I just got a new cell phone this week. Actually it is the same as the old one which I lost. (Very disconcerting. For a week I kept calling it in the vain hope I might hear it ring and find it. Almost like I was lost!) I waited a couple of days because my cell phone guy, Jay, was up in Minneapolis at a wedding.
When I went in I asked him if he was there when the bridge went down. He told me was at the Metrodome for the Twinkies game when it happened. His niece's boyfriend had walked across the adjoining bridge just as it fell and was in a cloud of dust but never knew the bridge fell! One other person at the wedding was literally feet away from being on the bridge when it went down and his daughter was in the car behind him.
I think that people outside of flyover country don,t realize just how close this tragedy was to being hugely worse. I have not spoken with one person since it happened that has not said to me "Oh, I was there a week (day, month, two months) ago." There were literally thousands of people on, around or under that bridge every day. I still can,t believe the death toll wasn't one hundred times what is being projected.