Maybe Hollywood movies primed me to expect big orange fireballs during explosions, but the Wilson Bridge demolition was sort of a letdown for me and the hundreds of people who turned out on the waters edge in Alexandria. I showed up at 10:30pm with my camera and tripod hoping to have enough time to set up and actually learn how to take night photos as I had never tried it before. I had the entire little park to myself where Wilkes Street meets the water, but not for long as the crowds started filling in the park and surrounding me as I was trying to figure out how to work the camera for the shot.
Set camera to shutter priority mode: check. Of course with every crowd, there are loud talkers who happened to settle in near me. Everyone apparently thinks they are either a comedian, the best narrator/storyteller in the world, or particularly in this case, a traffic and highway engineeer. Bump up ISO/sensor sensitivity: check. I had about ten minutes of quiet to myself, before the first people showed up. At first it was couples out for a walk just stopping to catch a view, that was fine — they were quiet too. Switch lens to manual focus: check. Then the peanut gallery showed up: I lived in San Francisco once and it’s really cool by the water. Roger Woodward survived Niagara Falls. Wilson Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. They need to make diagonal parking just like on 9th Street. All of that jibber jabber couldn’t escape my ear as I was running my 50-photo experiment to determine which shutter speed would work the best.
The moment of truth finally came at 11:59pm. Well, not really. This is Washington. At 11:59, there were still cars going across the bridge. As I was finally ready to take the shot, I held down my shutter button anyway, just in case they decided to blow up the bridge with traffic still passing by. Of course they didn’t though. Thirty minutes of listening to people speculate and pointing out every… single… car… on… the… bridge, the traffic eventually stopped and the crowd started to cheer. I heard a horn, I pressed and held my shutter button down, my camera started to click away, and then a tremendous, thunderous explosion. However, sound travels slower than light, and there was no light! No flash, sparks, or fireballs. Just a puff of dust. Granted, there was a building blocking the view, but everyone out there was hoping for something. Some sort of explosive, fiery retribution for what the bridge meant in their lives: wretched workday gridlock across two states, delayed trips to the beach, missing appointments and events, white knuckle driving, and the idiocy of a drawbridge on I-95, the major north-south highway on the east coast. Boos and groans of disappointment — that is the legacy of the old Wilson Bridge. And to add insult to injury, the streets of Old Town Alexandria became ensnarled in traffic at 1am with the rush of let-down people trying to go home. Meanwhile, I folded up my tripod and sat down on a bench at the end of the dock. I was just happy to have the park all to myself again.
Pre-Blast
Post-Blast (with a sad dust cloud behind the building)
The Washington Post had a much better vantage point as they had access to all the officials on Washington Street at Belle View. They have a good video as a result.
