The Sunshine Skyway Bridge Disaster of 1980 | Episode 44

Florida deputies once pulled over a man weaving all over the road. His excuse was that he'd been drinking. But then there was this squirrel that was in a shirt and it kept biting him. Oh the things you'll see on Florida's roadways or won't. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and uninspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll find out how seatbelts help prevent bloodstains, we'll see what happens when you drive underwater, and a special second safety segment covering Florida road etiquette. This is not the show you play around kids, or well eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin in our adventures together. We spent almost a third of our time in America, which makes sense. Of course, it's a real horn of plenty, a cornucopia of riches for disaster enthusiasts like yourself. And in all this time, we're only just now visiting the sun kiss shores of Florida, America's overly humid alligator film down. Beautiful, irresponsible, awful, crazy, lovely Florida. Damn it. If you think of America using the dysfunctional family of state's analogy, Florida is the cousin with no sleeves and a handful of warrants on a four wheeler. Did you know they used to have mermaids on their state payroll. Writer in Floridian Craig Pittman suggested, Florida is so weird because we're the third most populous state. We have twenty million people living here and then about one hundred million tourists who come every year. You put that many people in that close proximity, and they're bound to start ramming into each other's cars, attacking each other with machetes. That kind of thing. Florida conjures mental images of everything from dolphin kidnappings to full scale hurricanes. But there are also many quaint and beautiful pieces of Florida too. For today's story. We're going to be spending our time in Saint Petersburg, a beautiful, sunny Saint Pete, for short, sits on the shore of a peninsula near the mouth of Tampa Bay where it meets the Gulf of Mexico. If you don't know, think about peninsula's luck Island. I'd black the will to entirely leave the mainland. Tampa Bay is It's hard to describe. It makes me think of a lobster doing Michael Jackson's thriller I told you. Saint Pete sits directly across the bay from Tampa, and the tour kind of synonymous. They're treated like twin cities by the locals, you know, like Rally Durham or Saint Paul Minneapolis. For most of recorded history, residents of Saint Pete who wanted to visit Tampa faced an hour long drive around the bay or an hour on the Bee Line Ferry. I'm trying to think of an adjective to describe how bad they wanted a connecting bridge. Horny might do it. Horny, But there was always some Great Depression or World War to come along and turf their plans. That was until nineteen fifty four, when everything had calmed down just long enough for a bridge connecting Bay Vista Park in Saint Pete to Piney Point in Tampa to finally materialize, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. If you remember our Quebec Bridge episode, you remember what an undertaking these things can be. The bridge was going to need to be about four miles or six and a half kilometers long, and like the Quebec Bridge before it, this would become the longest bridge on earth. And because of that, a steel cantilever design with a two lane roadway and a central suspended section was designed. An entire concrete factory was built to keep construction on pace. Five hundred and forty four people worked on the bridge and it was built by the Virginia Bridge Company. Over twelve million pounds of structural steel and another eight and a half million pounds of reebar went into this thing. The bridge would sit on thirty two concrete columns set one hundred and thirty five feet apart, except for the central dredged out shipping channel, which had a space of eight hundred and sixty four feet between the piers, and a four hundred foot wide channel had been dredged, surprising no one. The bridge was immensely popular. On its opening day, fifteen thousand cars enjoyed the novelty of a crossing in just twelve hours. It was so popular by nineteen seventy one a second identical span would be added to ease congestion. Two more lanes. It meant opposing traffic had their own separate roadway. It was a beautiful bridge, but have you ever taken a bridge over open water with a busy shipping lane underneath. They tend to elevate kind of quickly. That allows water traffic to pass safely below. Nothing dangerous, but the effect is kind of like climbing the first hill of a roller coaster. You can't see over the lip at the top, and that can be spooky, especially when the weather turns. In a state called the Sunshine State, it really says something to be nicknamed the sunshine City Saint Pete. It's about three hundred and sixty one days a sunshine a year. They even hold the world record. They had seven hundred and sixty eight days of sunshine in a row one time in the summer. Though, and I'm not weather kink shaming here, but