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For McLane, Aug. 1 was ‘just another day’ |
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Wednesday, 19 March 2008 |
 Cliff Buchan
News Editor
It was a busy day at work in Richfield for Michele McLane. She worked late beyond her usual 5 p.m. quitting time in preparation for taking the next day off.
Climbing behind the wheel of her Saturn, she paused, picked up her cell phone and called her husband Shawn at their Linwood Township home. They chatted for a few minutes before she started the engine and pulled away from the office of the mortgage company.
On most days, McLane will swing south, jump on I-494 and go east to TH-5 and the easy shot north through St. Paul on I-35E. But on this day it was now 5:30 p.m. and McLane opted for I-35W, figuring traffic would be light.
“There was nothing special that happened that day,” McLane would say later.
But during the next 20 minutes or so that would change, of course. It would change when the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River would fall.
And for Michele McLane, 40, it was a day that would change her life forever.
Last to cross
It was still bumper-to-bumper and slow-moving traffic when McLane reached the bridge around 6 p.m. on that Aug. 1 last summer. She was moving no more than 30 miles an hour when she felt the “earthquake.”
Moments earlier, she saw bridge construction workers congregating as their work day was nearing its end. Cars and trucks moved slowly in both directions.
The first round of shaking stopped, only to be followed in seconds by a second more severe round of tremors. She felt and could see the bridge moving.
It was then that the bridge started to fall. McLane, who was nearing the end of the bridge on the north bank of the river, felt her vehicle plunge, like an elevator dropped several floors. Suddenly, McLane was looking upward at a sharp angle.
Panic filled her.
“This is it. This is my last moment,” she said recently, recounting her thoughts. “I thought I was dying.”
McLane believes she may have been the last person to drive off the bridge in the northbound lane. As her car slumped, she managed to jam down hard on the brake; luckily, the Saturn did not kill.
Only seconds before, she had observed a car directly behind her and one in the lane to the left, a short distance behind her. Both vehicles did not make it off the bridge, falling to the river bank below.
The driver of the vehicle to her left was killed; the driver of the vehicle behind her was trapped in the vehicle for a half hour before being rescued.
McLane says it is plausible that if she had not been able to drive off, her car likely would have fallen to the bank and crushed the car behind her, and the driver who ultimately survived.
Although almost paralyzed by the prospects of plunging to the ground, or worse, to the river, McLane did not lose control. She pressed down the gas pedal as she took her foot off the brake.
She began moving, upward and forward.
Three blocks or so later, she drove off the bridge, near the University Ave. exit.
Still healing
It has taken months for McLane to advance in the healing process. She was not injured in the bridge incident and there were times of guilt and depression.
“Why didn’t I die? Why was I OK?”
These were two of the common questions that followed her in the immediate days following the Aug. 1 bridge collapse.
By late August of 2007, she was one of the first to start attending weekly meetings of bridge survivors who came together to find common ground and support. It was part of her healing process.
“It’s tough, especially meeting those other folks,” McLane said. “Everybody heals at their own pace.”
It was a time for McLane to reflect on her path in life and why she did not perish as 13 others did on that now infamous day in 2007.
She continues to heal in 2008, but has moved beyond the need to gather with other survivors. By the end of January, she had bowed away from the survivors’s group, turning her energy in a new direction.
It is now a direction that involves any kind of lawsuit.”I have no injuries and no lawyer,” she says.
A new mission
McLane sees herself as a person of faith, but in the past was a woman who lived a quiet Christianity. She was a believer, but never one to publicly express her faith.
The bridge likely changed all that, she says.
By last fall, McLane says she felt internal pressure to do more. As part of her recovery, she frequently shared her story, recounting that fateful day at least 200 times to friends and co-workers.
But there was more. McLane says she felt a calling to reach out to others — to strangers who might hear her story.
With the support of her husband and other family members, McLane hired a video production company and filmed a 30-minute video telling that fateful story of Aug. 1.
“I felt like God was bugging me,” she said. “I clearly was not going to find any peace until I did it.”
It includes a message by McLane, interspersed with a treasure-trove of photos from the bridge collapse and the reflections of several McLane family members.
“It’s a vehicle for me to talk about faith,” she says. “None of it was scripted. I had no idea I was going to say any of it. It was an incredible healing experience for my family.”
How to follow
As part of her plan, McLane offers the public two vehicles to hear her message of faith.
She has created an interactive web page. The video can be seen and downloaded at www.survive35w.com. There is no charge to download the video.
As a second method, McLane is also willing to speak to any group that would like to hear her message. She has talked to church groups in her hometown of Dassel and in Pennock.
On Sunday, April 6, at 6 p.m., she will speak to the congregation at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Lester Prairie. On April 24th at 10 a.m., she will speak to a senior citizen group at Grace Church in Eden Prairie.
She is asking a speaker’s fee with the funds to help pay the cost of the video production. Any excess funds will go to faith-based programs for kids.
McLane can be reached at 651-295-9457 or by e-mail at:
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On her web page, McLane states: “August 1, 2007 was a day of great tragedy in Minneapolis. But there is also a story of faith and hope that emerged from the wreckage.
“It is our goal that this video provide an understanding of that experience in a way you may not have seen in current coverage.”
In the weeks and months since the bridge collapse, McLane says she accepted her fate and her calling from Aug. 1, 2007.
“It is what it is,” she says. “It wasn’t my time to die.”
In the split seconds that McLane’s life likely swayed in the balance on a bridge that was about to fall, she says she learned how quickly life can end. It has become the framework of the message that she wants people to hear.
“At the end of the day, where are you going to spend eternity?”
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