HoodaThunk?

Well, it’s over and done for the old Wilson bridge. As advertised, commuter Dan Ruefly started the countdown to the charges’ detonation and dropped a half-mile of steel structure to the ground.

The demolition was delayed a half-hour early Tuesday by safety concerns. At one point, the crowd started chanting, “Blow it up!”

Then, Ruefly and his daughter pushed the plunger.

“Make sure nothing’s left,” Ruefly’s friend had told him.

Ruefly, for his part, said he was “probably more angry at the politicians who made it this way” than at the bridge, a chief chokepoint on the north-south I-95 corridor.

Nobody anticipated the volume of traffic the bridge would carry when it opened in December 1961. The old bridge carried more than 73 billion vehicles, but sometimes caused massive traffic jams when it stuck open. Many commuters also remember the time in 1998 when a man held up traffic for hours as he contemplated whether to jump off.

Although I was never a regular commuter of the bridge, I’ve dealt with the consequences of it’s backlog of traffic plenty of times. Congrats to Mr. Ruefly for allowing a regional catharsis to ride on his actions. And now, the bridge is dead – long live the bridge!