there's a forty percent daily chance of an afternoon shower. Sea breezes from both coasts collide and they create storm cells over the state that spin away like meteorological bakudan. I have no idea if that reference is going to land. But did you know that lightning kills more people in Florida than all other types of weather hazards combined. It's true, fourteen point six million strikes last year alone. The only state with more is Texas. Hey, Texas, I guess even percentages are bigger in Texas, But Florida, at only a quarter of the size, has just over a third of texas As lightning strikes. That means per capita lightning prefers Floridian barbecue. Sorry, Texas, Floridian lightning obituaries outnumber yours more than two to one. It's true lightning does love to feel Floridians, but not today. Grab your coffee, your keys, and some fare for the toll as we're going to Conga our way into the line of early morning traffic heading over the Bay north to Tampa. The date is May the ninth, nineteen eighty. It's always hard to see on this kind of bridge like we said, because the climb is steep enough that you don't see the peak till you're pretty much there. Today was worse because a tremendous fog rolled in the bay and visibility had dropped. Oh no, you say, there's going to be a traffic accident on the bridge. You say, just wait, it's not what you think. We'll start our day following freighter pilot John Laro. By five in the morning, he was already ferrying over to the Envy Sum Adventure. The Sum Adventure was one of those massive ass bulk cargo vessels that go on forever and fills its holds with grain or coal or dog food or whatever. The Sum Adventure was a Liberian registered freighter headed into Tampa to pick up a load of phosphate. Compared to a water taxi, the Sum Adventure was an absolute monster. It was two football fields long and weighed in around thirty four thousand tons. The reason John Larro had woken up with folgers in his cup. Yeah, that's an eighties reference, kids, was because he was the harbor pilot. A harbor pilot guides in pilot's ocean going vessel around the bay like a local. He knew the bay like the tattoo of the bay he had on the back of his hand. All he had to do was safely pilot the ship along the forty mile trek from the Gulf of Mexico to what was then known as the Port of Tampa and returned control to the captain. Although the captain still had final say on everything. It is his ship, after all, and this could be a bit of a stressful job, which is exactly why harbor pilots get all the babes. Larro guestimated visibility to be about two miles or three kilometers through light mist, with patcherine and fog in all directions. He'd spent the morning monitoring weather reports, but no warnings or alerts had been issued, so off they crawled. Larro started guiding the sum adventure out of the harbor and towards the bridge. They immediately struggled to guide themselves. The boys helped mark their route, but they were cloaked by the fog. The rain was increasing, but nothing to worry about yet. They were a plotting their position on maps with radar for guidance. The route was simple enough on paper. They only had one real wide turn to deal with, and just as they were negotiating it, a triple threat of winds, rain, and fog rose up and overtook them. The sudden rain was so heavy it overwhelmed the ship's radar and reduced visibility to maybe a ship's length. Heavy enough rain can make radar signals bounce back, and it makes the rain kind of appears like this continuous quab of useless data. And this was nineteen eighty Satellite guidance systems weren't a thing yet. Some men were sent to the front of the ship to act as his eyes. They watched for marker boys while he crept the vessel along as cautiously as possible. Other men had been sent to stand by and be prepared to drop anchor. Of course, with a vessel a large and heavy stopping it wasn't guaranteed at any speed. It would be a little like trying to stop your car by making a parachute out of your shirt, especially if sixty miles or one hundred kilometer per hour when gus were catching you the wrong way. Between the weather, the inability to properly monitor themselves, and the crew busy trying to learn echolocation, no one noticed. No one could have noticed that they had been pushed off course. They could barely see past their own bow. On a normal day, you'd be more worried about hitting a manatee than a marker boy. The men finally saw something emerge from the rain and the fog, but it was a concrete bridge support. It stood before them, planted firmly like God's leg. Larrow ordered engines full of stern turned hard to port and drop all anchors, But all the evasive actions and anchors in the world couldn't change what came next. It was seven thirty four in the morning, and with a strong wind blowing astern, the bow of the sum Adventure ventured face first into a support piera. It struck with tremendous force that rattled and shook the entire structure. Jay Hirsch had been driving on the bridge at that exact moment. He said, I