Florida Bridge Collapse: Seconds Separated Those Who Lived and Died

MIAMI (AP) — They had just finished up lunch, and set off to run a humdrum errand: a drive to the travel agency to pick up airline tickets for their annual visit to their beloved homeland Cuba. Osvaldo Gonzalez and Alberto Arias, friends and business partners, happened to pass under a Miami bridge that Thursday afternoon, the road bustling with fellow drivers also out on the most ordinary and unthreatening of life's tasks. A teenager was driving her friend to the doctor's office to pick up some medicine. A father of three was heading home from work. A woman on her way to a nail salon was stopped at a red light. Seconds — inches — would soon separate those who would live from those who wouldn't. Sweetwater police Detective Juan Llera was at his office a few blocks away, when he heard what he thought was a bomb exploding. It was not a bomb; it was a bridge, a structure every American has passed under hundreds of times. But in an instant, this 950-ton span under construction at the Florida International University collapsed, and with no time to act or to flee, the cars that just so happened to be below it were pancaked under the rubble. Six people died. "Imagine," said Amauri Naranjo, who has known Gonzalez since before he left Cuba in the 1980s, "a longtime friendship that survives even with the sea between us, and it ends because of something like that." Gonzalez and Arias, who together owned a party rental and decoration business, were among the dead...
Source: JEMS: Journal of Emergency Medical Services News - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Major Incidents News Source Type: news