Minneapolis blogger Noah Kunin has one of the most dramatic accounts of the collapse of a bridge over the Mississippi last night during rush hour, which killed at least seven people.
"I live the closest to the 35W bridge than anyone in Minneapolis and I watched it come down from my roof," Noah writes on his blog, Blanked Out. "I spent 20 minutes getting people out and off the bridge. I'm being evacuated. PS This was not a bomb."
His friend and fellow local blogger Aaron Landry has posted Noah's photos of the wreckage on Flickr, showing cars piled up amid broken concrete in the river.
Blogger Uncle Mikey was on a river boat when the bridge collapsed. "As we approached the lower lock, we watched the I35W collapse ... with cars on it. We're parked a few hundred off the lock. Right now, there's nowhere to go ... We missed being under it by 15 minutes." His photos show the boat's approach to the bridge and the sudden realisation that it was no longer there.
Fox columnist Michelle Malkin has a round-up of TV and blog coverage of the disaster. There's much speculation over the cause of the disaster, with Ed Morrissey, a blogger in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, commenting that "bridges like these don't collapse in the US, especially when they're only 40 years old".
Wisconsin news channel WISN.com, which has CNN and eyewitness videos and photographs of the disaster, has a civil engineer's perspective on the likely cause of the tragedy.
UPDATE: Journalist Steve Yelvington says that he drove over the bridge for 14 years when he lived in Minneapolis, and there have been questions about its structural integrity since the early 1990s. He said:
The bridge is just downstream from a dam that kicks up mist (creating a chronic ice problem in the winter), and like all reinforced concrete structures in Minnesota, it's had problems with road salt that seeps into the concrete and attacks the rebar.
Meanwile, one of Noah Kunin's latest blog posts notes that while the recent repair work on the bridge may not have been structural "for a time, there were holes in the bridge through which I could look up and see the sky." He also points to the debate on the New York Times blog about shortcomings in the design of bridges across the US.
