Smithers MINNEAPOLIS

Gawkers

As promised, here is my valuable opinion.

As opposed to those who think it is some kind of depraved desire to blood and guts, I think it is quite natural to want to see for yourself when “something big” happens. Look at the turn out when a building is demolished. People just want to see big changes for themselves. They want to capture the event in their own memory. There is nothing sick or twisted about it.

Sure, there is a minority that wants to see all the gore, but I think most of the people that came out to see the bridge collapse just wanted to see the missing bridge itself. That bridge was used regularly by hundreds of thousands of people every day and every one of those people, like me, thought about what they would do if they were on that bridge when it went down. Seeing for themselves is just a natural step in understanding the event.

Having said that, I would have controlled access to the site in exactly the same way that the police did. Giving people access to the Stone Arch Bridge and the Cedar Avenue Bridges in the days following the collapse would have most likely created massive crowd control issues in some fairly small and confined areas. In order to provide security and assure the safety of those crowds the police would have needed to patrol those areas heavily and this would have taken away from the rescue and recovery effort. So, while it may appear to be overly authoritarian to some, I think it was a logical issue of resource allocation.