Tag: Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse

PBS Documentary: The Night the Key Bridge Fell

It’s still hard to believe

Almost one year ago, I heard about the incident but refused to believe it. Whoever told it to me, in my mind, had no business telling me a lie that obvious.

Then I went to YouTube and found it not only true, but well documented by two cameras, each one on opposite sides of the bridge.

I don’t watch local news. In Baltimore City and surrounding counties, there’s crime. All kinds, and some of those trigger my memories and can make me ….sick for a day, a week, and sometimes longer. I need no help being outraged. I stay that way.

In the link right here you’re going to be walked through the collapse and what caused it as well as what it took to reopen the Baltimore harbor to shipping. There are interviews with experts, salvage teams and the city’s mayor.

Opened in 1977, I have traveled across the bridge too many times to count. From the side, at a distance, it almost appeared flat. It was not. Driving it in a car, you got a feel for the incline, but in a rig, when I pulled containers out of Dundalk and Seagirt Marine Terminal, a load of goods in a short 40-foot box, it was different, and I never liked it. But, on the other hand, I never wanted this to happen.

There’s still no work or word of any on it. Sit back and watch a chilling and sad account of the anatomy of the collapse.

Many thanks to PBS for sharing a very well done documentary from their show “Nova.”

The Cursed Novel Strikes Again

A while back, I wrote about the novel I’ve written. That post is titled “The Cursed Novel.”

It does not have an ending, but now I know it needs one, and I finally know how to do it.

You see, I painted myself into a corner. I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Any ending I tried turned out to be uneven or silly. After taking the reader for a great ride, I couldn’t publish it with a lame ending. So, since 2013, it’s been unfinished.

I’ve had several test readers. All of them seemed to like it. Then bad things began to happen to them. Lost jobs, accidents, the deaths of close friends, money losses. You name it.

But I have more bad news. The story revolves around the main characters who try to help people, and the whole time, disasters keep happening. One such disaster was the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Yes, I wrote that. And that was back in 2010. I never dreamed of it really happening, but now it has.

I was planning on publishing it on Amazon, but now, I think that to stop the things I wrote from happening, I should end the book and then destroy it.

I remember when the Francis Scott Key Bridge didn’t exist. I remember when it was being built. I remember being one of the first to cross it.

The bridge was dangerous. The winds in the outer harbor were especially fierce, and no trucker with an empty trailer was allowed to cross when wind warnings were posted. I once pulled a 48-foot trailer loaded with pallets across, and what had seemed like nothing in a car surprised me. It had a steep enough climb that I had to gear down and turn on my hazard lights.

In the summers, the salt water smell made me wish I was going to Ocean City.

On the center span, you bounced. Bridges have to flex to stay up to accommodate the crosswinds and heavy traffic. I never did get used to that, and from 1998 to 2001, I crossed it every day on my commute. It was weird that so many freaky things happened on the bridge: ice flying off a rig’s roof and smashing out my headlights, changing lanes without meaning to during a tropical storm, and more.

And I scripted its demise. Some things in my book have come true, and that doesn’t seem possible because the whole thing is fantasy.

I really think, even as I know better, that once I close out the novel, I should burn it.