Bridge workers may have died needlessly
Before anyone anoints people as heroes, we should wait for all the evidence to be reviewed and revealed. Serious questions remain about the deaths of the work crew on the bridge that night.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge workers were not notified in time to drive off the bridge when the ship took down the bridge early Tuesday morning.
At about 1:28 a.m., a Duty Officer of the Transportation Police asked whether a construction crew was present on the bridge.
“Is there a crew working on the bridge right now?” he asked. “Just make sure no one’s on the bridge right now. … If there’s a crew up there, you might want to notify whoever the foreman is to see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily,” he said.
The bridge fell about 30 seconds later.
Two of the dead crew members who were working overtime were pulled from their truck at the bottom of the river, which is 40-feet deep. They had been sitting in the truck on their break. If notified by radio when the Transportation Police knew, they would have had nearly 3 minutes to get off the metal part of the span.
No record exists that anyone, including the Transportation police, radioed the workers to evacuate the bridge.
The “heroes” who stopped traffic did not call the workers who had no idea what was happening. The surviving construction crew members said they were never concerned about boats hitting the bridge.
Hand signals, waving arms, or yelling to that crew was not going to save many lives. Only two workers got the message. The others only needed to reach the concrete section of the bridge. They had time, a radio, and transportation.
They did not get a heads-up on the radio.
Who will stand and say, “I called the workers on the radio?”
Nobody will because nobody did.
Dudley Thompson lives in Girdletree, MD., population 106. He was born, raised, and lived most of his life in Baltimore. He worked for the News-American on the advertising side until it closed in ‘86. His second career was teaching in juvenile jails for the Maryland State Department of Education. He holds a Masters in Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University, ‘77, and a B.A from the University of Maryland,’74.