thought it first it was thunder. Then something hit the bridge so hard it knocked my car out of its lane. Kept going till I got across, and when I looked back, I saw it. At that same moment, another driver, who had been driving very slowly southbound, suddenly realized he couldn't see any cars on the bridge in front of him. He stopped his car. The bridge wasn't lit, but it had these red airplane warning lights, and as he watched the red pulsing lights, they began to descend and then they just dropped out of view into the fog below. He told investigators. Immediately after the light drop, I saw the overhead steel superstructure falling ahead. It seemed to wave and roll as it was falling. The sum Adventure had sheared off the peer support beneath the southbound lanes at about ten feet above the water line. The supports under the central span of the bridge had collapsed, dropping one hundred and fifty feet into the Great Green waters below. With a dull, heavy thud of a splash. Three hundred and ninety five meters or about thirteen hundred feet of the southbound roadway between piers three S and one N had fallen. In English picture a span of roadway as long as eighty one Dodge caravans parked end to end. As the lights of the other cars approached from behind, the driver rolled down his window, yelling and waving and slapping cars as they passed, but no one stopped. Why well, let's do a quick safety segment first. You can't be asserting yourself like that in traffic unless you're prepared to play for a round and find out. An uber driver for Manateee County recently took the one star rating and kicked out a passenger at gunpoint because they thought they might throw over. No good comes from leaving your vehicle in Florida if I just never get out of your vehicle to talk to anyone about anything. A Gainesville woman was rear ended in a small feather vender and when the other driver got out, they started laying fists on her windshield. She Florida, and he just stood there cursing around until his pickup truck, which had not been put into park, had enough and ran down, rolling over his head. Florida traffic is not the place to make friends, Oh and the people you might meet. In twenty fifteen, a truck driver plowed into a dead alligator that someone chained to an overpass, and their response from everybody was pretty much, well, that's Florida. On top of that, Americans have a bit of a reputation for not being the kind of people you want to tell what to do, no matter how well intentioned. In twenty twelve, the US Postal Service ran a public service announcement because so many Floridians regularly crash their cars into post offices. I don't know if you're the kind of driver that would drive into a post office just to teach them a lesson about telling you not to drive into post offices, but it does happen, and you probably see the funny in that. But also in Florida, in Inverness, there are billboards reminding parents not to drunkenly rape their own children. So remember, Florida may sound like a joke at a distance, but it is no laughing matter. Between the steep angle of approach in the weather, drivers wouldn't have known anything was wrong until they were right on top of it. All told a linking Continental, a Buick Skylark, two people in an el Camino, four people in a Toyota, and an entire Greyhound bus with twenty five passengers on board pass by Dick Hornbuckle and three passengers have been driving in the Skylark. They're only doing about twenty miles or thirty kilometers an hour because they could hardly see the thing about headlights in fog is they illuminate the water vapor in the air. All that light bounces right off it, reflecting right back at you. Fog lights, on the other hand, there angled down to illuminate the road in front of you. But these drivers could have had sonar and still not have noticed the sudden absence of break lights in front of them, each one of them dropping out a view one by one, and as they continued along, the grayhound bus passed them. Do it about thirty miles an hour and then just disappeared. The bus left the road and tumbled through space into the water below in a shower of concrete and metal debris. Its roof caught on the jagged metal edging of the bridge and sheared away as it fell. It landed upside down with a huge, unsurvivable speck against the water. Jumping ahead here but the National Transportation Safety Board later noted that vehicles which fell from the bridge into the water look like they had impacted a solid surface. Meanwhile, back on the bridge, Hornbuckle's brains boggled at what he'd just seen. He flexed his legs straight against the brakes, and this sent them immediately skidding along the wet roadway until they finally came to rest staring right at the water. The section of roadway that they'd come to rest on had broken free from the rest of the bridge, but there was still enough of the support of substructure to keep it from testing its diving score, not yet. At least Dick and his three passengers were face first with certain doom and did not want to find