Old Sidney Lanier Bridge marked by tragedy, endurance

thebrunswicknews.com ^ | Aug 25, 2018 | By LARRY HOBBS

[Red Badger]

Something went wrong that night aboard the African Neptune, which was 13 minutes out of the Port of Brunswick with a full load of naval stores.

The 16-year-old Sidney Lanier Bridge’s center draw spans were open for passage through the Brunswick River. But it became increasingly clear to those waiting in vehicles on the bridge that the U.S. freighter was off course. Also, it was not stopping.

Crew members would later attribute the ship’s wayward trek to a “steering failure,” according to an Associated Press report. They dropped anchor in an effort to stop its trajectory toward the Sidney Lanier Bridge, but the anchor apparently could find no purchase in the riverbed below.

It kept on coming.

“Someone screamed that the ship was going to hit the bridge,” Glynn Police Chief A.L. Lockey told the New York Times. “So they got out of their cars and started running off the bridge.”

Not all of them, not enough of them. “Others, he said, sat frozen in their vehicles,” the Times reported, illustrating the national story the crash became.

And so 11,000 tons of floating steel slammed into the Sidney Lanier Bridge, on top of which many found themselves trapped. The disaster occurred in the waning hours of Nov. 7, 1972, on a Tuesday night described by a bridge maintenance engineer as “pitch black,” according to the AP.

The African Neptune crashed into the bridge about 350 feet south of the draw spans. The collision crumbled three 150-foot spans of the mile-long bridge. Worse still, 10 vehicles plunged into the swift currents of the 40-foot Brunswick River. Ten people died that night, among them four members of a Waycross family. Others who perished included a 19-year-old Brunswick woman, a Jacksonville man, a Savannah woman, a doctor from Kentucky and a 28-year-old from Citrus, Fla., who was passing through on his honeymoon.

The big freighter “went plumb through” the bridge, bridge-tender Roscoe Tanner told the AP.

Eleven others were injured; many were rescued. Some survivors held to life preservers tossed into the water from the African Neptune. Tugboats and shrimp boats joined immediately in the search for survivors and bodies. The last five bodies were recovered on Nov. 11, according to the Times.

Among the survivors were Mary and Albert Donal, a Pennsylvania couple returning from a honeymoon in Florida. As they waited in line with other cars on the bridge for the ship to pass, then 36-year-old Albert Donal stepped out of the car and over to the rail to see what the holdup was.

“She said her husband got out of the car and went to the bridge rail to see what was wrong,” the AP reported. “He was walking back when the ‘bridge fell out from under us.’”

Both survived the disaster, reuniting at the local Brunswick Hospital emergency room.

Repairs to the damage took six months to complete, and cost $1.3 million. Interstate-95’s construction through Glynn County had not been completed. The only detour option was via Ga. Highway 303 through Blythe Island.

In the final analysis, “steering failure” did not cause the deadly crash of the African Neptune. It resulted from a who’s-on-first confusion of human errors on the bridge of the ship, according to the conclusions of the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board.

From a report released May 23, 1974:

“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the collision of the SS African Neptune with the Sidney Lanier Bridge was (1) the failure of the helmsman to apply the correct rudder response to two helm orders; (2) the failure of the third mate, master, and pilot to discover the first error; and (3) the delay by the third mate, master, and pilot in detecting the second.”

The majestic sweep of today’s arching 480-foot-high Sidney Lanier Bridge has etched itself so iconically into our local skyline that it is sometimes hard to believe it was never there. But the cable-stayed bridge with a 185 foot clearance underneath has only been open since 2003. Its 1.5-mile-long stretch makes it the longest-spanning bridge in Georgia, longer even than its sister bridge in Savannah, the Talmadge Memorial.

The original Sidney Lanier Bridge was completed in June of 1956, connecting U.S. Highway 17 for the first time between the northern and southern banks of the Brunswick River. That horrific night in 1972 was not the only time the humble drawbridge of old gained national attention.

In fact, yet another ship struck the bridge in 1987. The Polish freighter Ziemba Bialostocka struck the draw span tower on May 3 of that year, causing $3 million in damage that took about five months to repair. Fortunately, there were no casualties this time.

All that remains of the bridge is the section that juts out a couple of hundred feed into the north bank of the river beneath the present Sidney Lanier Bridge. It serves as a fishing pier and observation deck for Sidney Lanier Park.

But that old bridge can still be seen, usually late nights on channels that carry old movies. Fans of Burt Reynolds’ movies have seen it often. The old Sidney Lanier Bridge is the setting for parts of the opening-scene chase in The Longest Yard.

That part where Bandit clears a rising drawbridge span, briefly losing the cops as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Saturday Night Special” blares in the background? That’s us, y’all.

[Red Badger]

History repeats itself....................

[FoxInSocks]

Brunswick, Georgia.

[ComputerGuy]

A friend of mine and his wife made a wrong turn and missed being two of the fatalities when the Tampa bridge went down. They were so close they couldn’t back up.

[Red Badger]

I remember when it happened.......................

[sauropod]

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