Bridge Disasters -- Collapse and Chaos

"It will be days before we know how many people were on the bridge. It may be days before some tourists are reported missing," The New York Times quoted Millard Halstead, the chief deputy sheriff of Mason County, W.Va., as saying the next morning. "Deputy Halstead said that witnesses to the collapse told him they had heard victims screaming for help in the water, but they could not be seen in the darkness. One trailer truck floated several hundred yards downstream after it plunged into the water, he said. The disaster blocked all traffic on the Ohio River. The Corps of Engineers at Huntington said that no boats were moving in the area of the bridge collapse."

The superstructure of the bridge also fell, crashing on top of the piles of vehicles on the shore and in the water below. Traffic had been described as bumper-to-bumper before the bridge collapsed. Amphibious trucks and other equipment were dispatched from cities in Ohio, and local boat owners with spotlights were asked to help in the rescue of survivors.

The bridge, built in 1928, had not been inspected in 32 months, the prior inspection having been performed in April 1965.

Frequent Causes

Fatal bridge collapses are not uncommon. In the past decade, they have occurred on Interstate 40 at the Arkansas River in Oklahoma, and near Biloxi, Miss., on the CSX Railroad, derailing Amtrak's Southwest Limited, drowning a number of passengers trapped in the rail cars. Both were caused by wayward barges, as was the case with the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway collapse in June 1984, when two barges knocked a 224-foot gap in the causeway just as a Trailways bus was crossing. Six passengers drowned in that wreck.

Wind and water often are causes of bridge collapses, as was the case with the 6,471-foot Hood Canal Bridge at Port Gamble, Wash., or Old Galloping Gertie, the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge that collapsed in 46 mile-per-hour winds on Nov. 7, 1940. Royal Insurance advertised that they had paid out $6 million on that loss.

Perhaps the most notorious bridge collision was that of the Sunshine Skyway on May 9, 1980, one of the most expensive bridge disasters in American history. The Sunshine Skyway was a dual span (two lanes each span) between St. Petersburg and Palmetto, Fla., constructed during the 1960s to replace frequent ferry service between the two towns. The Florida Department of Transportation had received numerous warnings that the bridge's location was hazardous, as it stretched across the mouth of Tampa Bay at an awkward angle.

As this writer stated in "Bridge Losses: Catastrophes Waiting To Happen," in the September 1988 issue of CPCU Journal, citing the book, Skyway, by Jim Curtis (Chillum Publishing Co., Bradenton, Florida, 1980), "The problems were multiple. The shape and design of the channel leading to the gap between the twin spans of the bridge required a 19-degree turn within a space of .7 nautical miles west of the bridge. Given the length of many of the ocean-going vessels entering the bay, this meant a distance of less than seven lengths of the ship itself. The dogleg turn required to pass safely beneath the bridge left a too-narrow margin for error in eastbound travel. Westbound, there were two miles in which to align for the passage.

"Additionally, the bridge passage itself was only 800 feet wide between the two main support piers. Passages in other bridges, such as the Golden Gate, Verrazano Narrows, and the Chesapeake Bay Bridges, are up to five times wider. A fender system, rubber-encased pilings called dolphins, capable of holding back a ship which might veer toward the bridge supports, had once existed, but had been permitted to erode and crumble into uselessness. The Department of Transportation felt that replacement would be too costly."

In May 1978, a 75,000-ton phosphate freighter came within 40 feet of broadsiding the bridge. How many other near misses there had been are unknown, but the bridge pilings had been struck by ships as often as three times in four months in 1980.

On tiny Egmont Key, once the site of the Civil War-era Fort Dade, is a station for the Tampa Bay Pilots Association. In the early morning hours of May 9, 1980, local pilot John Lerro took control of the 608-foot, 19,734-ton Liberian freighter, Summit Venture, which had anchored off Egmont Key awaiting a pilot so that it could enter the bay to pick up a load of phosphate from one of the many phosphate-loading docks on the bay. A storm was building a hundred miles to the west.

By 7:30 a.m., trans-bay commuters, along with a Miami-bound Greyhound bus, were heading south toward Palmetto from St. Petersburg, and had just passed the toll booths at the north end of the bridge's long causeway, approaching the bridge. At the same time, the fury of the storm broke, with hard rain and high winds, certainly nothing new for Tampa Bay. Meanwhile, aboard the tanker Pure Oil, another Egmont Key-based pilot, John Shiffmacher, sitting east of the bridge, checked his radar and decided to drop anchor and await the end of the storm. He had no idea just how long that tanker would sit at anchor in the bay.

Aboard the Summit Venture, the storm hit suddenly. Rain fell in sheets. Lerro carefully instructed the helmsman. "Where are the turn buoys?" he shouted, and was informed that they were starboard. But where? The next moment is described by Jim Curtis, city editor of the Bradenton Bureau of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, in Skyway:

Lerro feels the Summit Venture skirting across the bay like a crab. The force of the wind is grabbing the ship and pushing it laterally. Lerro tells the captain [Hsuing Chu Lui] to order the lookouts to stand by the anchor. There is an urgency in the pilot's voice, a tone that gives Lui a sense of foreboding.

Lerro orders the speed cut to dead ahead. The hole (the space between the piers of the bridge) has to be there any minute … He stares ahead into the curtain of rain, waiting for the hole in the bridge to show itself. Then, suddenly, from the corner of his eye light, from a rip in the curtain, illuminating the shadowy lines of steel girders; the Sunshine Skyway Bridge!