out its score. As a passenger. The roadway had collapsed facing down about thirty degrees and didn't appear all that well supported. So you know, thirty degrees is called an acute angle, and it's the same angle as pac Man's mouth. If they'd skidded just a little further, maybe the length of a very small bathmat, and I would be describing the incomparable existential horror of unexpected weightlessness. Dropping from one hundred and fifty feet It sounds like a lot, like the way a drop off a fifteen story building sounds like a lot. And it is, but not if you're falling, not in the sense of time, at least in all the ways that would really matter to you. Not a lot at all. When the absence of the bridge beneath your car really takes hold, you would feel the most terrible inescapable weightlessness of unanticipated free fall. You'd accelerate about ninety eight and a quarter feet per second, and you get up to about sixty seven miles or one hundred and seven kilometers per hour. And if my math holds up, he would do that for about three seconds, and after that you would be eating steering wheel, seat belt or no hornbuckle. And his passengers scrambled up the roadway to the bridge. It seemed safe. At least, it wasn't threatening to just cleave off and drop butterside down into the water below. Not yet, at least a highway patrol car was racing up the bridge towards them. The police thought they were there for a car accident. The motorists thought they were there to watch a police car do a half gainer into the afterlife. They ran towards the cruisers, shouting and waving their arms for it to stop, which it did, thankfully. When the trooper got out and looked over the edge, he saw the freighter below with a large piece of broken bridge as much as one hundred feet draped across its bow. Cracked and broken pilings stood tall in the fog before them, but no road. He also saw the wheels of an overturned greyhound bus in the water. But the most amazing thing that day was fifty six year old Wesley McIntire's flight into the known. McIntyre had been approaching in his forward courier just as the bridge was struck, shuddering hard enough to swerve him out of his lane. When the bridge before him fell away, it was way too late to do anything about it, and he slowed right off the edge. He shut his eyes and waited, but he hit something dry. His truck actually landed on the piece of roadway resting across the Summit Venture's bow. Hitting the ship broke his fall just enough to make it survivable, which was good. But then his rye proceeded to roll off the ship and into the great green water below damn it, which was bad. McIntire forced his way out of the sinking vehicle and clung to wreckage until the crew of the sum Adventure fished him back on board. So you're out for a nice drive when for reasons you find yourself surrounded by water and sinking, would you know what to do first? Don't worry about four hundred people drown in their vehicles every year in North America. That is out of about ten thousand water immersion auto accidents. But to put that into perspective, this happening is only about four times more likely than your chance of being killed accidentally on your own lawn mower. So you've decided to submerge your vehicle. In a lot of accidents, you want to immediately call for help to get that process started. But a sinking vehicle is really more of a self starter situation. You are on a clock and waiting is not a good way to wind it down. Generally a car will submerge in under two minutes, so you got to move fast. If you're not in the water yet, you know, just on your way, hold your steering wheel at the nine and three position instead of the ten and two. If your airbegs go off at ten and two, ten and two can set you up to slap yourself silly. People have been knocked out by their own wristwatches doing this. Most people are going to try to open the door, but they're going to find out that it's not that easy, and even if you could, don't you do it. Water is going to rush in causing you to sink, and it cuts your escape time from maybe one to two minutes to just a couple of seconds. So just remember, open the door, breathe no more. The first step that you want to do with your time is check your seat belts, yours, your passengers. Just make sure everybody's buckles haven't become stuck. Passengers in the backseat should ideally plan to exit through their own windows, or you're going to probably have to pull them into the front of the car so they can exit through your window. The window is your exit, and in a perfect world, yours will continue to function and you could just roll it down. If not, though, keeping a car escape tool in your glove box is a great idea. It's this wee little doodad with a seat belt cutter and a shattering tool for windows. You would be amazed in reality how hard it is to actually break a car window. The idea of a window breaker is that takes all the force of you hitting a thing and compresses it into one tiny little spot that's a window's achilles heel. I have heard that it's easiest to do if