I just found out, via Making Light and a tendency of mine to procrastinate, that a rather large section of the Minneapolis 35W freeway just now fell down and went boom.

Or splash, depending on whether you’re talking about the bit that fell into the Mississippi River or the bit that crushed businesses below. Just Like That. With anywhere between 50 and 100 cars on it. Including a school bus.

WCCO has the story here.

Amazingly, only seven deaths have thus far been confirmed. Not to dismiss the tragedy felt by the friends and family of those seven unfortunates, that’s amazing.

The mnstf LJ community is hosting a check-in page for Twin Cities residents to let others know they’re OK. This is important, because a lot of people are without communication. Cell phones are down, as are some land lines. Laurel is the excellent blogger keeping that page updated. Thank you, Laurel. Everyone else: if you’re in the area and think someone might be worried about you, please please please shout out loud and clear where your loved ones can hear you.

Scanning briefly through that list, I had an OMG Moment wherein I realized what a non-trivial portion of the fantasy writing contingent lives close enough to the disaster to need to report. Steve Brust (the Taltos series). Patricia Wrede (the Enchanted Forest YA novels, i.e. Talking With Dragons). Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet (The Secret Country, Tam Lin, & etc). Neil effin’ Gaiman, people. We’ve lost too many of our literary lights in recent years; I’m very grateful that this catastrophe has not unduly robbed us of more (so far as we know).

Back to Making Light. Posting regular Jim Macdonald on occasion will post something very accurate, informative, and chilling about Ways Fragile Humans Can Die Before Their Time, and What We Can Do About It. One of his super-powers, aside from writing good books and teaching others how to write good books, is being an EMT. Here’s how he starts off his post about seat belts:

Do you know how we can tell the difference between people who were wearing their seatbelts and those who weren’t, at the scene of an automobile accident? The ones who were wearing their seatbelts are standing around saying “This really sucks,” and the ones who weren’t are kinda just lying there.

Not for the faint of heart. But being faint of heart is no excuse for not informing yourself, so read it. Now. You know why?

“I thought it was just construction going on … it was a free fall all the way to the ground,” said one person who was on the bridge at the time. “Thank God I was wearing my seat belt. The only thing I was hit was the steering wheel.”

—bridge collapse survivor quoted on WCCO, via Elise, whose reaction to the quote gives us this blog entry’s title

Can it be made any more clear than that?