THE BRIDGE-Over 75 years, accidents, yes, but damage has been minimal|[6/22/05]
Published 12:00 am Wednesday, June 22, 2005
During the 68 years its roadbed was open to two-way highway traffic, the U.S. 80 Bridge across the Mississippi River here was the scene of many wrecks – and countless close calls.
Vicksburg native Jennifer Akers-Harper, 43, remembers how scary it was to meet an oncoming car on the roadway, just 18 feet wide.
“Getting that close to the rail, it was just mortifying,” she said. “If you had your window down, you could reach out and touch the rail.”
An exact number of wrecks could not be found, but one newspaper article from November 1964 chronicled the death of a Vicksburg firefighter, Billy Joe Bliss. The 21-year-old was killed in a two-car crash on the Louisiana side of the bridge. Passenger and fellow firefighter Clarence L. Parker, 25, was critically injured and died the next day.
Charles Finane, now 84, was an ambulance driver that night.
“I knew both those boys,” he said. “When I got there, I was shocked.”
Because of the width of the bridge, Finane said he couldn’t turn the ambulance around. He had to drive in reverse the length of the bridge. That wasn’t uncommon, though. He’d done it many times before.
The bridge was closed to cars in 1998 because of deterioration of the concrete roadbed. It had been closed and patched up one time earlier that decade, but Warren County supervisors are adamant that the roadway will never be used by cars and trucks again.
That leaves assorted utilities and Kansas City Southern Railroad as “customers” of the county-owned river crossing. While the roadway was historically hazardous, the rails have had a better record.
Bridge superintendent Herman Smith said he remembers only one derailment. It happened in July 2004. A train was headed from Meridian to Shreveport when five boxcars and an engine jumped the track on the Louisiana side of the bridge. No one was injured.
Trains rattle the span, and crossing in a car was made even more tense if a train was on the adjacent tracks. In fact, Margaret Simmons, 69, said one of her relatives would just wait.
“My aunt didn’t like it,” she said. “If a train was coming, you couldn’t get her across it.”
Simmons’ stepfather was one of the 700 workers who built the bridge. She believes some of them died.
“They lost three men when they were building it, in those piers,” Simmons said. “They couldn’t get them out.”
Smith said he doesn’t know of any confirmed deaths of workers on the bridge, and Gordon Cotton, curator of the Old Court House Museum, said the same.
“I’ve heard that rumor, but I’ve never seen it in print,” Cotton said.
The story is that the three men fell in the piers and were covered with concrete, but, as Cotton said, no records of such have been found.
The old bridge has also been hit countless times by river traffic. Towboat captains headed downstream must make a sharp turn and align barges just right to “shoot” the bridge. Earlier this year, in just eight days, barges being pushed by three different tows hit piers. There were no injuries, but two barges were sunk and several others were grounded on the banks. Smith said those kinds of accidents do very little damage.
“They basically knock some of the concrete off the piers,” he said.
Smith said it would take a huge impact, like an earthquake, to cause major damage to the piers, and there’s a way to measure that. It’s a plumb bob suspended in Pier 4.
Bridge workers check the bob several times a year. Smith said it has never moved.
For all its assorted treachery, the bridge has not been a common site for suicides. In 1978, a 28-year-old woman jumped to her death and was reported the first in memory to have done so. Eight months later, an unidentified woman jumped from the bridge, but was rescued.
THE SERIES
In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. 80 Bridge over the Mississippi River, The Vicksburg Post is spending a week looking at the old bridge, its operations and history. Many of the photographs accompanying the stories were taken by Post presentation editor Marty Kittrell, who gingerly took his camera 110 feet to the top of the span, offering rarely seen views.