you try to do it in the corner of your window. By the rear view mirror. Before you do crack that window, make sure everyone knows how they're getting out, in what order, and how to do it calmly. If you can't get the window to open, wait until the car eventually fills with enough water for the pressure to equalize on both sides the door and try that. I probably don't have to tell you to take a deep breath, open the door, and swim out head first. If you don't know which direction is up, which, believe me, actually does happen, just follow your bubbles. They'll always rise to the surface. Once you have successfully escaped from your sinking vehicle, determine whether or not you can swim to dry land. If it makes sense to stay put and call for help, just do that instead. Some people even suggest taking the time to put your phone in a ziplock bag to protect it from the water. And when you are on the surface and you're trying to swim to safety, swim in the direction of the current. That's if you're in deep water. Believe me, you'll know. And this is good advice. Even if you're just trying to drive through high flood areas, which is kind of and you're just going to wreck your car and if you could remember the National Weather Service's kind of hammily worded advice, turn around, don't drown. Stopping the bridge. Traffic that morning was challenging, but between panicking motorists, confused toll booth operators, and Larro's frantic called in the Coast Guard, both directions were shut down and commuter traffic was replaced with police and fire vehicles. Rescue boats from the Coast Guard were also on the way. They discovered some adventure was taken on water and totor clear of the area. Divers pulled the first victims from the wreckage, and a fishing pier at the Fort de Soto Park was transformed into a makeshift morgue. Three adults and a baby were the first to be recovered. One man was pulled from the water half naked with his arms facing the wrong way. How much of that was from the impact and how much of that was from living in Florida, we'll never know. Thirty six people fell that day, but Wesley McIntyre was the only survivor, and the guilt of surviving would haunt him for the rest of his life. The youngest victim was a baby and The oldest was ninety two, and twenty five of those who died were on board the bus. It had been filled with students from Tuskegee University at the time, and many of their bodies were found floating around or trapped inside the bus. As bodies were laid out along the pier, they were covered in shrouds which quickly soaked through with blood. And you might think, well, that sounds weird, but no, See, in nineteen eighty Florida didn't have a seat belt law. Most states didn't. In fact, they wouldn't enact one for another six years, and even after that that only made them the eighteenth state to have one. So without that, in an impact, your body can and will be thrown around the inside of your vehicle until you are way past caring. Crushed limbs, spinal fractures, and traumatic brain injuries are the most common souvenirs. And if you think that's bad, take a peek in the abdomen. In an impact, your body moves and sink with a vehicle, and it stops by pressing itself up against the dashboard and the steering wheel. But once the body has stopped, but the organs inside continue their trajectory and can rip or tear free. Either way, it's not pretty because they had ignored the weather. Investigators laid the blame at the feet of the ship's master, poor Laro. Oh, but not really, see, the captain has ultimate authority and sucks up all the blame, even if the pilot is at the controls. Still, everyone gave Laro stinkye for not throwing on the brakes as soon as the weather had picked up. The coast guard believed they wouldn't have struck at all if Laro had just turned the vessel hard to starboard immediately after the radar got spammed. Counterpoint, No indications of bad weather had been forecast, and no ships had reported anything to him, suggesting he should have as full on negligence or charges go. John Larro was eventually cleared and allowed to return to work, but he was forced to retire on medical grounds. His health that declined, and he took up a teaching position at the State University of New York's Maritime College. His health declined, and he took up a teaching position at the State University of New York's Maritime College. One question for me is about the quality of the concrete produced for the bridge. Investigators inspected the bridge and found that the peers had showed cracking throughout. One of the piers had cracked so bad during construction it needed repairs before it was even finished being built, but for reasons that was never fully investigated. Also, this was one of the busiest commercial waterways in the country. The National Transportation Safety Board reported that quote, several bridges with peer protection systems have survived collisions similar to the ramming of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge without major damage to peers or superstructure. Well