Recovery and clean-up efforts are beginning nearly five days after the Interstate 35W Bridge collapse. As of today, five persons have been killed, eight are missing and over 100 were injured. The grim task of clean-up and searching for the missing victims, while concurrently conducting an investigation is what public safety officials in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region are facing.

The response of public safety is continually under scrutiny and increased public expectations of the public safety function along with the flow of information via electronic media have increased the transparency of the public safety response to serious incidents. Initial decisions made by first, and then second responders, are analyzed and critiqued by the public and the media. Additionally, these decisions are even more intensely analyzed and critiqued by the public safety organizations themselves following the incident. Just about every decision made, by line personnel, line supervisors, middle managers, and commanders and officials within the public safety realm will be second-guessed and questioned and generally concluded with, “They should have done……” Public safety personnel recognize this as part of the job.

Several days have elapsed since this horrendous incident. Public safety officials made two very early good decisions.

1. The Department of Homeland Security announced the incident was not terrorism-related.

This timely announcement is important in today’s world. The public needs to feel at ease, as do second responders. This rules out the possibility of a secondary and tertiary device, or that a biological or chemical agent was released. This is very important during initial mobilization of first and second responders.

2. The Minnesota Twins-Kansas City Royals game was Not cancelled.

This decision, made presumably with conferrals between public safety and Minnesota Twins’ officials, was an excellent, very early, yet under stress decision. The bridge collapse was at approximately 6:05 PM Local time, and the game started approximately one hour later. Cancelling the game would have placed another 20,000 -25,000 persons, and perhaps another 5,000 – 10,000 vehicles in close proximity to the bridge, hampering second response.

These two early decisions certainly contributed to what appears at this point to be an excellent first and second response by public safety personnel to this disaster. Moving forward, these are types of Best Practices that we need to build upon for continuing preparedness and training.

Joe Pascarella

A responding Minneapolis police lieutenant, quoted shorted after the incident that she had never seen anything remotely as the collapse. The bridge collapse is yet another example of how public safety personnel must be prepared operationally, tactically, and emotionally for just about any type of disaster in today’s world. Consider yesterday’s incident in which a very large and seemingly invincible structure, was rendered a twisted pile of concrete and steel leaving a path of tradegy. A large yellow school bus on the bridge was a reminder of the enormity of this tradegy.

Responding public safety personnel must react swiftly and professionally during these types of incidents and there is no margin for operational errors. However, hours of training and preparedness can hardly train public safety for the emotional toll in both the short term and long term.

This tradegey is particularly unnerving for those of us in the Capella University community given that downtown Minneapolis is the headquarters of Capella and many of our colleagues live and work in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan region. Are prayers are with all those affected.

Joe Pascarella