A miraculous escape

The woman in this story, Djana Andic, was one of our majors and a co-worker in our department. She tells the story of her escape from one of the cars that plunged into the river when the bridge collapsed.

I'm so very grateful that she escaped with only bruises. Her experience was terrifying, but she is alive and well.

Rescue workers tell some of their stories. This man was riding his bike and was one of the first on the scene to help rescue people.

I think I"m not alone in feeling a kind of delayed shock. I've been thinking a lot about what happened in the earthquake of 1989 in San Francisco, where my family lives, and in New Orleans where the catastrophe was monumentally more dire. I'm also thinking of my experience in Spain of having passed through Madrid one day before the bombings of the train station in Atocha. I'm thinking of the victims of the plane crash in Brazil where inadequate airport facilities made such an accident a matter of time.

Every day in Iraq when a car bomb goes off and dozens, hundreds of people are murdered, the citizens of that country must experience the fear, horror and despair, compounded by the desperate lack of basic resources such as water,electricity, safety in the streets.

I believe that we will discover that budget constraints forced the state agency to spread out needed repairs to infrastructure in a way that contributed to the likelihood of such an accident. Some people wish that the "finger pointing" or political discussions would wait until all the victims have been identified, and I understand that desire. But we will need to understand how such a thing could happen, in spite of the fact that this state's agencies do a very good job in general, not commonly marked by corruption or incompetence.

The last budget cycle has been marked by acrimonious contention over the funding of transportation, with the governor and Republicans blocking bills that would have provided for more investment in roadways and public transportation, even losing out on matching available federal money in the process! I think that once the recovery work is done, we will see a set of hard-hitting reports on the fact that in the last six years Republicans have starved state and municipal agencies of all kinds in the name of "no new taxes."