Editor’s Note:
On Jan. 15, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that gusset plates—plates that bind steel beams—were the cause of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis last summer. Plates that should have been 1 inch thick were only ½ inch thick and failed in 8 of 122 instances. The collapse killed 13 people and injured 145.

The NTSP estimates that as many as 12,600 bridges nationwide could suffer from a similar vulnerability. The Federal Highway Administration has asked state authorities to re-examine bridges, and the recalculation of maximum loads for dozens of bridges is currently underway.

Inside the Collapse

2 on-scene chiefs share their perspective of the I-35 bridge collapse

On Aug. 1, 2007, chaos hit the city of Minneapolis when the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed during rush hour, sending as many as 50 vehicles into the river, injuring 123 people and killing 13.  The body of the final missing person was recovered Aug. 21, nearly three weeks after the initial incident.

Following is an account of the incident and initial lessons learned from the incident commander on scene, Chief Jim Clack of the Minneapolis Fire Department (MFD), and a mutual-aid chief officer, Chief Rich Gasaway of the Roseville (Minn.) Fire Department (RFD). 

Immediate Response
The bridge collapsed at 1805 hrs. Police officers began arriving on scene approximately 4 minutes after the initial 911 call; only minutes later, firefighters joined the rescue effort. The bridge was crowded with traffic, and a train had been passing beneath the roadway at the time of the collapse.

“I had just gotten home from work,” Gasaway says. “I headed to our closest station, about a half-mile from my house, to coordinate on-duty resources. While en route, countywide dispatch set off tones for every fire department in our county to send all available resources. Never in 30 years have I heard a call for help that says everyone come and bring everything you can. So that really put into perspective for me that this was going to be a large-scale event.” The RFD sent four chief officers, an engine company, a heavy-rescue company, members of an advanced rescue team, a medic response unit and a boat. “They were there within 10 minutes of being called,” Gasaway says.

Chief Clack arrived on scene about 30 minutes after the initial call. “As I was approaching the scene, I was listening to the radio communications, but I didn’t really get a sense of the scope of the incident until I pulled up on the bridge that runs parallel to the I-35,” he says. “It was an amazing sight. Several hundred feet of bridge were in the river, and there were people crawling all over it. It was surreal; it looked like a movie set.”

The city set up an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in city hall, about a mile away from the incident, and Clack spent much of his time managing the incident from there.

The initial rescue involved all responders doing whatever they could to help. “Initially, it was hard to maintain accountability—there were police officers, sheriff’s department personnel and civilians all crawling on the bridge,” Clack says. “Within the first 2 hours, Assistant Chief John Fruetel, who was acting as the operations chief, pulled everyone back off the bridge and then redeployed them. This gave the command staff a chance to set up full accountability for everyone who was working there, and ensure that only those with the proper level of training were part of the operation.” At the height of the rescue effort, about 200 hundred emergency responders were on scene.

Their task was daunting, to say the least. In addition to victims on the bridge decking over the river, and wounded and bleeding ambulatory victims, many people were in the water. When the tough terrain prevented ambulance access, emergency workers commandeered pickup trucks to ferry 55 victims from the water’s edge. MFD fire captain Shanna Hanson, who does diving on her days off from the department, was televised across the country, performing rescue dives with only a rope tied around her waist.

Another highly distributed image was that of a school bus teetering on the edge of the collapse. “From where I was, I could look across the river and see the school bus that we later learned contained 60 kids, some of whom had significant injuries,” Gasaway says. “The tractor-trailer next to the school bus was burning. There were two vehicles beside the burning truck, and a large column of thick black smoke.”

Clack notes that much of the equipment his department sent was purchased with grants established after 9/11. “We didn’t have a collapse rescue team until after 9/11,” he says. “Those funds enabled us to finance equipment and training for large-scale operations. We brought several semis of equipment to the scene, including shoring, tools and command vehicles.”

From Rescue to Recovery
About 1 ½–2 hours into the incident, operations changed from rescue to recovery as commanders decided the water was too dangerous to dive in. Rescuers also faced an impending storm. “The sky darkened up significantly, with lots of impressive lightning,” Gasaway says. “We were restaged on the 10th Avenue bridge, which runs parallel to I-35, and commanders told the firefighters to stay in their vehicles. Luckily, the storm skirted just around downtown.”