It is too late. The bridge is hit and the span falls with several cars on it. Don Albritton's Chevrolet is approaching the gaping openness of the missing span and he sees the bridge falling. He stops and begins to back down the bridge. Other cars pass him and fall into the openness. Richard Hornbuckle slows, pulls into the left lane behind the Greyhound bus and follows its taillights up the steep slope of the bridge. He sees the bus disappear in front of him. He feels the bridge nose downward and slams on the brakes. His car is 14 inches from the edge. Terry Butterfield is now coming up the incline. He sees Albritton frantically waving. 'I'll be late for school,' the teacher thinks, but suspecting that his fellow traveler may need help, he stops. It saves his life.

The Skyway collapse claimed 35 lives. The second, undamaged, span served until 1987, when a $250-million suspension bridge with precast concrete segments linked with steel ties was opened. Wesley MacIntire, who had driven his pickup truck off the fallen span and crashed onto the deck of the freighter, was the first to cross the new bridge. He had been the sole survivor seven years earlier.

In June 1983, a tractor-trailer, east-bound on I-95 outside Greenwich, Conn., disappeared into the Mianus River when a 100-foot section of that bridge collapsed, killing three and causing $20 million in damage. Four years later, a span on the New York State Thruway collapsed in a flood, carrying away four vehicles. A bridge in East Chicago, Ind., collapsed while under construction, and the San Francisco earthquake in the 1980s collapsed both an Oakland freeway and parts of the Bay Bridge.

More to Come

As state highway department budgets struggle with the conflict between building new roads and repairing old ones, bridges may become the victims. Travel the nation on state highways other than Interstates and the orange sign, "Detour, Bridge Out," is common. There are thousands of bridges, but only a handful of full-time inspectors.

One study conducted a few years ago by the U.S. Steel Corporation and the American Trucking Association found 39 percent of this country's 590,750 bridges to be functionally or structurally obsolete. "The aged condition of bridges in the United States, coupled with the specific problems of irregular bridge maintenance and replacement, has resulted in a genuine and substantial problem which today threatens the proper functioning of the nation's roads," the report stated.

More than a quarter of the nation's bridges are structurally deficient, the American Society of Civil Engineers stated recently. The society rates the entire U.S. infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, highways, and power grids) at "no more than a D." The number of dams categorized as unsafe has risen more than a third since 1998. Most bridges are designed for a life of perhaps 50 years; many bridges on the Interstate system are well beyond that, and those in the East that encompassed the existing turnpike systems may well date to the 1930s or 1940s. Even the Brooklyn Bridge is more than 100 years old.

Vulnerable Railroad Bridges

On Dec. 29, 1876, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway bridge across the Ashtabula (Ohio) River collapsed, with 92 dying in the flaming wreckage of the Pacific Express. The bridge's designer, William Howe, thought that his iron lattice-work design might have been the culprit, but it turned out to have been the wide flange of the coach wheels, designed for transfer between railways of slightly different gauges, that was at fault, along with a large snowdrift that had built up at the edge of the bridge.

Railway bridge accidents have occurred periodically but, except for a few washed out by floods, most were not due to collapse. The Sept. 15, 1958, wreck of a Jersey Central commuter train occurred when the train went through an open drawbridge span into Newark Bay; the bridge itself was not at fault. Could it be that the privately maintained railroad bridges get more attention than publicly maintained highway bridges, or are major losses yet to occur on both means of transportation? As railroad freight cars become ever heavier and longer, it may just be a matter of time until one collapses a river span somewhere.

Many scenarios have been reviewed regarding the potential for terrorist attacks on major bridges or tunnels. A federal court recently overruled a Washington, D.C., ordinance barring hazardous materials from the rail line beneath that city, almost directly under the U.S. Capitol Building. As cities and towns become more aggressive in their safety plans, however, other ordinances with similar rail or truck restrictions may face courtroom challenges. Bridges and tunnels may be the primary focus. Nobody wants a train full of nuclear waste or chemicals passing through his back yard or over his local river.

Inland Marine Insurance

Bridges and tunnels are expensive to build and maintain. Most are the results of governmental projects, such as highway department or port authority construction, but there are private bridges as well, such as those owned and maintained by the railroads and a handful of private bridge operators. The first highway bridge across the Mississippi, north of St. Louis on historic U.S. Route 66, was privately built and operated for some time until the state took it over. The Brooklyn Bridge began as a private operation, as did other 19th century projects. Insurance on such projects was difficult to find.

Bridges and tunnels are considered "instruments of transportation." Hence, they are covered under the inland marine branch of the insurance industry. Insurance Company of North America, now a part of Cigna, first began insuring bridges in 1925. "More than once, there has been an accident involving a bridge where a single claim far exceeded the premium collected in the preceding five years," commented Joseph Bolger, a Cigna Special Risk Facilities account manager in 1983, reported Scott Mylchreest in America's Bridges & Tunnels: Big Risks for U.S. Underwriters.

When and where will the next bridge disaster occur? How many will die, and what will it cost taxpayers, insurers, or corporations to repair or replace the bridge? What will be the cause: terrorism, lack of maintenance, collision, or just simply age? These are the unknowns, the risks. It is unlikely that the typical claim adjuster ever will handle much more than perhaps a bit of damage to a concrete bridge abutment struck by some drunk policyholder but, some day, somewhere, some adjuster will get a phone call reporting another major loss. Will he be ready?