110 Minutes

After the I-35W bridge collapsed, every survivor was rescued in less than two hours. The inside story of how ordinary citizens saved countless lives.

Photo by David Bowman

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Bernie Toivonen was working that afternoon, painting the addition to a home near Spoon Lake in Maplewood. That night, he was supposed to help his son move, but he wanted to go home, to his place in Minneapolis’s Bryn Mawr neighborhood, and eat first. He got hung up, though, initially at the job site, trying to find his glasses, and then by gridlock near downtown.

He was a few car lengths behind Petterson and Ebling, headed across the river, toward 94 West. He turned to his right, looking upstream at the Stone Arch Bridge, which paralleled the 35W span. When he turned back, the cars in front of him had dropped out of sight. The road started to swing up in front of his gray Explorer. He realized that if the asphalt rose high enough, the cars he’d been following would tumble down onto his vehicle. He threw the Explorer into reverse and floored it. “I wanted to at least do something. I really did think I was going to die.”

Toivonen had made split-second decisions like this before. Years ago, he lived up near Virginia, Minnesota. Late one night, he was in his car when he saw a train approaching the bottom of the hill he was driving down. What he couldn’t see was the ice glazing the roadway. His brakes failed to grip, so he took a breath and mashed the accelerator. “I beat the train by maybe 10 feet,” he says.

On the bridge, Toivonen backed onto a flat piece of road, and rode the rest of the way down without injury. When he came to rest at the bottom of the concrete U, it was absolutely silent. “I sat there for a few moments, then I got out and I just walked around my car a little bit and then got back in. I called my dad up. I told him that I was going to be late for supper, that the bridge went down. I don’t think he had heard about it. He said, ‘I’ll see you when you get here.’”

For a few minutes, Toivonen seemed to be the only uninjured person moving. He checked out the cars near his, guessed a woman slumped over a steering wheel was already dead, and kept going. A few people appeared on the embankment above the road, shouting and motioning. He looked where they were pointing and saw a man pinned under a steel beam. Two teenagers emerged from one of the cars that had been in front of Toivonen and moved the beam to free the man.

Toivonen followed the sound of a screaming voice to a minivan that had rolled over, blocking the driver’s-side door. He guided the woman trapped inside out of her seat belt and then out the passenger-side window.

For about 20 minutes, it was Toivonen’s piece of bridge. And then the scene was swarming with rescue workers. When a paramedic asked him to leave, his adrenaline was pumping so hard he just stared. “I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay there and help.” The medic asked a couple more times. “He was real polite about it and firm. He said, ‘We appreciate your help. We have to take control of the work from here on in.’”

Toivonen went back to his truck and got his lunch box and a bucket of tools. He picked his way up the hill, stopping to give his name to someone from the Star Tribune and his contact information to a Minneapolis Park Police officer. She gave him a hug. He walked along the riverside until he got to the Stone Arch Bridge. There, he asked a stranger to take his picture with his cell phone, the wreckage in the background. He put the phone back in his pocket, picked up his tools, and started walking. He walked all the way to the intersection of Hennepin and Seventh Street, where he waited for his brother to pick him up. He was covered in blood, but no one stopped him.

When he got home, he showed the picture on his phone to his dad, who had dinner waiting. For a little while, they sat quietly and watched the coverage of the disaster on TV. Soon, though, the phone started to ring. It didn’t stop for four days.

In the two hours after the bridge collapsed, Minneapolis’s 911 operators answered 505 calls, 52 of them from the scene. The first was placed 36 seconds after 6:05 p.m.

“The bridge collapsed,” a woman screamed, “in downtown Minneapolis. There are people all over the place.”

“Ma’am, I need to know where. Give me a cross street, okay?” asked the operator, seemingly unfazed.

“Hang on. Okay, I can see Gold Medal flour, I can see Riverside Apartments.”

“Ma’am, I need a cross street. Are you on Main Street?”

“No, I’m on West River Road.”

Other calls were pouring in, and within 90 seconds, dispatchers had gathered most of the basic information needed. Ideally, 10 seconds elapse between the time someone dials 911 and the moment an operator comes on the line. In that interval, the computer-aided dispatch system has already collected information and begun the process of categorizing the call and calculating the emergency responders needed to be activated. The system had been upgraded just six months before the bridge collapsed.

When an operator answers a call, a computer screen displays the caller’s phone number and an address. If the call was placed on a landline, it’s the street address where the phone is located. If it’s a cell phone, the computer will retrieve the caller’s latitude and longitude from a chip in the phone. The first thing the operator does is verify this information.

She then asks why the caller dialed 911. If it’s the proverbial cat in a tree, she issues instructions. If it’s a true emergency, she assigns the call two codes: one indicating the type of incident and the other its urgency. When the operator hits return on her keyboard, the information cascades onto a 911 dispatcher’s monitor, and then onto any other dispatching systems the computer determines need to be alerted. News of an injury on Minneapolis’s North Side is zapped to paramedics at North Memorial Hospital, for instance, while one in the southern half of the city is routed to Hennepin County Medical Center.

If the incident is big enough, or requires unusual resources, the city’s human dispatcher swings into action. She might call on paramedics or firefighters from the county or from another city. A disaster like the bridge collapse triggers still another flurry of alerts to more specialized emergency responders. An unknown chemical leaking from a crushed train warranted a HAZMAT team; people in the water meant divers.

That afternoon, HCMC emergency-room doctor John Hick was at home in southwest Minneapolis working on an emergency-preparedness grant proposal when his pager went off. He ran out of the house and climbed into his county car, which has a trunk packed with exactly the kind of thing the government has thrown money at since 9/11—special equipment for dealing with people injured by the collapse of a building. Hick turned on his rooftop flashers and headed north. He was at the site within minutes.

Not everything worked so smoothly. Because the first 911 call came by cell phone, the computer logged the address of the incident as 500 Second Street Southeast, a restored warehouse a few blocks upriver from the bridge. Operators can override such mistakes, but the first few callers weren’t certain what had collapsed. Many insisted Washington Avenue had fallen.

Paramedics Chad Stencel and Paul Redmond had just dropped off a transfer patient at HCMC when their mobile dispatch computer crackled to life. Stencel heard his dispatcher order two ambulances—“trucks” or “rigs” in EMT jargon—out of the garage. Whatever was up, it was big.

Heading for the address they’d been given, Redmond drove across the Stone Arch Bridge, just north of the collapse site. Once they got far enough out on the pedestrian bridge to see downstream, Stencel looked out his window and realized the mistake. “All of 35W was gone,” he recalls. He shouted at Redmond, who grabbed the radio. “Be advised: All of 35 has collapsed. It appears 35 has collapsed all across the river.”

No one knew it yet, but the collapse had also blocked the frontage roads along the river that could get rescuers to the site. Stencel had been on the job just four months, but Redmond knew the area intimately. He veered down some railroad tracks and then a winding dirt access road. At the bottom, they realized emergency vehicles would soon clog the narrow path, making it impossible to get the wounded out. Redmond corralled cops and bystanders and positioned them along the road with instructions on who to let through.

Stencel grabbed some equipment and took off running. Trained as a cop as well as an paramedic, he cut his teeth working in Northfield and Texas. He was as bored as the next guy during the endless disaster drills that are now a standard part of first-responder training. But now, as he ran, he was relieved that he remembered how to take command of a scene. “It’s not like I thought, ‘This is how this is going to go.’ I just started doing the things I knew.”