35W Bridge Collapse

By John R. Finnegan, Jr.
Dean and Professor
Aug. 6, 2007

My spouse and I walked around the entire restricted periphery of the 35W bridge collapse site last evening, about five miles in all from the Washington Avenue Bridge to the Stone Arch Bridge, up University Avenue and back to the Mayo Building across campus. We, like those we passed on the way, had a need to connect with this terrible tragedy, with those still lost, and to try to understand it. You catch snippets of conversation along the way - a prayer, a "there-but-for-the- grace-of-God" story, lots of barely audible conversations like being in a place of worship, and comments like "...This shouldn't have happened..." and a shake of the head. The public pulse along the way was sadness, disbelief, the need for meaning and understanding, the need to know what has gone wrong. Something has gone wrong.

Lt. Governor and Transportation Commissioner Carol Molnau angrily ripped into a reporter at a Friday press conference on the disaster for asking whether she believed her department was less able to do its job because of the Governor's "no new taxes" policy. She took offense and immediately personalized a very legitimate question as an attack on the integrity of good people in the Transportation Department. She was way off the mark in my opinion, but likely sleep-deprived and not thinking clearly. Whatever has gone wrong is not apparently about bad people doing bad things. It is about an entire system that doesn't give good people the tools they need to do the best job possible for prevention. My guess is that the shower of national media attention on Minneapolis during this tragedy suggests the rest of the country is coming to this conclusion, too.