Before Baltimore, freighter downed Floridas big bridge and killed 35
Cynthia Zahnow was eating breakfast in her college’s cafeteria when the pager beeped and announced its message aloud: “Code Red Alpha Zulu.” Something bad had happened.
The 19-year-old — a member of the search-and-rescue team at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. — ditched the poster board she was supposed to present in class and ran to the boat house. There was as much uncertainty as there was urgency.
But the situation was worse than anyone could have imagined: This was the morning of May 9, 1980, and a freighter had just ripped out a chunk of the Sunshine Skyway. Reportedly spanning 14 miles, it connected St. Pete and Sarasota and was considered Florida’s flagship bridge.
Her job that rainy morning was hoisting bodies recovered from a submerged Greyhound bus onto the search-and-rescue boat. No one on the bus had survived.
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“I remember loading the bus driver,” Zahnow told The Washington Post on Tuesday, “and seeing the horror still frozen on his face.”
The tragedy is a dark spot in the history of St. Pete — the Sunshine City in the Sunshine State. Motorists fell 150 feet to their deaths that day. In all, 35 people died.
For many connected to the area, some of whom felt the ground shake on shore those 44 years ago, the Skyway’s collapse was the first thing that came to mind after hearing that a freighter had crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday, sending at least eight people hurtling into the water.
Zahnow was among them. Now an oncology professor at Johns Hopkins University, she said she has driven over the Key Bridge countless times. When she woke up and heard the news, her reaction was visceral. Her heart started beating faster.
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“It brought back the horror of the day,” she said.
On that May morning, the water under the Skyway was no longer a place where casual divers would snag snow crabs for dinner. It became a place where police divers slipped into a watery graveyard, pulling bodies from submerged vehicles.
Summit Venture, the Liberian-registered freighter that hit the bridge, was about the length of two football fields. The vessel was heading to Tampa to pick up a load of phosphate, The Post reported, at a time when the U.S. Coast Guard said “visibility was zero.”
The Summit Venture struck one of the span’s western columns, knocking out 1,200 feet of the bridge. Six vehicles and the Greyhound bus plummeted into the choppy water, according to the state parks website.
One of them was carrying Wesley MacIntire, a 56-year-old man from nearby Gulfport, who spoke with The Post from his stretcher in the emergency room hours after his pickup truck fell into the water.
He said it was raining so hard he almost decided not to cross the bridge. (At that time, many in the area were scared of the wind and how the bridge’s metal grating grabbed tires. When it opened in 1954, per the Tampa Bay Times, it was the longest unbroken bridge in the United States.)
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As he approached the tallest section of the bridge, MacIntire said he began to feel it sway.
“Then when I looked down, I could see the ship and the edge of the bridge was breaking off,” he said. “I couldn’t stop. I just slid and then I hit the ship and dropped into the water.”
He said he held onto bridge debris and called to the freighter for help, which dropped a rope ladder and pulled him aboard.
A doctor at the hospital told The Post that it was a miracle MacIntire survived, sustaining injuries “on the level of a common automobile accident.”
The divers from that day and the ensuing weeks sustained a different kind of trauma.
Robert Raiola was still teaching Michael Betz the ropes: Betz had started as an inspection diver with the Florida Department of Transportation five days before the crash, according to the Times.
Raiola compared it to starting at the New York Fire Department on Sept. 6, 2001, in an interview with the Times years later.
They recounted starting that rainy morning with coffee and breakfast sandwiches at the Bunny Hut. It was going to be a routine inspection of the Skyway that day. But the waitress interrupted to tell them that the bridge had been struck.
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They loaded up their 16-foot FDOT Boston Whaler and sped down a dirt road to what was left of the bridge. They found a steel truss hanging over the water pointing down at where they needed to dive, reported the Times.
Betz recounted seeing the Greyhound wheels up, the top of the bus sheered off. Raiola signaled for Betz to wait outside as he swam into where the front window had been. He found people still trapped in their seats, according to the Times.
Realizing this wouldn’t be a rescue mission, they swam up with two bodies each and handed them off to crew members at the surface.
Betz told the Times he decided to hold the bodies by the backs of their shirts. He didn’t want to see their faces.
The National Transportation Safety Board held 10 days of hearings during which 28 people testified and 93 exhibits were entered into the record. An April 1981 report from the NTSB found multiple causes for the crash and collapse: high winds and heavy rain from a line of thunderstorms; a failure to notify mariners of the severe weather; and the lack of a structural pier protection system that could absorb some of the impact.
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A new Sunshine Skyway opened in 1987. The standing wreckage from the old bridge became the Skyway Fishing Pier State Park in 1994. At least 40 tons of debris from the old bridge have become artificial reefs throughout the area.
Locals still swap tales about where they were when they heard or felt the bridge collapse.
But one story rises above the rest.
As the bridge started to crumble, Dick Hornbuckle slammed on the brakes, stopping his yellow 1976 Buick Skylark only 14 inches from where the roadway had been seconds ago. He and his three friends crawled out of the car, thankful for their luck.
But he tested his luck again. The 60-year-old scrambled back to his Buick for something that could have cost him his life: his golf clubs.
More than four decades later, those there that day are still haunted in even quiet moments.
Zahnow said the cafeteria staff had set aside food for rescuers, knowing they’d be back late. Sitting down to dinner, she remembers cutting an orange in half and rubbing the citrus on her hands and nails so she could try to eat.
“You just felt like you were covered in death,” she said.
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