My wife is from Charleston and I always hated driving over the "old" Cooper River bridge. It always struck as an exceptional rickity old thing...of course I grew up in the desert in Arizona so driving over large bodies of deep water was a pretty alien concept to me!
You would REALLY get a scare then, if you took the trip I did last December: Near Norfolk, VA, one not only crosses bridges over large, deep bodies of water, but then one dives down through tunnels UNDER the water, dug deep enough to allow ships to pass overhead. There is just something alien about driving under tons and tons of water while thinking if there were a 'breach' and water came rushing in, there would be absolutely no way to escape.....
When I lived in Charleston there were chunks of pavement falling out of the old bridge on a semi-regular basis.
"I always hated driving over the "old" Cooper River bridge."
There were many stories of Yankees coming up to that 2 lane 8ft. lanes and freaking out and stopping before the bridge.
I got a job with the Bridge Division of S.C. working with the man who engineered the building of the "old" Cooper River bridge. My first job, standing around since I didn't know anything, was to watch concrete being poured into a hole in one of piers of the Old Cooper River bridge. The state had hired some scuba divers to inspect all the piers and they found one that had a hole so big in it a man could swim around in it. Yeah that bridge was scary alright.
Ravenels uh? Old money family.