Chris, Since you read or are reading the book "The Rising Tide," I thought you might find the following excerpt of interest. It sounds eerily familiar to what is going on in Minneapolis with the bridge collapse:

"Salvage operations...none existed on the Mississippi because of unique difficulties: light does not penetrate the muddy Mississippi more than a few inches, so men had to operate blind, and the river made locating wrecks nearly impossible, both because currents could quickly move them far downstream and because the enormous sediment load the river carried could quickly bury a boat under tons of sand." (page 24)

Now replace the word "boat" with the word "car" in that last phrase and you have the essence of the salvage and recovery operations in Minneapolis.

On the subject of that book, the Mississippi flood of 1927 is described on the back of the book as "the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known." However, I recently read "The Worst Hard Time" by Tim Egan which is about the 1930's dust storms and it is described as "the story of the nation's greatest environmental disaster." Of course, it was a man-made disaster with the plowing under of the prairie grass, but a natural disaster ensued, nevertheless.

"Americans had become the force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than 'the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.'"

"The human stories, each sad in their own way, were part of a larger tragedy: the collapse of a big part of mid-America. One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been 'essentially destroyed' and could not be farmed again...and area stretching five hundred miles north to south and three hundred miles east to west was drifting and dusted; two thirds of the total area of the Great Plains had been damaged by severe wind erosion -- an envronmental disaster bigger than anything in American history."

So, the question is: what was our greatest environmental disaster?

Barbara