People with ties to Minn. made frantic calls after collapse

The bridge collapse in Minnesota kept people in Southeast Missouri with ties to the Minneapolis area glued to their televisions and close to telephones to learn whether anyone they knew was injured or killed in the tragedy.

Linda Tilsen, who moved to the area recently with husband Scott, said in an e-mail to the Southeast Missourian that she was "stunned and deeply saddened" by the catastrophe. "After frantic telephone calls to our former hometown -- many of which failed because of cell-phone problems following the bridge's collapse -- we were fortunate to determine that our family members who still reside there were all safe."

Amy McCabe, daughter of Kenny and Rhonda Buchheit of Biehle, Mo., said she and her husband, Paul, who currently reside in St. Louis, called immediately to learn the fate of family and friends. The McCabe family owns the Midwest Tile, Marble and Granite Corp., which has a distribution center in Minneapolis.

"My wife called me when I was driving home and said the I-35W bridge came down right by downtown Minneapolis," Paul McCabe said. "I was like in disbelief."

McCabe said he's driven over the bridge more than 100 times. He reached friends by telephone and one said they were in line to cross the bridge, which was jammed with traffic because of construction, while another had crossed four or five times Wednesday.

The collapse will cause delivery bottlenecks as the company seeks to reroute trucks to its distribution center, McCabe said.

"Now they will have to channel traffic in other directions that will clog delivery systems," he said.

Brad Wood, a Minneapolis construction executive who is cousin to Amy McCabe and has family ties to Perry County, said he crossed the bridge early Wednesday and that his in-laws crossed the bridge 11 minutes before the collapse.

As he spoke on the telephone from his home, Wood said he was watching a story about Sherry Engebretsen on his local television station. Engebretsen, who died in the collapse, was a family friend whose daughters were close friends of his own children.

"That for me is the personally most devastating part of this," he said.

People in Minneapolis and St. Paul spent most of the day telling each other where they were, when they crossed the bridge most recently and who they knew who was near the bridge when it collapsed.

"Everyone knows someone who had a close call," Wood said. "It is incredibly real to us."

Wood is executive vice president for marketing and administration at McGough Construction, which will be building an ethanol plant near Cape Girardeau.

The collapse in many ways is hard to believe, Wood said. "Everyone around the country is saying this just doesn't happen. If it exploded, it would be more explainable."

rkeller@semissourian.com

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