In the summer of 2007, Jake Rudh's Transmission dance nights were a hit in Twin Cities nightclubs, but Jake's program hadn't come to The Current yet. Rudh and his fiancée, Mercedes Gorden, lived in a house in Northeast Minneapolis. Mercedes had just received a promotion in her job at the Best Buy Corporation in Richfield, Minn., and had stayed later at work the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007.

Jake was mowing the lawn that evening. Neither he nor Gorden had their own cellphones yet; Apple's iPhone, for example, was only a month old at the time. When he heard the phone ringing inside the house, Jake went in and picked up. "It was Mercedes, and she was in a kind of panic mode," Jake recalls.

The 35W bridge had collapsed, and Mercedes Gorden had been driving her car across it when it fell.

Twitter was just a little more than a year old at the time and had received a bump at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference, but it had nowhere near the proliferation it has now. "Mercedes told me to turn on the TV," Jake says. "I saw live action of a dust cloud and a collapsed bridge, just a mess. I was like, Are you involved in that?"

At that moment, Mercedes was trapped in her car, the dashboard pinning her legs to the floor, speaking on a borrowed phone. "It was pretty heavy," Jake remembers. "I thought maybe I was saying goodbye to her for the last time."

The odd thing is, Mercedes kind of predicted it. "Every day I drove over that bridge that was being worked on," she recalls. "I just felt really not safe, but I kept telling myself they wouldn't let us drive on it if it was not safe. Of course, my gut told me otherwise … but I just went with it because it was the fastest way to get to work."

Mercedes had even contemplated taking the 10th Avenue bridge that evening. "At the last minute, I had a decision to make, and I just said, 'Oh, you're fine. Just go with it, you'll be home much faster'," she says. "That was obviously a decision that would affect me for the rest of my life."

Traffic on the bridge was moving slowly, due to rush-hour volume and a construction project that had narrowed traffic flow to one lane in each direction. Mercedes remembers each moment. "Within seconds of getting on it, driving very slowly, it started to sway side to side," she recalls. "It was just a second where I didn't know what was happening, but then quickly figured out, 'OK, I know what this is.' Then there was a construction worker standing there and he started to brace himself, and he had a sheer look of panic on his face. That sealed the deal for me that I knew it was going to collapse."

Mercedes thought back to a few minutes earlier, when she chose 35W over the 10th Street bridge. She was so close to being home. "It was a mixture of fear, anger, disappointment that I didn't trust my gut and go a different route that day," she says. "It just all happened so quickly."

With that decision behind her, Mercedes made a new choice. "I knew what was happening, and I knew it was going to be rough and I knew I was going to be in for a very long, hard experience, but in that second, I decided I'm not going to die," she explains. "I thought, 'I'm going to have a very long day, this is going to hurt, this is going to be painful,' but I just decided I'm not going to die.

"I don't know if that was me that was deciding that or if that was something else telling me, 'You're going to be fine'," Mercedes continues. "It was me bracing for the worst, but at the same time, I felt like I was going to make it."

There was nothing left to do but ride it out. "I held onto the steering wheel pretty tightly," Mercedes recounts. "The bridge started to buckle; it started coming at me in waves, which was really strange to see cement coming at me in waves like an ocean. Then it just ripped apart. I remember going through this hole. Everything got really cloudy, and I couldn't see anything. I was free-falling, and then I just remember landing pretty hard, but I could tell that shock set in immediately because there was no pain."

In the immediate aftermath, Mercedes was struck by how eerily quiet everything was. As the dust settled, she realized she was still alive, but that she was trapped in her car. She wondered if there were other survivors. "The car was pretty much sealed shut from the impact," Mercedes explains. "I had basically crashed into a retaining wall and just kind of bounced on the riverbank."

Exacerbating the situation, Mercedes felt de-icing fluid dripping on her neck, burning it. Puffs of smoke were rising from beneath her car's hood. She feared there might be a fire. Soon, some people approached. "These wonderful people, Megan and Phil, were two of the first on the scene, and they were able to get into the passenger side of my car to check on me," Mercedes says.