The storm wasn’t the only factor in slowing the pace of the operation; secondary collapse was a concern throughout. “As soon as the rescue phase was over, we went into a much more slow and deliberate effort,” Clack says. “At midnight on August 1, we ceased all operations until it got light, and then we brought in engineers along with a collapse rescue team to inspect the collapse site before we sent rescuers back in. We didn’t restart operations until well after daylight on Thursday.”

Clack notes that even a week after the incident, secondary collapse remained a threat. “The bridge is settling into the bottom of the river, and there’s a lot of movement going on. Engineers on site, as well as personnel from OSHA and the NTSB, are using lasers to monitor the movement,” he says. “As the incident goes on, people get more comfortable with the layout of the collapse, and there’s a real risk for complacency. One of our ongoing roles now is acting as the safety officers on site, and we’re taking that very seriously.”

Cooperation Amid Chaos
Gasaway notes that the various factors at play in this incident would have made it seem unreal on paper. “We take incident command and mass-casualty classes, but the scenarios they give you in class always seem so unbelievable,” he says. “In this incident, you had 800 feet of bridge decking collapse into the river and onto the shores, 87 cars involved, many of which were in the river, workers on the bridge who went into the water, a school bus teetering next to a burning vehicle, divers who can’t get into the water, civilians coming in trying to effect rescues, power lines down touching the metal bridge structure, a railroad tank car with an unknown substance crushed beneath the wreckage and a severe storm coming through. We were living the complete unreality of a scenario you would say could never happen in real life.”

Central to responding to an incident of such complexity was the cooperation among rescuers. “The best way I can describe it is all-hands working,” Gasaway says. “I saw nothing that indicated there were any turf issues, any us-versus-them issues. Police officers were treating victims right next to firefighters and paramedics.”

Clack attributes the successful unified command to numerous tabletop exercises and scenarios the department has run through since 9/11. “We know each agency’s capabilities,” he says. “We’re very comfortable letting whoever is in the lead, be in the lead. Initially, it was a rescue operation and the fire department was in the lead. After 26 hours, when the initial rescues were completed, we passed command on to police because it became more of a law enforcement issue.”

Lessons Learned
The MFD will be conducting an in-depth review of the incident, but already some lessons have emerged. One extremely positive aspect: communication. The MFD converted to 800-MHz radios about 2 years ago; the RFD less than a year ago. “We could all talk to one another,” Gasaway says. “We had radio interoperability and a common command channel. This incident was a great test of the system, and it worked as advertised.” Clack notes the MFD was able to set up talk groups and cross-patch in personnel so they could talk to one another. “Radio communications were excellent,” he says.

Cell phones, however, were another story, as one carrier was completely unavailable for several hours after the incident. Fortunately, Clack and some other personnel carried personal cell phones using another carrier, and he was able to communicate with the command vehicle using his personal phone. “This incident has revealed the need to have more than one cell phone provider available for key personnel,” Clack says.

In addition, although the incident went fairly smoothly from a unified command perspective, it also underscored the need for multi-county drills. “At the time of the incident, we had no regional plan that was rehearsed for an event like this, a mass-casualty incident involving both county resources and state resources and eventually national resources,” Gasaway says. “We learned that incidents can transcend the county boundaries in significant ways. There’s a great deal to be proud of in terms of how the incident played out, but Chief Clack has the wisdom to capture the lessons learned to share with the countywide area and with the fire service as a whole.” As Gasaway notes, such lessons will be critical to the city’s planning for the Republican National Convention next year.   

The effectiveness of the general alarm that indicated to Gasaway the seriousness of the incident is also being evaluated. “We need to do a better job of figuring out the call-back procedure when we have a major incident,” Clack says. “There was a general alarm, and a lot of people self-deployed. If the fire department would have been in command longer, we would have had a problem with not having enough reserves.”

That said, both Clack and Gasaway are extremely proud of the firefighters and other emergency personnel who responded to the scene. “It made me incredibly proud to be part of the emergency response of this region, and to be a Minnesotan,” Gasaway says. Clack adds, “Our firefighters did an outstanding job under very stressful and dangerous conditions. Their dedication and professionalism make Minneapolis Fire one of the best fire departments in the United States.”

Sources: Information for this article was taken from AP, CNN, The Edmonton Sun, and other online resources.

Shannon Pieper is managing editor of FireRescue.