Front page of the International Herald Tribune...

One of the benefits of my position and working for a broadcasting company is that I get free subscriptions of three newspapers - the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune and the Prague Post (published weekly), plus the magazine The Economist. Every day one of the admin assistants brings them to my office. Almost always I put them away to take home and look at later. I look at the Wall Street Journal on the bus ride home, but read the International Herald Tribune less frequently. Kathy, though, likes the Herald Tribune and will at least glance through them when she has a minute.

Kathy and Noah just got back to Prague last Sunday, and I had a week or two worth of newspapers that I hadn't recycled yet, thinking Kathy would want to look at them. When she did she pointed out that the International Herald Tribune from Friday, August 3rd, had a big photo of Sandy and Dan's SUV on the bridge. What a surprise!

More bridge pictures (I can't help it)...

My friend Steve sent me an email with 15 photos of the bridge that included the SUV of my sister and brother-in-law. Thanks to him - and please check out his blog using the link on the left side of the page. Here are the best of 15 pictures that he sent me. The last one shows their vehicle in the background of President Bush's helicopter.
I am more thankful for their safety every time I see these pictures

Email from daughter's high school friends's mom...

There was a Tischler family reunion on Saturday that I, alas, was not able to attend. Neither were Kathy and Noah since they were on a plane traveling back to Prague. If I get some pictures I will post on it.

My sister Sandy and her husband, Dan, are still absorbing the effects of their experience on the 35W bridge. As my sister relayed in an email:

We've gotten calls from everyone we known, or ever known. We had sixteen messages on our recorder when we got home from work on Friday. It's quite unbelievable. This morning I got an email from one of Tina's high school friend's mom. (got that??) She heard it from the sister of one of my high school friends. At work, people I have never talked to before have come up to hug me. It's so remarkable! We are without a scratch. We feel so totally blessed at our good fortune.

Even friends in Prague that we know are just flabergasted when the subject comes up (since just about everyone knows that we are from Minnesota) and they discover that my sister was actually on the bridge. If Sandy was here they would hug her too.

The picture shows the entire bridge collapse and has a small circle around my sister's vehicle in the lower right hand corner of the picture. There were heading south, towards the bridge. If the collapse had happened and couple of seconds later who knows what might have happened.

Close call on the bridge - one more picture...

Here is another picture of (I believe) my sister and brother-in-law's SUV on the I-35 bridge after the accident. This one is courtesy of the Minnesota Daily newspaper (Univ. of Minnesota).

Close call on the bridge - more pictures...

I found more pictures of what I believe is my sister's SUV on a Russian web site (via an email to Kathy from one of her friends). I will verify, but based on the location, vehicle type and the fact that my sister said she left her passenger-side door open, this would appear to be their vehicle. It's the black SUV on the left, not the blue van on the right. It is basically on the section of bridge that is right over the train that ran along the riverbank.


And an email from my mom captures a few more details:

Sandy and Dan were on their way to the Twins game and were on the bridge when it collapsed. They had just enter the bridge when suddenly they felt a tremor and felt themselves sliding downwards, as cars around them slide entirely off of the bridge. All of the sudden their car came tp a jarring stop throwing them both forward. Dan screamed to Sandy, "Lets get out of here!"

They bolted from the car and began crawly up the cement incline. They couldn't get through, so Dan told Sandy to stay put and he went around the broken barriers and found another clear area. He signaled Sandy to follow him and they were able to climb over an side bridge railing on to safe ground. They looked down and saw their car hanging there.

After helping two women over the railing, and seeing no other signs of movement round their car, they walked a ways down to a cafe to sit for a moment and process what had just happened ........

The pictures of the bridge clearly show their car in a downward angle with the passenger side door swung open. Sandy said she forgot to close her door.

I had lunch with them today and delighted in being able to hug them each tightly .... Sandu has an ache all over stiffness and Dan has a bruised, sore chest from being thrown forward when the car came to that miraculous stop. Other wise they are fine, and so grateful to be alive ....... I am grateful along with them!.

A very close call. I like to think Al was watching over them, as he always did.

Update - Close call on the bridge...

I finally talked to my sister and got a first hand account of their experience last night. As I mentioned before, they were driving to the Twins game and got to the bridge just as the collapse was happening. She said there was bumper to bumper traffic as they started onto the bridge when the section that they were on broke and tilted down, towards the river, at a fairly steep angle. The vehicle they were in started rolling towards the edge, but stopped about 20 feet short. She doesn't know how many vehicles went over, but thought it was many. There's was the last vehicle on that section that didn't go over. When the SUV stopped moving my brother-in-law yelled for them to hop out, which they did.

They climbed over a wall and jumped a three foot gap to the north bound side since they were concerned the section they were on would fall further. At first, they didn't immediately grasp the extent of the bridge failure because the section of bridge in front of them broke the other way, with the front facing up, which obstructed their view of the rest of the bridge. Once they realized that the entire bridge was down they realized that their situation wasn't serious enough to get attention any time soon, so they walked to Jimmy John's (sandwich place) in Dinky Town, next to the University of Minnesota campus. There they had a drink and tried to settle down. The cell phone circuits were overloaded by this time so they used the land line at Jimmy John's to call their daughter to come and pick them up.

My sister said that she will email me some pictures that shows their car, and when I get them I might post them.

Both are off of work today and the emotional impact is just being felt. Yesterday was fueled by adrenaline and today you get to ponder what might have happened but didn't and try to explain what is unexplainable. Our story has a happy ending. Unfortunately there are many that did not.


This isn't a great picture but I think this picture shows their SUV which is on the section of bridge tilting downward. I will try to verify this. I had seen a picture from much closer but it was in Adobe and I didn't know how to save it.

Close call on the bridge...

First of all, my heart goes out to all of the folks who lost someone in the collapse of the 35W bridge, or still has friends or family missing. Kathy called me at 5:45 am this morning (Prague time), which was about 4 hours after the collapse, to tell me about the tragedy and to let me know that all of our loved ones were safe.

However, it sounds like my oldest sister, Sandy, and her husband, Dan, were on their way to the Twins game and arrived at the river just as the bridge was collapsing and saw cars disappearing. I have tried several times today to get a hold of either one of them without success. I am sure they are OK, although probably shaken up, but I want to get their first hand account of what happened to them. I'll find out when I can and report later.

Here is a video of the collapse. The link was provided by Styopa, and I went there and then uploaded the video to YouTube (the first time I have ever done that). It doesn't show a great deal, but is still interesting.

The last time I received a wake up call early in the morning about a tragedy was on November 13th, 1995, when a friend called me and said "Turn on CNN" - I did and saw the truck-bombed building that I had worked in while in Saudi. In many ways that was worse, because they had reported several dead and I knew that most of the dead would be my friends, only I didn't know which ones.