You’re driving… and the road disappears below you: what’s it like to avoid a bridge collapse?

Linda Paul, 72 years old, On August 1, 2007, a bridge in Minneapolis survived a collapse. The Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis collapsed without warning during midday rush hour.

Paul was 55 at the time, working as a home store designer for a local company and driving home in a minivan that also served as a “store on wheels” stocked with fabrics and samples. Traffic came to a complete standstill after she got stuck on the bridge around 6 pm.

“I remember looking around and thinking something was definitely wrong,” Paul said. “I looked ahead and I saw that the middle part of the bridge was falling down, and at that moment I knew there was a good chance I would fall for him. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Police later told him that he fell down a 15-metre slope when the bridge’s concrete deck collapsed. She was still inside the minivan when she fell onto the riverbank debris.

Chunks of concrete hit her, fracturing five vertebrae and crushing her left cheekbone, while 13 people were killed and 145 people were injured in this blast.

Jesse Shelton, now a 35-year-old Broadway actress and broadcaster in New York, was 18 when she survived a Minnesota bridge collapse. He was driving from work to a production he was a part of at the Children’s Theater in Minneapolis.

“I started sliding backwards. And it was like a shock,” he said. “I felt like I was on some kind of amusement park ride.. And I remember thinking when I was 18, ‘Well, we’ll see what happens.’

He was then knocked unconscious, suffering concussions and injuries that broke his back in four places.

“I remember the last moment before I had a concussion“Shelton said. “I don’t remember what came next. “I woke up at North Memorial Hospital with my mom or my best friend standing next to me.”

“There was a big block of cement in the back seat of my car,” he recalled. “He was going to kill me. I think it came from one of the posters above. “So it was really quite miraculous that he survived because he couldn’t get out of that situation, because he was out cold.”

Gustavo Morales Jr. A truck was driving on the Queen Elizabeth Causeway in Port Isabel, Texas, and on September 15, 2001, a tugboat hit a pier and fell into a ditch when part of the bridge fell into the water.

Morales was on his way home from a night managing a restaurant on South Padre Island at the time. He remembers what felt like a bang or an explosion, and then his truck flew over the broken road for a few seconds before hitting the water. Thoughts of his wife expecting their third child flooded his mind.

“Everything comes at you at a thousand miles an hour,” he said. “It was my wife, my daughters, my son who were on the way.”

Morales believes so Wearing his seat belt and being able to roll down the window on his own helped him remain conscious and escape the truck. He spent about ten minutes in the water before some nearby youths who had seen the tugboat crash into the dock helped him and the others out to safety. Eight people died that day. Morales was among the three survivors.

Garrett Ebling Another survivor of the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse was paralyzed when he learned that six people on the bridge in Baltimore were still missing and presumed dead.

“As survivors of the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the thing we’re holding on to is that we’ve gone through this with the hope that people won’t have to go through something like this in the future,” Ebling said.

Ebling, 49, of New Ulm, Minnesota, suffered Multiple surgeries including facial reconstruction, as well as emotional trauma.

“We don’t know what happened in Baltimore,” Ebling said. “But I don’t want anyone to have to go through that, especially if it’s unnecessary. I feel really bad if it ends up being a preventable accident. In my opinion, what happened in Minneapolis was a preventable bridge collapse. And if it happened in Baltimore as well, I think that makes it even more disappointing.

(with information from AP)