Comments
-
Long scary way down into dark deep water. Terrible way to die.
-
IPC has updated the 50year old manual bridge inspections with modern robotic inspection services. After 5years of R&D and field testing, we are the only commercially viable way to inpsect bridge cable stays, post tension cables and high mast light poles. Finding early stage deterioration can help save billions in infrastructure costs. We are looking to educate the department of transportation, asset managers and public that this technology exists and it works.
-
Remember this like it was yesterday.never heard the pro dispatcher taking total control, glad we have people like that.couple years after me and friends would skate down the bridge. Then a fence came so we jumped that,hahaha a lot of fun.check out some of the ghost story's in Tampa triangle. 2 guys fishing on the bridge in the fog then the greyhound bus passed.thats a good one
-
Good subject for, "Seconds From Disaster"!
-
I lived in Palmato when it happened so foggy that morning you could not see your hand on front of your face
-
I was in high school when this happened. We had just moved from St. Pete to Bradenton when this happened. it was horrible and unbelieveable that this could have happened.
-
In 1980 my parents, brother, grandfather and I spent the last week of April,which was school vacation week, in FL. We dropped my grandfather off at his sisters in Bradenton and we spent the week on Treasure Island. When the end of the week came we packed up the car for the ride back to New England and headed out across the Sunshine Skyway to pick up my grandfather in Bradenton then headed back north. Just a few days after we arrived back home we saw the reports of the bridge collapse on the TV news. We all were just stunned watching the reports. We had just driven across that span a few days prior.
-
The many thousands of times I have drove over the bridge, and until today I get sooo scared.
-
I go over the new sunshine bridge and its gorgeous
-
God rest them in peace.. I visited that place in November of 2014 and seeing that video I realize how tragic the collision were..
-
I used to go over the new Skyway, and the Howard Frankland, four times each day. I liked to say I could do them in my sleep…kidding of course. They're both well designed and as long as traffic was moving, no biggie.
-
"Where did the people come from that are in the water?" "From the bridge". Chilling
-
I'll never forget this day, I was on my way to work that morning on US 41 south and was got caught in the storm that hit the skyway, it nearly blew my van off the road and I had to stop, that's how bad the wind was. When I arrived at work in Bradenton, I heard the news.
-
I lived there in 1980 I never herd of this
-
looks like a chintzy piece of crap
-
I lived there till 1978
-
as a kid I was so terrified of the old one..always thought it qas going to fall..when I saw this,a nightmare. .
-
as a kid I was so terrified of the old one..always thought it qas going to fall..when I saw this,a nightmare. .
-
Who ever was on the radio at the coastguard station sounds very young , he did an excellent job !
They probably never met, Chip Callaway and Gerta Hedquist. Never nodded or smiled or even made eye contact. They had, after all, no mutual friends, no shared interests. He was 20, an exceptional college student, on the school tennis team, standing on the brink of his life. She was 92, stiffening with advanced arthritis, planning another trip to her native Sweden, undoubtedly the last given her growing physical limitations. They had nothing in common at all. Except, as they settled into their Greyhound bus seats, heading south under gray and threatening skies, they were about to die together. At 7:25 a.m. on May 9, 1980, with the Greyhound approaching Pinellas Point a few miles from the north end of the Sunshine Skyway bridge, Capt. John Lerro tensed at the helm of the freighter Summit Venture, a ship as long as two football fields. Lerro, 37, an experienced harbor pilot from Tampa, shouldered the responsibility of guiding the Summit Venture from the Gulf of Mexico 58.4 miles up Tampa Bay to the Port of Tampa. It is one of the longest shipping channels in the world, and one of the most treacherous, given the shallow waters of the bay and the ambush style of Florida weather. With the ship's belly empty of cargo and her tanks nearly empty of ballast, she rode high in the water. She ran through intermittent fog and rain along the first 19 miles of her journey. Then southwest winds exploded to tropical-storm force. Rain sheeted at rates exceeding 7 inches an hour. Visibility plunged to near zero, and shipboard radar failed. It couldn't have happened at a worse point. Lerro faced the most critical course change of the run, a 13-degree turn that would take him between the two main piers of the Skyway bridge. It was at almost this exact spot that the Coast Guard cutter Blackthorn had been rammed four months earlier by the tanker Capricorn. The Blackthorn sank. Twenty-three men died. Lerro approached the critical bend on a ship weighing nearly 20,000 tons battered by winds of nearly 60 mph. And he approached it blind. Anthony Gattus didn't like what he saw at all. "It was a lousy day to start with," Gattus recalled. "It started raining hard 2 or 3 miles before we got to the Skyway. It got really dark. I don't like rain and cold and darkness. Didn't then. Don't now." Gattus, now 81, was a passenger in a yellow Buick headed south with three other men to ferry cars back for sale in Pinellas County. Richard Hornbuckle, the owner of the Buick, was behind the wheel. Jim Crispin sat beside Hornbuckle in the front seat. Kenneth Holmes sat beside Gattus in back. "Hornbuckle was a real good driver," Gattus said. "I always felt safe with him. When the rain started hard, he slowed way down. Twenty. Don't think he could have been going faster than 20 mph. "I remember a blue pickup passed us. "I remember a bus passed us." On the water below, Lerro considered his options. Visibility was so bad he could no longer see the bow of his ship. He judged it too risky to turn the Summit Venture out of the shipping channel to the north to anchor and ride out the storm because the outbound Pure Oil had been approaching. Without radar or visibility to locate the tanker, Lerro feared he might ram her if he steered across her path. If he tried to stop, or if he turned south out of the channel, the winds could usurp control of the ship and hurl him into the bridge. Thinking the wind was still from the southwest, his right, Lerro judged it would push the Summit Venture safely through the main spans of the Skyway. He made the decision to proceed. Lerro didn't know the squall had forced the wind around to the west-northwest, his left. Instead of keeping him in the channel, it pushed his high-riding vessel off course. At 7:32, the weather cleared marginally. Lerro saw part of the bridge superstructure directly ahead. With heartstopping clarity, he realized he was no longer in the shipping channel. He ordered a series of maneuvers, including emergency reversal of the engines and the deployment of the anchors. But it was too late. At 7:33, the bow of the Summit Venture collided with bridge pier 2S. The pier toppled, taking the roadway with it. --- Legend813