The scores of children and counselors on the bus were tired and running late. The Wednesday outing to a suburban water park had been fun...
MINNEAPOLIS — The scores of children and counselors on the bus were tired and running late. The Wednesday outing to a suburban water park had been fun, but traffic on the Interstate 35W bridge was jammed. Parents would be showing up soon at the Waite House community center.
Sasha Bouye, 23, a pregnant youth-program specialist, sat wearily in her seat. Imahni Taylor, 15, another counselor and high-school sophomore, sat all the way back, with the water coolers. And activities leader James Hanson, 21, a University of Minnesota senior, was dozing, and thinking a detour would have been wiser.
The bus was due back at 6 p.m. It was 6:05 p.m. “This’ll take forever,” Hanson thought.
At that moment, the bus went weightless, Bouye said. “It just dropped. … That was the first thing. Then we sat. Then we dropped again, the same exact way, and then we dropped again.”
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“Three drops,” she said. “It really was like a ladder, like falling down the steps or something. People were yelling. People were, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What’s going on?’ ” With a vast exhalation of dust, the “35W,” as it’s known, was falling into the Mississippi River.
Hunks of the road snapped, dumping vehicles into the river, crushing and pitching others sideways, and leaving a scene of calamity reminiscent of an earthquake.
Fate was cruel with many — entombing numerous victims in still-submerged cars, authorities said. Those on the bus were more fortunate.
The school bus plummeted several levels, those on board said, as the slab of road on which it was sitting dropped, cracked and bent, pitching the vehicle sideways. It came to a rest on the edge of the slab, its fall over the precipice arrested only by a bridge guardrail.
Of 61 people on board — including 50 children, eight staffers, the driver and the driver’s two children, only a handful remained in the hospital Thursday, according to Tony Wagner, director of the Pillsbury United Communities, which operates the Waite center.
“Everything was normal,” Bouye said. “We were playing games. We were talking. Some people were sleeping, and all of a sudden it was just this big boom.”
In the aftermath, Bouye was frantic to find her sister’s son, Kameron Price, 5, who emerged unscathed.
The collapse was attended by a “surreal” cloud of white haze, she said. “Things were colorless, almost like, you know, an old photograph … and all the dust rushed in.”
It had a strange smell and left a weird metallic taste in her mouth, she said. “We were all kind of just dazed.” People were banged around and bruised. Several bit their lips on impact.
As the bus lurched against the right guardrail, the front door jammed shut. A truck up ahead caught fire. Bouye said it felt as if too many people had moved to the right side of the bus, and it was going to tip over the side of the bridge.
“We had to get off that bus,” Bouye said. “Right away.”
At that point, one of the youth counselors, 20-year-old Jeremy Hernandez, kicked the back door open, Bouye and others said.
“You could hear kids moaning and crying,” Hernandez told the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune. “You couldn’t see the kids yet because of the dust. When the dust settled down, they were all screaming ‘We’re going to go in the river, we’re going to go in the river.’ “
The counselors piled out and formed a kind of “assembly line,” Bouye called it, to pass the children out the back door.
“I got up,” she said. “I looked for my nephew. I found out who had him. I jumped off the bus, and Jeremy started passing me kids.”
The view from the parkway beneath the bridge was no less harrowing. Driving to a baseball game, Jay Danz heard a ferocious rumble shortly after 6 p.m., and glanced in his rear-view mirror to see the collapsed bridge span on the road he had just traveled.
He glimpsed the school bus sitting on a slab of concrete. It was on its tires and upright. As Danz ran toward it, the back hatch flew open. Plastic coolers came tumbling out, followed by a young man.
“The children were absolutely hysterical,” Danz said. “At this point, they have no idea of what’s happened.”
Some had bloodied faces and were shaken up, but none appeared seriously injured. Danz said he and another stranger began leading the kids to a railing and then up a bike trail to safety. From there they went to a piece of grass and sat down. “Other than the children screaming, it was silent,” Danz said.
All eventually made it to a nearby Red Cross center.
Taylor, the sophomore counselor, sitting in the last bus seat on the right, said it felt like a dream. “I was thinking I wasn’t awake,” she said. “I was wide awake, but it just felt like I was sleeping.”
She was hit by a flying cooler but helped clear the doorway and then helped with the younger children. She looked stunned Thursday as she spoke outside the community center but grinned. “I’m alive,” she said.
Hanson, meanwhile, was dazed. “I have no idea how I got off the bus,” he said, adding that he had suffered a bruised jaw and cracked teeth. He said he thinks he was knocked out. “I have no idea how I got off the bridge.”
He said somebody told him he had helped the driver off the bus. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t even know if that’s true.”
Post reporter Anne Hull contributed to this report.