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

(page 3 of 4)

The surface of a collapsed portion, when Stencel got there, was several feet above him. A boost from a bystander helped him up, and construction workers rushed over a stepladder they were using for him to climb down. What he saw stopped him cold. “There was fire. There were people everywhere. For about 10 seconds I couldn’t breathe.”

He could see slabs of concrete and rebar moving—shifting, cracking, popping. Ignoring the heat, Stencel put on his blue helmet. Good thing, too: A few minutes later, it stopped a chunk of concrete the size of a hibachi from crushing his skull.

He could see what looked like hundreds of bystanders running down the hill toward him. He turned to a man in an FBI jacket. “I need these people out of here now.”

The agent pivoted. “I need you off this bridge,” he barked at the crowd. “If you don’t go, you will have committed a federal offense and you will be arrested.” People listened.

Stencel turned to two young men who had been helping the walking wounded. “Go to the truck and get my blue bag. Tell my partner the blue bag,” he ordered.

When the collapse occurred, paramedic supervisor Tom Ward was finishing his shift at HCMC, preparing to hand responsibilities off to the next crew in about 20 minutes. He was responsible for some 26 paramedics in 13 ambulances around the metro area. When the call came in, Ward started ordering rigs to the scene. He called in mechanics and other support people. Then he jumped in his own vehicle, switched on the flashers, and started toward the river.

Ward planned to cross the river using the Third Avenue bridge, which would put him nearest the address on the 911 log. He headed north with a rig in tow, up Washington Avenue, from the hospital’s location next to the Metrodome. He didn’t get far before he saw a fire truck headed the opposite direction. He exchanged glances with the chief in the cab and guessed he must look as puzzled as the other man: Where’s he going?

Eventually, Ward ended up on the 10th Avenue bridge, parallel to the shattered stretch of interstate. A number of things became clear the moment he looked down. He realized what Stencel and Redmond were forced to figure out on the fly: The marked, paved roads leading to the site had been blocked. He also realized that spans of the bridge had been curled into half-pipes and ravines, separating emergency workers on the ground into a series of canyons. He and the fire department brass who had joined him to set up an Incident Command post needed to let people on the ground know where they were, a way of signaling their location. They decided to identify the sections, labeling one end east and the other west. But there was confusion because the bridge had spanned a bend where the river ran east-west. They finally settled on A, B, and so on.

Further complicating efforts was the fact that there were multiple landmarks near the bridge: If Ward told a driver to take his rig on the road by the power plant, would the paramedic know to ask whether he was talking about the plant upriver or the decommissioned one downstream? I’m overwhelmed, he thought. I’m not making good decisions.

As a tour guide, Charlie Leekley is ridiculously overqualified. He holds a U.S. Coast Guard Captain’s license, a credential that’s nearly impossible to get anymore. To obtain one, you have to spend 750 days working on the water on a commercial vessel.

Leekley grew up driving rental pontoons at his grandfather’s resort on Lake Vermilion. He earned his first qualifying hours working for family friends, before following a long-forgotten girlfriend to the University of Hawaii, where he ended up with a sailing scholarship and a spot on the catamaran-racing team. He was on the water for weeks at a time.

Anyone with a Coast Guard Captain’s license has been in high demand since Katrina, which wrecked the ecosystem around Louisiana’s Barrier Islands. The oil industry had over-dredged the area, leaving New Orleans with one less defense against the tidal surge that accompanied the hurricane. The Gulf states used to have plenty of licensed captains, but in recent years, Homeland Security tightened things up; a lot of guys with old DWIs on their records lost their licenses.

When salaries went up, Leekley headed south to find work rebuilding beaches. But in the summer of 2007, he returned to Minnesota to captain the Minneapolis Queen, a steamboat with a Mardis-Gras-on-steroids theme that ferries young families and seniors up and down the Mississippi on narrated tours. It’s not hard to get a commercial captain to pilot cruises on state waterways like Lake Minnetonka, but the river is federal jurisdiction. Most people who can run a passenger ship there don’t want to spend their days pointing out landmarks on the same few miles of shoreline.

Leekley finds it hard to pilot while reading a script, so he’s memorized two hours of Mill District history. Much of the spiel involves disasters that took place in the vicinity of St. Anthony Falls. The current eats at the limestone and sandstone under the falls. In 1859, two different bridges over the river collapsed into it. In 1869, a tunnel through the limestone under the falls collapsed, shearing off some of the falls. In 1880, another tunnel caved in. A century later, a Northern States Power hydro station on the eastern bank fell into the river.

