This was no dam failure. It was a freak storm that dumped so much rain — 7.5 inches an hour — that the river channel returned to its primordial state.

For the successive days, the names of victims rolled down our television screen. My dear friend Christy had moved to that area earlier in the year. Every newscast, I scoured the list for her name, silently praying it wouldn't be there. When it didn't appear, there was joy and relief but also a feeling of guilt for feeling such elation when as others had suffered so much loss.

I flash back on that experience any time a different list of victims' names appears on my television screen, be it for an airplane crash or the Sept. 11 attacks on America. I fully expected to see such a list when the first reports of the Minneapolis bridge collapse surfaced. There were relatively few deaths considering the traffic load and the time of day the incident occurred.

Will we be that fortunate the next time a piece of our national, state or municipal infrastructure crumbles?

As we've learned from Katrina and to a much lesser extent, the tornado that touched down in downtown Salt Lake City in 1999, man is fairly powerless against Mother Nature. Yes, we can mitigate her fury through design and construction, but she will always get the last laugh. We can — and should — continue to improve upon man-made structures such as bridges, highways and dams because many of those problems are within our control.

What will our leaders say when one of these structures fails and the death toll is horrendous? "There just wasn't any traction to raise the federal fuel tax" or "We had other spending priorities."

Those are pretty meaningless excuses when your loved one's name rolls past on the television screen during the nightly news.

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Marjorie Cortez, who wishes rebuilding America's infrastructure was as much of a priority as building and restoring that of Iraq, is a Deseret Morning News editorial writer. E-mail her at marjorie@desnews.com