What a nightmare!

Minneapolis. Jeez.

As disasters go (and I'm sure if anyone actually read this, I'd start catching flak [by the way, newsies, "flak" is airborne shrapnel or excessive criticism, a "flack" is a hapless spokesperson for a celebrity] for my excessive pragmatism), the death toll is surprisingly low. It'll definitely be more than 4 by the time it's all said and done, but honestly, it could have been far worse.

As for the whys and wherefores, those will come out on their own, and there's no point in me speculating. I will say that I'm surprised by the number of quotes that go along this line: "It's just unthinkable that something this massive could fall down." Uhhhh. No. It's not unthinkable. Many engineers train for years thinking about that very question, and how to make it very unlikely, but it's still possible. Maybe, having gone to an engineering school, I'm more open to the possibility. When I was in college, the 1981 Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse (billed here as the largest U.S. structural failure) and the 1986 Challenger explosion were big engineering failures that still quieted a room when they came up. The public kind of forgets (it's interesting...this collapse has more in common with the Hyatt than 9/11, yet everyone's rushing to make the 9/11 comparisons), but I think that's becuase by and large, engineers are damned good at their jobs. Mistakes happen, materials fail, and sometimes, you don't catch them in time. This will get (more) politicized, and there will be (more) finger-pointing, and there will even be conspiracy nutjobs claiming that George W. Bush personally melted the bridge supports with a beam from space.

But it doesn't change the fact that at some point in the not-too-distant future, one of my recurring nightmares will probably haunt me. It's the one where I'm driving, with family or friends (sometimes in my underwear, just to add a little extra kick to the horror) usually to some incredibly distant place or over some incredibly difficult terrain, and the vehicle I'm driving plunges off of a bridge. Sometimes the bridge is incomplete, sometime it's in the process of being repaired and the remaining surface is ridiculously inadequate for my car, or what have you, but in the end, there's always that pitching-forward-falling-toward-the-water feeling.

Thank God I always wake up before that one finishes. My heart and prayers go out to the people who had to go through that in reality this week, and to their families...particularly the ones who won't be waking up again.