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Bridge Collapse

     
Last night, just after 10pm, I was snuggled in bed watching a movie when a message popped up from my sister: 
I5 bridge collapsed in skagit river people on water send prayers

 I sat bolt upright and immediately started searching the news online, while my wife Kris started flipping through the national news channels for more information. The problem was that the bridge collapse was in Northwest Washington, whereas we live in Central Florida. There was nothing on the national news, and even the local newspapers were slow in providing details. At first I wondered if it was some kind of hoax or misunderstanding, until I saw the first picture posted by my sister on Facebook:

Collapse
This was no hoax, and no exaggeration. A complete section of Interstate 5 in Washington State had collapsed and fallen into the Skagit river. For a little context, if you happen to have read my book 3500 you may recall that in the second paragraph of the very first chapter I mention "...we finally made our way back to our tiny apartment in the small farming town of Burlington, Washington." That is where the bridge collapsed, on the freeway bridge that spans the river between Burlington and Mount Vernon. If you were driving northbound on I-5, you would take the very next exit in order to get to our apartment. On that Christmas day when Ben's mom went into labor, we drove across that bridge in order to get to the hospital.

In fact, as a child I had a paper route in which I biked under that bridge every single morning.When you look at that photo and see the collapsed bridge section, just to the left of that and before the bridge reaches solid ground there is an underpass. It is a small, very low-traffic access road that runs parallel to the river, and I pedaled my way along that road each day delivering the Skagit Valley Herald to the two farm houses perched just west of the freeway before continuing on to Old 99 (now called Burlington Blvd) and heading north towards home.

If you are not familiar to the area, the significance of this disaster cannot be overstated. I am very thankful to hear that there were no fatalities, that the three people whose cars went plunging into the river received only non-life-threatening injuries and were safely rescued, but the lost of this bridge is going to have a significant economic impact to all of Western Washington. Interstate 5 is not just the primary north-south highway that runs from Canada to Seattle. It is, for all intents and purposes, the only highway. There is a bridge immediately to the east on Old 99, but it is a surface street that runs through a heavy retail area on both sides of the river with stoplights every few hundred yards. There is no functional way that the 70,000 vehicles per day that cross (well, crossed) the river on I-5 can be diverted to that bridge. Aside from the Old 99 bridge, the only other ways across the river are either Highway 9 significantly to the east, or else to drive through downtown Mount Vernon and take the aging and tiny Westside bridge across the river and follow that road to to Highway 20 and back into Burlington. I am not surprised this morning to see that those are the two routes that traffic is being diverted to. Both routes will amount to significant delays, both in terms of distance and in terms of the time it takes to navigate them. All tourism to and from Canada is now effectively throttled into nonexistence. All trucking of goods and supplies is now equally throttled. I know many, many people who live in Burlington or farther north and who work in Everett and farther south -- people who will now have to factor an extra 2-3 hours every day into their commute, along with significant additional fuel costs, and that is if they are lucky enough to be able to keep their job. 
The only potential good news here is that the Old 99 bridge really isn't the Old 99 bridge anymore. Back when I was in high school, it was an ancient two-lane bridge built (I think) in the 1920's. My best friend Edgar and I used to climb that bridge at night, watch the traffic pass underneath us, and talk about life. It was an aging, creaky green mass of girders that had passed its prime decades earlier. Fortunately, a few years ago that bridge was replaced by a brand new four-lane span that has significantly improved the traffic flow between the two cities. I am sure that this morning the city planners in Skagit Valley are grateful that the bridge was updated so recently, as it is now the only practical route for the local residents of these two very closely-knit towns.

I am still stunned this morning looking at the images from my home town. I am, of course, grateful at the lack of a human toll (particularly in the wake of the EF5 tornado in Oklahoma, which dwarfs this story by several orders of magnitude). I just drove across that bride, not three weeks ago. It's a chilling thought.

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Ben and Snow White

Ben and Snow White

About Shmoolok

The word "shmoolok" is a mashup of the longtime computer handles for my wife and myself ("Shmooby" and "Lokheed", respectively).

I originally created this website to be a place for my family to connect, but it has since grown into something a little different.

As for me -- I am a father, a husband, a son, a software developer, and a writer. On any given day I am not sure how good I am at any of those particular things, but I do try my best.

Thank you for visiting my website.

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ISBN: 1-482-09330-8

Benjamin's Lullaby

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There has been an influx of new readers to my blog. If you wound up here looking for stories about my son's ten year romance with Snow White's Scary Adventures, here are the major blog posts you will want to read:

SW1K - The Full Story

SW1K Redux

SW2K - The Full Story

SWSA Final Night - Prelude

SWSA Final Night, Part 1 - The Beginning of the End

SWSA Final Night, Part 2 - The Fairest One of All

SWSA Final Night, Part 3 - Counting Up, Counting Down

SWSA Final Night, Part 4 - The Big Ending

SWSA Final Night - Epilogue

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