived, but we all met when they bought a cabin on our lake. Although their boys were a couple years younger than ours, they all were friends and hung out together every summer for at least the past ten years. R messaged that yesterday he and his dad went to the dentist somewhere north of the river. When they came home, J, the dad, took a different route than usual. Had he gone their normal way, they would probably have been on That Bridge at the crucial time. For some reason he didn't take That Bridge yesterday.
I checked with a friend in my accounting firm in downtown Minneapolis today. The office employs something like 800 people, but she hadn't heard of any that were on That Bridge; definitely no one from the tax department, but the partner we work for had crossed it five minutes before the collapse.
My husband was in Minneapolis working all weekend and had to stay for another workday on Tuesday. He called at about 4:15 on Wednesday and we arranged to meet for dinner at favorite spot that is on his way home to Wisconsin. The logical route from our house in south Minneapolis to the lake in Wisconsin crosses the Mississippi at That Bridge. Because of bridge repairs, traffic was backed up for several miles and he took a different route. Had he taken the logical route, he would have passed over That Bridge a half hour before it collapsed. Perhaps some of the cars that were southbound when he got off I-35 to head into Wisconsin were on That Bridge at 6:05.
The population of the Twin Cities area is something over a million, but it is not so big that there aren't many stories like mine. I suspect that all over the metro area today there were people thinking of others who commute on 35W, recognizing someone they saw interviewed on TV, thinking of the times they have crossed That Bridge.
Life is a dangerous business. We never know what may come next. There are no guarantees. Luck, fate, whatever, it goes both ways. Hug your loved ones and be glad none of you were on That Bridge.
