How the Baltimore bridge collapse compares to the fall of Florida’s Sunshine Skyway

TAMPA — Americans awoke Tuesday to images from a devastating scene in Baltimore, where a cargo ship rammed overnight into a major bridge, crumpling the road and sending cars into the water.

For some in the Tampa Bay region, the scene conjured memories of the biggest bridge disaster in local history: The collapse of the Sunshine Skyway bridge after it was hit by a freighter in 1980.

Though they occurred 44 years apart, it’s hard to shake the similarities between both tragedies. Here’s how they compare.

Both opened in the 1970s

The original Skyway was a two-lane bridge that opened in 1954. It was expanded to two bridges — one northbound, one southbound — in 1971. It was the newer, southbound bridge that collapsed in 1980.

Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge opened in 1977, just a few years after the southbound Skyway.

But in its own way, the southbound Skyway was a full generation older than the Key. It was built with similar specs to the 1954 original. Those bridges had a clearance underneath of just around 150 feet, whereas the Key’s clearance was around 185 feet — close to that of the current Skyway.

Stylistically similar, structurally different

With its towering yellow suspension cables, the modern Sunshine Skyway bears little resemblance to the Key Bridge. But the original looked more similar, with webs of steel trusses at the middle.

The first Skyway was a cantilever bridge, with arms that spanned outward from support pylons farther from the middle. One benefit of this style is that a direct hit to a pylon won’t necessarily take down the entire bridge — just the span stretching out.

The Key Bridge, however, is a continuous truss bridge, which relies on connective support from span to span, truss to truss. It’s efficient engineering, but it also means that when one support element goes out, the rest of the bridge likely will, too. Indeed, videos of the disaster at the Key Bridge — one of the longest continuous truss bridges in the world — show the whole thing dropping into the water within seconds.

What went wrong

The Skyway crash occurred on a stormy Friday morning. John Lerro, the harbor pilot captaining the 19,734-ton Summit Venture, said he couldn’t see where he was going and didn’t have an up-to-the-minute weather forecast as he approached. It was only as he came to within a few hundred feet of the bridge that he got his bearings and realized he was outside the shipping channel, with the wind pushing him astray.

“The radar was out; the visuals were out,” Lerro said in 1990. “I ought to have put the ship aground.”

Weather did not appear to be an issue in Baltimore. Video of the collapse shows the 948-foot ship, christened the Dali, slowly approaching a pylon, its lights briefly shutting off, cars passing overhead, the water fairly still.

Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin told the Baltimore Sun that the ship apparently lost power, which shut down its steering.

Crash and collapse

In both Baltimore and St. Petersburg, the ships approached slowly, inevitably, with pilots unable to right their steering paths before impact.

“It takes an incoming ship of that size — of any size basically — a full mile to come to a complete stop,” said Bill DeYoung, the St. Petersburg author of “Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay’s Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought it Down.”

“Harbor pilots will tell you you have to make decisions way in advance. You have to have your next six moves already in your mind and make them in advance,” DeYoung said.

The Key fell almost instantly into the water. The Skyway’s collapse also unfolded quickly, though some drivers had time to hit their brakes or slam into reverse. One driver in St. Petersburg would later compare the sight of headlights plunging into the water to “Roman candles on the Fourth of July.”

Recovery and aftermath

Thirty-five people died in the Skyway collapse. By mid-morning Tuesday, authorities in Maryland had recovered at least two survivors from the cold Patapsco River. They still were searching for at least a half-dozen more.

Investigators exonerated Lerro for decisions he made as the Summit Venture’s pilot, though the tragedy haunted him until his death in 2002 due to complications from multiple sclerosis.

“There’s a lot of armchair quarterbacking about what Lerro did and what Lerro could have done,” DeYoung said, “but I think people who do that don’t take into account all the circumstances he faced.”

To replace the fallen Skyway, Florida leaders debated options ranging from a tunnel to a bridge rebuilt with the same specs as the original. A new cable-stayed Skyway, inspired by the Brotonne Bridge in France, opened in 1987.

Engineers added several key safety measures designed to prevent a similar crash, including island-like mounds of rocks shoring up the tallest supports and huge, disc-like structures called dolphins that act as bumpers protecting the bridge from wayward ships. The main span was moved about 1,000 feet east to smooth out a dogleg left turn for ships entering Tampa Bay.

Like a lot of older continuous truss bridges, the Francis Scott Key Bridge did not have similar safety measures in place.

Replacing the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a key commuter corridor and gateway to a major port, won’t take as long as it took to rebuild the Sunshine Skyway. When a similar truss bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2007, a sturdier replacement opened just over a year later.

President Joe Biden said that once search and rescue efforts wrap up, local, state and U.S. officials would “send all the federal resources” and “move heaven and earth” to restore the bridge “as soon as humanly possible.”