History in the Making

Last night we were both fortunate enough to be sitting safely at home when news came on the television that the I-5 Bridge had collapsed. Wow! If we were still working on the book we would have to include an image like this:

Thank goodness there were no fatalities!

But of course that isn’t the first bridge collapse in the area. Our thoughts drifted to the Great Northern freight train crash in 1903, just east of the current I-5. This photo was shared by Ed Marlow and can be found on page 39 of Mount Vernon:

An earlier derailment of a car transporting logs had weakened the bridge (kind of like a large truck apparently hit the I-5 Bridge and weakened that). The locomotive in the picture had just reached the south bank when the bridge collapsed and the cars pulled it back into the river. We love how this photo from yesterday mirrors the photo above:

When we were doing research for the book, we can’t tell you how many stories we heard about the rebuilding of the West Side Bridge in the 1950s (the current bridge was opened on November 4, 1954). There were tales of the long, circuitous route people had to take to simply get to the other side of town. Well we are pretty sure we are headed for an extended period of our own traffic troubles. Getting across the river to the shopping mecca of Burlington will be no small feat.

But for now we are simply grateful. Grateful that this was not a bigger tragedy. Grateful for the beautiful Skagit Valley. And grateful for the Riverside Bridge that will serve as our new link to the north.