“Skywayaccident” by St. Petersburg Times. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.
With so much water in and around the state it’s not difficult to find famous bridges of Florida. So I’ll start at the beginning, and list two that I know something about personally.
Right after I moved into the state, I remember the story of the ship that hit the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, over in Tampa (on the west coast), knocking out a section of the road. It happened in 1980 one morning when people were driving to work, or wherever they were headed at 7:30 am. There was a storm and the downpour of rain, that is typical in the state, left drivers with nearly zero visability.
The ship took out a section of the bridge and vehicles just drove off into the water, never realizing that the bridge had vanished out from under them! And it was a very long fall into the water below. Only one person survived, and the picture above shows a car stopped inches from the edge of the broken road. How lucky was that guy? Visit the SkywayDisaster.com site for images, video and names of the dead (35). It was created as a memorial to the horrible accident.
On a more upbeat note, the reason I decided to mention famous bridges of Florida was that my son, who still lives in Florida, told me that Kenny Chesney had made a music video on the old bridge in DeBary. Continue reading “Famous Bridges of Florida Before They Grew Up”
