The Skyway Disaster
Sunshine Skyway Bridge (Present)
The Sunshine Skyway Bridge is as integral to the Tampa Bay skyline as the palm trees and the sunsets. It spans just over four miles of open bay, connecting Pinellas to Manatee County. Originally built to promote tourism and facilitate movement to areas adjoining the Bay, no one could have foreseen the problems that the location of the bridge could have posed.
Tampa Bay is not a maritime navigator’s paradise. For the most part the bay is quite shallow. As a result, larger ships have to strictly adhere to certain channels in the bay otherwise they risk running aground on the muddy bottom. To compensate for this difficult navigation, ships were given maps at Egmont Key before they entered the bay to guide them through. The Skyway was built with the top most span centered over one of these deeper channels to allow for the passage of ships underneath. To ensure that the water was deep enough for large vessels, the channel was further dredged.
As the construction of the bridge began, many believed that the craftsmanship was shoddy, questionable even. People wondered how a bridge could be built so quickly and yet still be safe. How could pre-stressed concrete and steel trellises and girders hold up thousands of cars as they pass over at an unfathomable height over open water? And as it turned out it was not the construction of the bridge itself that was the problem, it was its location.
The bridge, though situated advantageously over a deepset channel, required a precarious turn of 13 degrees in order to make it through the “hole” in the bridge. While on a normal, bright, sunny Florida day this posed no problems, Florida’s weather can sometimes be temperamental and fierce. Accordingly, accidents involving this 13 degree trouble-making turn did not occur under normal conditions; they happened in the dark and/or in the midst of one of Florida’s many and prolific thunderstorms.
On May 9th, 1980, the bay was beset by one such storm. Imagine: the water is rolling, the visibility is zero, and it’s impossible to see the monolithic structure of the bridge that is most definitely somewhere in front of you. This was the precarious position in which the Summit Venture was placed. Its pilot, John Lerro, was faced with few options: he could run the ship into the muddy banks until the storm passed or he could “shoot for the hole.” What he could not do was stop the ship, as a massive cargo ship like Summit Venture requires a half-mile to come to a complete stop. His split second decision to “shoot for the hole” resulted in a collision that made little more than a pfft and seemed almost not to have happened, that is until the bridge began to disintegrate before the eyes of the Summit Venture’s crew.
As first responders and the Coast Guard heeded Lerro’s Mayday radio call, they arrived to an impossibly desolate scene. A span of one of the twin bridges was completely missing, its pieces over a hundred feet below. A car teetering on the edge and, below, the sinking shapes of cars and a Greyhound bus.
As Jerry Knight, a St. Petersburg firefighter and first responder to the bridge collapse, recalls, “it was not a rescue mission, it was a recovery mission.” In what was undoubtedly an arduous and emotionally taxing undertaking, the Coast Guard and first responders of both Manatee and Pinellas counties worked to stabilize the bridge, pull vehicles back from harm’s way, and recover the bodies of those who had fallen into the water.
interview with first responder jerry knight
The Skyway Disaster took thirty-five lives, destroyed one career and shook the faith of Tampa Bay area residents. Unfortunately, and possibly unfairly, the blame fell straight onto John Lerro’s shoulders. A scapegoat in its truest form, Lerro was publicly smeared and dragged to court for his impossible and split second decision that rainy morning. But was it truly the fault of a pilot literally blinded by the Florida weather? Would someone else have been able to navigate that harrowing 13 degree turn sufficiently with no buoy markers and no dependable sonar readings? Instead, maybe it is entirely possible this was not the fault of one single man at all but the choice to build a bridge that provides little room for error in order to make it through the “hole.”
Hindsight is in fact 20/20 and when the Sunshine Skyway was rebuilt in the late 80s, it was moved slightly in order to alleviate the issue of the 13 degree turn. The structure of the entire bridge was re-conceptualized: the cement roadway was strung like beads on huge suspension cables, all held up and together by the prominent and recognizable yellow cables that project into the sky. Hopefully, this new and improved Sunshine Skyway stands the test of time.
