|
|
Navigating troubled waters
Dale Plemmons helped manage a massive recovery effort in the wake of a Minneapolis bridge collapse last summer
|
by DeShaun Harris
On the first day of August 2007, evening commuters on the Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis faced far worse than rush hour traffic. The steel frame of the I-35W bridge collapsed into the murky waters below, sending vehicles into the river and onto the river banks, and leaving dozens of people stranded in the wreckage. Thirteen people died. More than 100 others were injured.
Dale Plemmons (BSEH ’91), a district safety and health administrator for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, arrived on the scene to help manage the massive recovery effort, and stayed for more than two days.
“It was a unique experience,” Plemmons recalls. “I was responsible for the safety of the DOT personnel who were still looking for victims and surveying the area. I had to make sure conditions were safe to work in.”
Since 1999, Plemmons has served Minnesota by regulating industrial hygiene and safety training, and working with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Department of Homeland Security, among other capacities.
In the most basic sense, his job is like that of a reconnaissance soldier. His main duty is to make sure the environment is safe for the rest of the unit—in this case crisis recovery workers—to proceed with its mission. At the accident site, Plemmons identified potentially hazardous physical, biological and chemical conditions and determined how best to eliminate them. On a daily basis he makes sure supervisors in his district’s DOT offices adhere to OSHA standards, by conducting site visits and remaining abreast of policy updates in his field.
While Plemmons says the bridge collapse was just another day on the job—“we just had to be careful of a little falling debris”—the experience left him with some profound impressions.
He vividly remembers one situation in which a school bus carrying 60 children home from day camp hung precariously over the edge of the bridge. Although nearby drivers were killed, all 320 children were able to escape injury and leave the bus through an emergency exit and down a bike trail. Minnesotans, he says, have named the story “The bus that had wings.”
“If I didn’t believe in guardian angels before,” he says, “I definitely do now.”
—DeShaun Harris is a senior from Valdosta majoring in publication management.
Photo by Gerald Herb/AP
First lady Laura Bush talks to first responders, including Plemmons (in orange hat), as she visits the site of the I-35W bridge collapse over the Mississippi River in August 2007.
Top of Page
|
|
