Final Project

Section 7: Emergency Preparations in Minneapolis

Following the attacks on the World Trade Centers in 2001, Minneapolis Minnesota began to incorporate many disaster-mitigating defenses, including necessary steps should the city experience a major disaster, including bridge collapse.

Minneapolis experienced a successful recovery effort following the I-35 bridge collapse. This success is largely due to the investments the city has made to strengthen public safety in the area. These emergency response improvements involved funding to improve critical infrastructure and emergency personnel which also included additional training to help emergency responders work across organizational boundaries. Listed are a few of the steps that Minneapolis had taken prior to the bride collapse.

• The state practiced snap assembly of an emergency operations center, where agencies could quickly coordinate their immediate response to a tragedy
• Minneapolis studied where to place massive amounts of debris following a disaster
• Most local law enforcement officials had updated radio systems, allowing them to talk to each other in emergencies. This was found to be an issue during the recovery efforts after 9/11
• The Minnesota Department of Transportation developed traffic plans in case a bridge failed
• The bridge disaster was the first major test of state emergency response systems developed after years of practice and special urgency following Sept. 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina

The public safety community completed the following plans prior to the I-35 Bridge disaster:

• Deployed an 800 MHz Protocol Project 25 (P25) trunked LMR radio system that was shared across local, county and state agencies.
• Invested in a $5.2M dollar computer-aided di...

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...he chances of additional collapse. When instability was suspected, fire Command made an appropriate decision to evacuate responders from the bridge until the area could be deemed safe enough for continued operations.
• All but one of the patients who survived the bridge collapse and were transported to a hospital, survived to discharge from the hospital. The one patient who was pronounced dead at the hospital experienced cardiopulmonary arrest on the scene and had little to no chance of surviving.
• Local EMs plans worked well. The Metro EMS Incident Response Plan (IRP) was used success- fully by all EMS personnel who responded as mutual aid providers. (Mutual aid agreements are not managed through the IRP.)
• EMs response was rapid and in sufficient quantity. Units approached the scene from different directions allowing for a rapid, 360-degree scene assessment.