Jenelle Norris
Minnesota
Lake Street Bridge Collapse, Minneapolis, 1989
The current Lake Street Bridge replaced the previous bridge, a wrought-iron span built in 1889. The previous bridge was the second-oldest bridge in use over the Mississippi, next to the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, Missouri (built in 1874). At the time, the Minneapolis Tribune opined that the new bridge was a "foolish extravagance," since there were already seven bridges over the river. However, the Lake Street Bridge became a major connection between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Before the construction of the freeway system, it carried U.S. Route 212 over the Mississippi River.
When construction on the new bridge started in 1989, the builders built the first half of the new bridge while keeping the old bridge in service. Unfortunately, an accident ended up delaying construction. The falsework for one of the arches collapsed, causing the arch itself to collapse and killing a construction worker. Later, when it came time to demolish the old bridge, crews tried to take it down with explosives, but the first effort didn't bring the bridge down. It took another, more powerful batch of explosives to bring the old bridge down a few weeks later.
35W Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis
The eight-lane bridge on Interstate 35W, part of a major artery between Minneapolis and St. Paul, was being repaired at the time, and a witness told MSNBC that he had heard a jackhammer being used on the roadway just before the collapse about 6 p.m. Central time. Witnesses said the bridge, which was built in 1967, collapsed in three sections, sending a plume of smoke 100 feet into the sky.
The collapsed section of the bridge, which was about 1,000 feet long, had been supported by a steel structure.
Divers and rescue boats continued to search the river and the twisted wreckage of the bridge, with darkness setting in and rain beginning to fall. The Minneapolis Star Tribune said some people were seen floundering in the river, calling for help.
The Current State of Things
The current time and date. The current phase of the moon. The current financial cost of the Iraq invasion. The current US national debt. How things look in Moose Lake, Minnesota, Mt. St. Helens, Washington, Davis Station, Antarctica,
Nuuk, Greenland, New York, New York, the Falkland Islands An estimate of the number of people in U.S. prisons right now. The International Space Station: where is it now? Baby names (to 1900, too).
Art
The Katherine Nash Gallery at The University of Minnesota Art Department. Jean Dubuffet at the Fondation Dubuffet. PS1 and The Dia Center in New York. Insecula, l’encyclopédie des arts et de l’architecture. Mabuse. Niff Actuals.
Flora
Help on growing ornamentals that are native to your (US) region. A weblog that is occasionally about gardening in Minnesota. Digitized rare botanical books from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanical illustrations from the University of Delaware Special Collections. Botanical illustrations by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women. The National Agricultural Library’s collection of images from The Botanical Magazine, 1801-1807. The beginnings of the Smithsonian Catalog of Botanical Illustrations. Links and bibliography about botanical illustration at Western Washington University.
HTML
“The Semantic Web” — Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila in Scientific American, May 2001. Some cogent skepticism about semantic markup. “XHTML 2.0 Considered Harmful” thread at lists.w3c.org. HTML table art. HTML preprocessors: The Dolt and PPWizard. The University of Minnesota-Duluth’s web design reference page, including lots of PHP links.