that's great, but our bridge had wooden fenders installed around the base of the original center span pylons during construction, but they eventually just rotted and floated away and were never replaced. And it wasn't like the bridge had never been hit by for Oh no, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge loves a little bump and grind. It had been plowed into at least seven times that we know of in the decade before, but the vessels were relatively small and the damage was always minimal. They didn't even close the bridge, but one made waves. Our story takes place May ninth, nineteen eighty, but thirteen weeks earlier, on January twenty eighth, a Coastguard cutter, the USCGC Blackthorn, was struck by the six hundred foot tanker SS Capricorn and sank in Tampa Bay, killing twenty three. It happened just west of the bridge, not actually impacting the bridge itself, but it is closely associated with our disaster, and actually the reason it deserves its own episode is because at first the two ships just collided and the damage wasn't that bad, but the Capricorn's anchor was let go straight into the Blackthorn's hull, ripping the port side wide open. Still, thankfully it was above the water line. She tried backing off, and the chain went taut and firmly wedged in the Blackthorn side pulled her over until she capsized. It was the worst peacetime disaster in the history of the US Coast Guard, and the bodies again had been laid out at De Soto Park. In order to resume traffic, the surviving original bridge was converted back to two way traffic while they decided whether the bridge required repairs or replacement, and a new replacement bridge, which stands in place today, opened seven years later, engineers built a new bridge in a quote better location. They raised its height to make it easier for ships to pass under, and added almost three dozen fenders called dolphins to protect the supports from collisions and in the ongoing spirit of our beloved bridge. The day before its official reopening, a shrimp boat collided head on with a support. That boat sank, but the bridge was fine. But what became of the MV sum adventure. She was prepared and she continued service until she was sold. She was renamed the Jingbao, and in twenty ten she sank off the coast of Vietnam. A warning system had also been added to the bridge to warn drivers of hazardous conditions. They also decided that closing bridges in the case of extreme weather was a pretty solid choice too. The old bridge had been demolished, but the construction crews had kept both the ends, and those ends are now used as fishing piers. Today, a small bronze plaque stands in a rest area overlooking the site of the accident, honoring the loss of the thirty five people who died to make bridge travel more safe for the rest of us. People do dumb or unexplainable things in a disaster. Remember Dick Hornbuckle, He left his car hanging by the lip of the bridge while him and his passengers showed the wisdom and courage in everything they'd done, and they'd even saved the life of a police officer. And yet still, when he'd noticed he'd left his keys in the car and the car doors opened, he ran back, grabbed his keys and closed all the doors. But I have a lot more confidence in you people, considering we had two safety segments. And if I say Florida man arrested for dui after mistaking bank drive through for taco bell or Florida man worried about vampires burns down his own house. Remember, Florida holds a monopoly on bizar behavior, but not the trademark. Replace Florida with the name of your home state, and this or worse could be happening on your street. Keep your head on us, wivel, always know your exits and place safe out there. You can reach out to us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire us an email to Doomsday pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes could be found wherever you found this one. And while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends, and as a special message for people with hearing impairments, I am still quietly working to recreate all of our older episodes as YouTube videos with accurate captioning. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com slash Funeral Kazoo or buy me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making a donation to Global Metic. Global Metic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and today they have helped over four point five million people across eighty one different countries. You can learn more and donate Globalmedic dot Ca. And on the next episode, ever hear of Chekhov's Gun. It's this idea in writing that you don't introduce an element to a story unless there's going to be a payoff. Well, in our next tail, we're going on a river cruise up the Potomac with the world's biggest naval gun. Okay cool, And in our next tale, we're going on a river cruise up the Potomac with the world's biggest naval gun. It's the USS Princeton, Canada disaster of eighteen forty four. We'll talk soon safety GoGG goes off, and thanks for listening.