HTC Alumni Success Story
When the Bridge Fell, Training Paid Off
| Minneapolis Fire Chief Jim Clack never thought he would ever be dealing with the collapse of a major bridge in the course of his career in the fire service. “On July 31, if you asked a firefighter if there was a possibility that a bridge might fall into the river, they’d say no, it’s not possible,” he said. “We have preplans for a lot of situations – a large fire, a leak of hazardous material, a train derailment, a building collapse – but we never preplanned for an interstate bridge to fall into the river.” |
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That all changed a few minutes after 6 p.m. Aug. 1. When Clack heard the call come in – “Bridge collapse” – he assumed an accident had occurred with the construction crew working on the bridge deck and thought “something fell off, maybe a railing or something involving a couple of cars.”
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Then he pulled up to the nearby 10th Street Bridge. “I saw hundreds of people on the collapsed I-35W bridge – victims, firefighters, police, civilians – and for a moment I thought, this can’t be real. This is like a movie set. |
“It took a second, and then I said to myself, this is real, and I’ve got to get downtown and get things organized.”
For the next 26 hours, Clack was the unified incident commander, the person in charge of directing the massive rescue and recovery operation from the Emergency Operations Center in the basement of Minneapolis City Hall. But even before the chief reached the scene, emergency first responders were relying on their training – much of it provided by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system – to save lives.
| “Individual crews were making life and death decisions before I or any other chief got there,” Clack said. “They were operating efficiently, doing a super job, without any of us bosses telling them what to do.” |
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An estimated 80 to 90 percent of the firefighters, law enforcement officers, emergency medical technicians and others who worked to save lives on the bridge that day received their education and training from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.
Hennepin Technical College has provided basic firefighter training for all new hires of the Minneapolis Fire Department since the late 1990s. One of the program’s trainees, Raúl Ramos of Station 11, a few blocks from the north end of the collapsed bridge, was among the first firefighters to arrive. He was confronted by a horrific scene – cars stopped on the bridge, crushed cars in the water, dazed people walking on pieces of the bridge deck that had landed in the river. “You don’t think about anything,” said Ramos, 35, a firefighter since 1999. “You just do what you’ve been taught from back to rookie school at Hennepin Tech. That’s why we put in the training.” Ramos and his partner ran up a section of the bridge that was pointing toward the sky, checking cars to see if anyone was injured.
“We got to the top and you could see the levels of destruction going down, see a crushed car, the school bus, a Tastee Bread truck.”
The two ran back to the rescue rig, gathered their fellow crew members and moved the rig to the River Flats area near the north end of collapsed bridge. He donned a yellow Mustang rescue suit and grabbed some rope, tied the knots he had learned to tie at rookie school, and started working his way through the water. When he came to the first car, he reached in, then put his head in the water, reached in further and felt a person.
He cut the seat belt, pulled the victim out of the water and handed her to an emergency medical technician. The woman could not be saved and became one of 13 people who died in the bridge collapse.
Ramos then turned to the others. “I saw 15 to 18 people on the bridge, and they all were in a daze,” he said. He helped load people who could walk into rescue boats and then turned to those who had broken bones or other injuries. All the while, rescuers kept an eye on the twisted bridge structure above them, worried that it would shift and send debris raining down on top of them. Ramos learned later that 88 vehicles had been on the bridge when it collapsed, including a school bus with 60 passengers, and it had taken an hour and a half to get everyone off.
“If I wasn’t trained, I wouldn’t have known anything,” Ramos said. “You learn how to tie up the rope, how to use the Mustang suit, how to triage, how to talk to civilians and calm them down, how to know where the collapse zone is.”
Ramos was at the bridge scene most of the night, returning to the fire station around 3 a.m. But he was called back 30 minutes later when it was discovered that a railroad car that had been struck by debris when the bridge collapsed was leaking hazardous material. Ramos, a hazardous materials specialist, once again relied on the specialized training he received from Hennepin Technical College.
Ramos said he knew that others at the scene, though they were from a host different jurisdictions and agencies, had gone through the same training. "The one reason why we got along so well was that we knew each other through training,” Ramos said. “You feel more comfortable knowing you can trust these guys.”
Meanwhile, back at the Emergency Operations Center, Chief Clack was starting to think about transferring command to another agency. “Once we had been through the first hour and 50 minutes, we had rescued everybody who was rescuable,” Clack said. “At that time, two hours into the incident, we made the switch from rescue to recovery. Two hours after that – four hours into the incident – the switch was announced.”
During the rescue phase, Clack said, “we’re risking people’s lives to save people’s lives. When we switch to recovery, we don’t want anybody hurt or killed when it’s not likely we could rescue any more people.”
By 8 p.m. Aug. 2, Clack was ready to transfer command to law enforcement, and Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan took over. At that point, Clack took on a media relations role, becoming the public face of the tragedy and speaking to reporters not only from Minnesota and the United States but also from as far away as England and Japan. His physical presence (he is 6 feet, 6 inches tall) and stoic on-camera demeanor lent authority and credibility to his words.
While Clack had received some media training through the years, he learned the most from watching previous fire chiefs and how they dealt with disasters, he said. “One of the old chiefs told me, if you’re on the news and you look panicked and excited, all of the firefighters watching you will get panicked and excited. So no matter what happens, when the world is falling down around you, you need to project a confident, calm presence. People pick up on that.”
Clack, 47, who became fire chief in February 2007 after serving as acting chief since April 2006, said the comprehensive training provided by Hennepin Technical College is critical to the department’s success. “The fire service is such a diverse workplace,” he said. “Firefighters really have to be generalists – emergency medical technician, vehicle extrication, rescuing people out of buildings.”
Clack said he knew he wanted to be a firefighter as early as kindergarten. He joined the Minneapolis Fire Department in 1986 after a brief stint as a real estate broker. Right after joining, he started on his associate degree in fire protection through a collaborative program between North Hennepin Community College and Hennepin Technical College.
He knew from the start that he wanted to be promoted, and he knew that a bachelor’s degree would be necessary. So, after he received his associate degree, he became one of the first students to enroll in the fire administration program, a bachelor’s degree program offered by Southwest Minnesota State University. He took classes in risk management, diversity, fire administration, statistics and other topics, all online. He visited the Southwest Minnesota State University campus in Marshall once to give a capstone presentation to a training class. The entire cost of his education was paid for by the city of Minneapolis, which covers education and training for all firefighters.
Clack is now a walking billboard for higher education. Fire department recruits are told the first day on the job about the importance of continuing their education. They then go to Hennepin Tech’s Eden Prairie campus for four months of entry level training, taking emergency medical technician certification, firefighting I and II, hazardous materials and basic rescue skills courses. All courses are credit-based and will transfer to an associate degree program.
The fire chief said the bridge collapse reinforced the importance of good training: “What I learned most, what made me feel good about the city and the state, is that we had done a lot of tabletop exercises, but you never know until something happens that it’s going to work. All of that exercising came into place. It makes me feel proud and confident that we dealt with something we hadn’t practiced for. That really made me feel good and gave me confidence that when the next one comes, we can handle it.”
Raúl Ramos said his experience at the bridge reinforced his love for his job. “I love the camaraderie, the physical aspect of the job, and whether I should or not, I love running into that burning building. It’s not about being a hero, it’s just being able to help somebody.” Except when he goes home: “I love going home to my kids and being the hero. Having my kids look up to me, that’s a huge thing.”
Contact HTC at 952-995-1300 or info@hennepintech.edu
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