University of Wisconsin Law School student William Barron, working as a summer associate at Bowman and Brooke LLP in Minneapolis, was driving with his wife Annie when they happened upon the Highway 35W bridge collapse on August 1. Both ran to help rescue victims. Their story appeared in the publication Minnesota Lawyer on August 13, 2007; the text is reprinted below. The Law School was notified of the story by one of Barron’s co-workers, who said, "We at the firm are all very proud of Will."

At least that’s what Bowman and Brooke attorney Chris Fowlkes called summer associate Will Barron in an e-mail he sent to their co-workers. When we heard Barron’s story, we agreed.

By Dan Heilman | August 13, 2007

dan.heilman@minnlawyer.com

The Twin Cities legal community has a real, live hero in its midst, although he’d probably balk at the description. Will Barron, a summer associate at Bowman and Brooke in Minneapolis, found himself a block away from the wreckage when the 35W bridge collapsed on Aug. 1. He and his wife, Annie, didn’t hesitate to rush to the aid of the disaster’s victims.

What they encountered once they reached the site was an unforgettable series of events some horrifying, some moving, some even funny. Barron took time last week to tell Minnesota Lawyer how his adventure unfolded. The following is Barron’s description of what happened.

Annie and I are both from Madison, Wis., so were living in a summer sublet in Dinkytown while I work as a summer associate and we prepare to go back to Madison for our last year of school. We live on 8th Avenue and University Avenue, so that’s just a block from where University goes over 35W.

We were going to the gym, which is a little way’s down University, near the U of M. We turned left to get onto University, and just as we turned, we saw a group of construction workers running toward us. There’d been construction on the bridge for about a month at that point, and our regular on-ramp had been closed. So we thought they must be hurrying to do something associated with the construction.

Then Annie, who was driving, looked over and said, Will, the bridge is gone. I looked, and the bridge was just sawed off, right where it goes over the river. So we kept driving through the intersection, just because we didn’t know what to do. We saw a man who had pulled over, and I don’t know if he was an off-duty EMT or what, but he had a medical kit with him. He started running down toward the river, so we thought we should at least go down and see if there was anything we could do.

We followed him down an embankment to the spot where the railroad tracks were. We went around the railroad cars, one of which had been crushed by the bridge and was spewing out grain. There’s a cliff right before the spot of the collapse, and when we got there, we found four or five other people who had come to the same place. We were all just looking down from this cliff, trying to figure out how to get down.

It was absolute destruction there was rebar and rubble, cars on their roofs, cars completely crushed, cars on top of other cars. People were screaming for help and waving for us to come down. It was a pretty tough thing to see.

We didn’t have a clear path to get to where the water was. It was just a steep, sandy embankment, probably about 50 feet down. We started to go down, and everyone was slipping and sliding, holding on to branches and trying to help each other get down without falling.

We got to level ground and started helping people in the area between the rivers edge and the cliff wed just climbed down. One section of the road was flat, and one section was kind of in the shape of a tipi, with one part that was completely vertical. The people on the flat section were still in their lanes and their cars were upright. Most of those people were getting out and walking around.

We weren’t sure what to do, so we just got on that flat section and started looking into cars. The first lady we helped, her airbag had deployed and her windshield had shattered, so she was OK, but she was clearly in shock, because she kept trying to find her camera so she could take a picture of her car for insurance purposes. We couldn’t get her to leave, and when we looked at the section above us that was vertical, there was a car pinned underneath the green interstate exit sign, still running. So we finally convinced her that she had to get out of there before that car moved.

Just past her, there were two other vehicles. One was a subcontractor in his work truck, and the back end of his vehicle had bounced up and landed on a smaller car that had driven underneath it. The guy in the truck had broken his arm, and had it wrapped in a towel. It was bleeding pretty badly. We decided to get ahold of his wife, so we got a cell phone and dialed his number [for him]. A minute later, we could hear his wife yelling at him Where are you? You’re late! Are you at the bar? He said, Woman, I just fell off a bridge -- turn on the TV! And he hung up.

Annie took him and the first lady we saw and walked them to the access road so they could see if any emergency service vehicles had arrived. A woman named Sarah and I went over to the man whose car had been crushed. The rear wheel of the contractors truck had come down just inches from his chest, so he was pinned inside the car. Sarah stayed with him and called his family.

At that point, two firefighters appeared at the top of the bridge. They called us over and asked us to tell them what we knew about the people who were injured. When they got down, they called all of us probably eight or nine people who had been helping and asked us to get back so they could make their own assessment of the scene.

Then the police started to arrive, and they began cutting open the cars that had been crushed so severely that the people couldn’t get out. This was near the section of road that had gone vertical, and where the cars had fallen on to their roofs. The police asked for volunteers to carry people out once they got them out of their cars.

We had to go partway up the same sandy embankment wed come down to get to those people. The first woman we got to was able to get out of her car, but she couldn’t walk.

We didn’t have any backboards or anything, so four of us picked her up and carried her away from there as well as we could. She said to us, You know, I sure am glad Im on this weight-loss program, or else you wouldn’t be able to carry me.

While we carried her out, some other people carried out two girls, probably teenagers. They were distraught and screaming because their mom was still in their car and was unconscious. So I and some other guys went back to find her, and she was just coming around. Some construction workers had found a piece of plywood, so we used that to carry her out. She was conscious and breathing, but she wasn’t talking. She wasn’t doing very well. So everyone grabbed a corner, and we just tried to negotiate our way out with her.

Soon after that, there were enough police, fire and emergency people to handle the situation, so a police sergeant came over and told us to just go home. Out of the 20 or so cars that I could see, there were about eight on our side of the road, and I could see they were all going to make it, except one that had been crushed by the freeway sign. We showed an EMT where that car was, and he took a look inside and just sort of shook his head and waved us off. I don’t think that person made it.

I realized after a while that I didn’t know where Annie was. I didn’t realize that once she helped the two people up the hill, they wouldn’t let her back down. But after a minute, we found each other and went home.

When we got home, we just sat there and said, What do we do now? It was surreal. You see disasters like that happen, but its always on TV. It’s never a block from your house.

Thinking back on it, it was amazing how narrow my vision became. When Annie and I talked about it, there were things she remembered that I didn’t remember, even though we were together. We were on the bridge for a long time before we realized there was a running car hanging over our heads. You just don’t even think about things like that. Something must take over that lets you ignore the danger, because I can tell you, were not really that brave.

The police and the firefighters are the real heroes. Once they got there, they were efficient and professional. They asked for help when they needed it, and they just took charge of the scene.

We love Minneapolis, and this experience just impressed us that much more with this area. We hope we can come back here to stay.

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Submitted by on August 16, 2007

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