They lent Mercedes a cell phone so she could reach Jake, and they stayed with Mercedes until rescue personnel could arrive at the scene. "Megan was amazing," Mercedes says. "She held my hand, she talked to me, she tried to tell me stupid jokes, she recited some poetry, and she just basically tried to keep me company and keep my mind off of the pain that was starting to creep up."

Eventually, Firefighter Jackson Millikan arrived at Mercedes's car. Millikan assessed that Mercedes could not be extracted from her car without the Jaws of Life — the trademarked name of a hydraulic tool that can extract crash victims from wreckage. "Jackson just said, 'This is going to hurt a lot, but I have to get you out of here. We have a bridge that is tons and tons of cement hanging over our heads right now, and it could fall at any moment and kill us both.' So I said, 'OK — just go for it.'"

Mercedes says that Millikan was telling the truth about the pain. The extraction from the vehicle was extremely painful. As Mercedes explains it, her left leg was nearly severed, although the skin was intact. "I got to keep it, so that was good," she says.

After extraction from her vehicle, Mercedes joined other patients who were being triaged further up the riverbank, where they were given first aid and morphine. "It did absolutely nothing for the pain," Mercedes remembers.

Due to the day's heavy demand on and resulting short supply of ambulances, Mercedes and others were ferried to Hennepin County Medical Center on the bed of a pickup truck. In the hospital, Mercedes had a couple of operations overnight. "Essentially everything below my knees were completely shattered," Mercedes says. "And I broke my back. I ended up having 11 surgeries in the course of three years. I was in a wheelchair for four months. I ended up living in the hospital for just under two months."

During that time, she had a roommate — Jake Rudh. "They usually don't let people stay, but we moved a mattress to the corner of the room and that became my room, too," Jake says. "I lived in the hospital with her the whole time."

Over the subsequent weeks and months of treatment and therapy, Jake and Mercedes were a true team. When they did return to their Northeast Minneapolis home, they found their neighbors had surprised them with a sturdily built, ADA-compliant wheelchair ramp. "Our neighbors on our block did that with their bare hands," Jake says. "It was a tearjerker moment."

During the rehabilitation process, Jake turned to a reliable friend. "Music helped us a lot," he says. "We listened to music all the time. Even in the hospital, I was playing music, soothing music, jazz, classical … We listened to Mozart when Mercedes got her first and only blood transfusion; it helped a lot."

Advances in treatment and therapy allowed Mercedes to keep her legs and return to walking. Remarkably, the 35W bridge was rebuilt by summer 2008 — and even more remarkably and symbolically, Mercedes Gorden walked across it the day before it opened. "I was walking again after being in a wheelchair for so many months," Mercedes says. "It was something I needed to do for myself, and it was one more thing to check off my recovery."

"She's the strongest woman I know," Jake says.

In October 2008, Mercedes and Jake were married. Two years ago, their daughter Liv was born. Liv's middle name is Millikan — named for the firefighter who saved her mother's life.

Looking back on the bridge collapse, Mercedes is philosophical. She's grateful to have survived, but she stresses that there are 13 people who did not survive, whose families and friends still miss them in their lives.

Another thing Mercedes has recognized is that, in the intervening decade, the event is receding a bit in her mind. "It was a big deal for a long time, and now it's such a distant memory," she says. "So when a 10-year anniversary comes up, it's like I don't even know how 10 years passed. Because I don't really think about it every day. There was a time when I did. But gosh, for the last several years, it's not something that I think about that often except for when it sneaks up on you. And then you're like, 'Oh right — that happened.'"

"At the same time, I never want it to be completely gone from my memory," Mercedes continues. "It obviously has changed who I am as a person, and I hope it's made me a better person, a more compassionate, patient person. Definitely I'm a work in progress, but I feel like you can either have it make you a better person or you can be bitter and have life be awful.

"I'd rather choose the happy side, the positive side."