Speaking to a group of about 40 people on Tuesday, Oct. 9, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak reflected on the events and aftermath of the Aug. 1 collapse of the I-35W bridge, during which 13 people died and more than 100 were injured.

“I hope one of the lessons of the bridge is that we’re all on common ground,” Rybak said, repeating the phrase often in his talk, titled “Rebuilding Common Ground.”

Rybak’s one-hour talk, with question and answers, took place on the Minneapolis campus in the Ralph Rapson Hall near Dinkytown — several blocks from the gap in the highway where the bridge fell.

The lecture was one in a series of ongoing, free public lectures, held on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. through Nov. 20, titled “The River, the Bridge, the Community: Beyond the Headlines of the I-35W Bridge Collapse.” The series — held in conjunction with a U of M class of the same name — features city officials, university faculty and others speaking on a variety of topics related to the recent disaster. The series is sponsored by the university’s Institute for Advanced Study, the College of Design, the Institute for the Environment, Metropolitan Studies Consortium, and the Urban Studies Program.

Rybak said that, on the evening of the collapse, he went with Governor Tim Pawlenty in a State Patrol helicopter to get a first-hand look. The helicopter had open sides that revealed a beautiful night view of the downtown skyline. “Then there was the horrible sight of the bridge gone,” Rybak said. “Not bodies and blood, but steel and concrete in bizarre positions.”

As the helicopter landed, “I could barely speak,” he said. “It was overwhelming to me.” Rybak said he expected that hundreds of people had died but was glad to be wrong about the number. He and his wife went to the funerals of those that did perish that day.

Though Rybak and Pawlenty were together on the night of the disaster, Rybak did not hesitate to criticize in his talk the governor and what Rybak views as the lack of necessary investment in national infrastructure.

“Our country has ignored the basic infrastructure. It’s clear we’ve underinvested,” Rybak said. “There was a single person standing in the way: the governor of Minnesota.”

Rybak said that on a personal level, he works well with the governor, but that he hears “less and less commitment from him to make sure this won’t happen again,” said Rybak.

The audience applauded Rybak’s statement that a 5-cent gas tax at the state and federal levels is needed to increase spending on transportation. While he acknowledged that people don’t want to pay more taxes, “you pay now or you pay dramatically later,” he said.

Responding to questions, Rybak reported that the city was able to successfully negotiate for a structural design that keeps Southeast Second Street open under the new bridge in Marcy-Holmes. He suggested that it would allow for an extension of the East River Road, and he raised the idea of the road as a memorial to the victims of the collapse.

Rybak also said he’d like to see a memorial reflect the different cultures of those who died in the collapse.

Northeast resident and real estate agent Dan Kuch, who attended the mayor’s lecture, said he did so because he cares about the future of the city. Like many, Kuch had a personal story to tell of the day; he recalled that, minutes before the bridge collapsed, he was driving north on 35W but decided to exit at 46th Street because the traffic ahead seemed backed-up.

Lance Neckar — a professor of landscape architecture at the U of M who will give the final lecture in the series on Nov. 20 — said afterwards that the mayor “set the right tone about the bridge as a deeply emotional wake-up call about the city and what the city means.”

Rybak finished his speech with a look ahead to the future.

“We’re going to rebuild,” he concluded, “and we will be a greater city than ever before.”

The weekly lectures continue through Nov. 20. For more information about the remaining lectures, visit “www.ias.umn.edu/Bridgeseries.php”: www.ias.umn.edu/Bridgeseries.php.

October 16
“The Mississippi as a (National) Park” – Paul Labovitz, MNRRA superintendent

October 23
“Where does the Water Actually Go?: The Mississippi River is a Connected Bio-physical System” – Chris Paola, Professor of Earth Sciences, Geology and Geophysics and investigator at the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics

October 30
“Between Prairie and Sea: The Mississippi River as a Continental Transportation System” – Hokan Miller, Upper River Services and Friends of the Mississippi River

November 6
“A Vital Cog in the Regional Network: the New Bridge as a Transportation Link” – John Adams, Associate Dean of the University’s Humphrey Institute

WEDNESDAY, November 14
“The Design of a New Bridge” – Tom Fisher, Dean, College of Design

November 20
“Integrated Design: Sustainable Community” – Lance Neckar, Professor of Landscape Architecture

last revised: October 17, 2007

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