Four months after the Blackthorn went down in the channel, the bay's mouth took its second catastrophe of 1980, and this one fell from the sky. On a rush-hour morning in May, a freighter feeling its way up the channel in a sudden, blinding squall missed the gap beneath the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, struck a support pier, and dropped a quarter mile of roadway into the water. Thirty-five people died on their ordinary morning commute. The man at the wheel of the ship would spend the rest of his life being called the thirty-sixth victim.
The Sunshine Skyway carried U.S. 19 across the mouth of Tampa Bay, the same deep-water gap between Mullet Key and Egmont Key that George Gauld had charted, that Francisco Maria Celi had sounded, and that Fort De Soto's mortars had been built to command. The first Skyway span opened in 1954, replacing the old Bee Line ferry; a twin span was added in 1971, so that by 1980 two parallel cantilever bridges carried traffic in each direction, soaring high enough at the center to let ships pass beneath. To drive it was to cross the bay on a thread of steel and concrete a hundred and fifty feet above the channel.
The MV Summit Venture was a 609-foot bulk carrier inbound for the Port of Tampa to take on a cargo of phosphate. Because she was running empty, she rode high out of the water, a tall, light hull that the wind could push. Guiding her up the long channel was John Lerro, a thirty-seven-year-old Tampa Bay harbor pilot, an experienced mariner who had made the run up the bay hundreds of times and was just two days from a promotion that would have doubled his pay.
As the ship approached the bridge in the early morning, a violent squall blew in off the Gulf without warning. Torrential rain and winds reported as high as seventy to ninety miles an hour swallowed the bridge whole and knocked out the ship's radar. In the space of a few minutes Lerro lost all sight of the spans ahead, could not see his own bow, and was left blind at the most critical turn in the channel, the ship drifting in the wind, only seven-tenths of a mile from the bridge. To stop a loaded ship in that distance was impossible; to stop this light, empty one in a gale was no better. He committed to threading the opening beneath the main span and ordered the turn. When the rain lifted, seconds before impact, the bridge was directly ahead and to the side. He was hundreds of feet off the channel.
At about 7:33 a.m. the bow of the Summit Venture struck a support pier of the southbound span. Lerro had already ordered the engines full astern and the anchor dropped, but inertia carried the ship into the pier, and roughly a quarter mile of roadway, some twelve hundred feet of it, sheared away and fell a hundred and fifty feet into the bay. It was rush hour. Into the gap went six cars, a pickup truck, and a Greyhound bus bound for Miami. Lerro grabbed the radio and put out the call that everyone who heard it remembers:
“The bridge is down. Get all emergency equipment onto the Skyway Bridge. The Skyway Bridge is down. This is a major emergency situation. Stop the traffic on that Skyway Bridge.”Capt. John Lerro, distress call to the Coast Guard, 9 May 1980
Thirty-five people died, every one of them in a vehicle that drove off the broken edge before it could stop. Twenty-six of them were aboard the bus. The youngest was a baby; the oldest was ninety-two. The disaster cut so deep into local memory that, decades on, people in the bay area still recount exactly where they were when they heard.
The margin between life and death on the bridge that morning was a matter of feet. Richard Hornbuckle, driving a yellow Buick, managed to stop his car just short of the broken edge, skidding to a halt with the front wheels at the brink, and walked back from the drop with his passengers. The story, retold ever since, is that he then went back toward the car for his golf clubs.
One person went off the bridge and survived. Wesley MacIntire, a Gulfport man driving a Ford Courier pickup to his job in Manatee County, sailed off the fallen span. Contrary to the version that hardened into legend, his truck did not land on the freighter's deck and roll off; it struck the side of the Summit Venture's hull, ricocheted, and sank. MacIntire rode the truck down, waited for it to hit bottom, freed himself, and rose to the surface, where he clung to wreckage until the freighter's own crew pulled him aboard. He carried the day with him for the rest of his life, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress, haunted by nightmares, and he died of cancer years later. Of all the people on the bridge that morning, he alone made the fall and came back.
Blame fell on the pilot at once, and the public was not gentle; Lerro received hate mail and threats and was hounded in the street. The law, looking harder, did not agree with the public. A state administrative inquiry ruled in December 1980 that Lerro had not been negligent, had acted reasonably in an impossible situation, and reinstated his suspended license; the judge called the disaster, in effect, an act of God. A federal Coast Guard inquiry found that his decision to proceed in zero visibility had contributed to the accident but that many factors beyond his control had as well. In the civil reckoning, the shipping company was found negligent, the courts holding that the Summit Venture's own captain should have taken back command when he grew uneasy with the worsening weather.
Exoneration did not save John Lerro. Within months he began losing his balance and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the disease that would slowly disable and finally kill him. He left piloting, returned for a time to teach at his old maritime academy in New York, then came back to Tampa, earned a master's degree in counseling, and spent his remaining strength volunteering on a crisis hotline, helping other people carry things that could not be borne. He died in 2002, aged fifty-nine. The attorney who had defended him, and become his friend, said it plainly: Lerro was the thirty-sixth victim of the Skyway, a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time, who relived that morning every day for twenty-two years.
The wrecked cantilever bridge could not stand. In its place the state built the soaring cable-stayed Skyway that crosses the bay today, opened in 1987, with its golden cables and a far wider, better-protected channel beneath. The stumps of the old bridge were left in the water as fishing piers, and a memorial on the south approach carries the names of the thirty-five who died. The disaster, with the loss of the Blackthorn the same year, marked 1980 as the darkest year in the modern history of the bay's mouth, and it changed how ships are piloted in and out of Tampa Bay forever after.