Four years ago at this time, General Convention of The Episcopal Church was meeting in Minneapolis. Perhaps since I spent ten days there, I have been thinking about the bridge collapse.
Out of the mists of memory comes another one from my years when I lived in Princeton, NJ. If I wanted to, I could pinpoint the date when this event happened but it's not really important. It was sometime in the late-1980s.
The Harrison Street Bridge is one of the two major bridges out of Princeton to Rte 1 and beyond. Lake Carnegie flows under it and if you row/scull (as I did while a grad student at Princeton University), you go under the bridge. The photo (from the Princeton Historical Society) shows the old bridge that lasted until it was replaced.
One morning in the late-1980s, we woke up to the news that that half-constructed Harrison Street Bridge replacement had collapsed into the lake. Evidently, it was not built to withstand the heavy equipment that was parked out there (a huge crane, dump trucks, front end loaders and such).
I remember a contemporaneous Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, with Calvin asking his parents why does a bridge collapse? His father answered: They keep putting stuff on it until they find out it can't handle it any more.
I am not trying to be funny or irreverent. I couldn't help but be struck by seeing the number of dump trucks out on the I-35 bridge and wonder if their collective weight also contributed to the collapse (what do I know?) — seeing them is what triggered the memory.
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May the souls of the departed — found and not yet found — rest in peace.
God protect the responders.
God accompany those who mourn.
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