On August 1, Leekley was captaining a private charter: a woman and 48 of her friends, three crew members, and a bunch of chafing dishes heaped with barbecue. The Minneapolis Queen was just a few minutes out of its Boom Island slip, starting to ease into the second of the two locks carrying traffic around St. Anthony Falls. Leekley was looking straight ahead at the bridge when it fell. When investigators came around afterward, they wanted to know what snapped first, where the various cars had been. But from Leekley’s vantage point, a couple hundred feet away, it all went down in a second. “It just kind of crumbled, all the asphalt. It shattered,” he says. “You saw the Twin Towers collapse? All that dust.”

Using Coast Guard emergency radio channel 16, Leekley issued the first mayday call of his 18-year career. Then he radioed the lockmaster that he was going to proceed into the lock and downriver to render assistance. “Oh my God, here I am,” Leekley recalls thinking. “I am the first one here—and the only one down here.” Serendipitously, he’d spent the earlier part of the afternoon under water, trying to fix the Queen’s propeller, so he even had diving equipment in the pilothouse.

“The lockmaster came running out at me, screaming, pissed off at me. ‘Get the hell out of my lock,’ he said. I backed out, but I knew I needed to stay there. So I backed up just enough so he could close the lock gates, right up along that retaining wall, in front of the lock doors, and called 911 and told them I was the captain of the Minneapolis Queen and was ready to assist at the Lower St. Anthony Falls dam.”

Soon after, the cops showed up, shouting about commandeering his boat. No need, Leekley replied, he was ready to go. But they were going to have to argue with the lockmaster, an employee of the U.S. Corps of Engineers with indisputable authority over who gets in and out of the lock. Leekley drove back into the lock, and then back out when the police failed to persuade the lockmaster, who was concerned that the Queen might be too big to maneuver in the short space between the lock and the bridge, and that opening the giant miter gates would make the current unstable.

Leekley kept the boat there for an hour just in case. Then he asked the woman who’d chartered the boat whether she wanted to continue the party upstream or receive a voucher for another cruise. Her guests were upset, so he returned to Boom Island. He was too keyed up to go home, so he took the foil pans full of slow-roasted meat from the party and drove them around to friends’ houses.

At 6:20, Kristi Rollwagen opened Minneapolis’s Emergency Operations Center, a narrow, windowless chamber in the basement of City Hall. The assistant director of the city’s Department of Emergency Preparedness, Rollwagen walked around the room, turning on phones and computers as she called her boss, Rocco Forte, who was on a stroll around Lake of the Isles. He misunderstood her message, though: He thought a small chunk of the bridge had fallen. Still, he ran the mile and a half back to his car.

If the call had taken place five years ago, there would have been no city Department of Emergency Preparedness to handle the catastrophe. Back then, Forte was fire chief and Rollwagen was his communications aide. Once or twice a year, Forte would go before the City Council and ask for disaster-preparedness money. The prevailing attitude in local government then was that preparedness was nice, but cops and schools were nicer.

After 9/11, Forte saw his opening. In March 2002, he dragged 80 people—emergency workers, county commissioners, Mayor R. T. Rybak, and the City Council president and vice president—to Mount Weather, Virginia. For four days, the VIPs presided over mock emergencies: a chemical spill, a pandemic, a high-rise fire, a perfect storm of multiple catastrophes. “We did quite poorly,” Forte says.

Point made. “When we came back, the mayor asked what we needed to be successful,” he says. Forte got a brand-new city department, and carte blanche to write Homeland Security grant proposals. As a result, an unprecedented number of people had roles to play on the evening of August 1. Within a few minutes of Rollwagen opening the EOC, more than 100 people—including Rybak and the governor—were wedged into the room, which normally fits 12 people. Someone located a 20-year-old television and rolled it in on a cart, but the focal point was the computer monitor displaying a live image of the collapse site, courtesy of the city’s new Wi-Fi network.

Problems and tasks were listed on whiteboards on the walls of the room; there were so many that someone took a picture of the boards every two hours before it was wiped and reused. The public-works department was tapped for lights and generators, port-a-potties, and a crane on a barge. The Police Athletic League bus was commandeered to ship officers to the site. Someone from the finance department started tallying the costs almost immediately, tracking every cent the feds might reimburse.

All survivors had been rescued from the scene by 7:55, 110 minutes after the bridge gave way. The EOC was up and running until the last body was recovered, on August 20.