He and his wife, 18-year-old Marjorie, and their 17-month-old daughter, had just started across the bridge when it collapsed. One of the first pulled from the icy river waters was 24-year-old Howard Boggs of Bidwell, Ohio. Several small boats were launched to search for survivors. Many vehicles had sunk beneath the waters, and others were tangled in tons of twisted steel that had collapsed on top of the vehicles in the river. It was just a few minutes before police, fire, and other rescue workers started arriving on both sides of the river. Rescue workers were able to pull Margaret Cantrell from the wreckage. Melvin Cantrell, who was in the front passenger seat, and Cecil Counts, who was in the back seat, were both killed. A steel beam crashed onto their car, pinning it to the bridge. “Melvin and Margaret Mae Cantrell, along with their friend, Cecil Clyde Counts, were headed for town when the bridge fell. Ruth Fout, co-author of the book The Silver Bridge Disaster of 1967 and administrative assistant at the Point Pleasant River Museum and Learning Center, recalls that a few cars did not fall into the water but were trapped on what was left of the bridge by tons of falling steel girders. (Courtesy of the Ohio State Highway Patrol) By the time I went to the end of the bridge, I had gone into shock.” Cars and trucks were trapped by falling steel girders at each end of the bridge as it collapsed. “You could hear people screaming,” she said. Wood recalls seeing wires dangling, and she remembered a state patrol officer, Rudy Odell, and a volunteer, later identified as Robert Rimmey, coming to her car and walking her off the bridge. Only her quick action had saved her life. The bridge surface she had been on just seconds before was gone. By the time I got my car stopped, mine was on the very edge of where the bridge broke off.” So when I heard that sound, I automatically put my car in reverse. When it went to green, I started over the bridge and there was a terrible shaking of the bridge.” Wood said, “My father was a riverboat captain and had talked about barges hitting the bridge and the pier. She told the Huntington (WV) Herald-Dispatch, “As I was approaching the bridge when the light changed. She was driving her brand new 1967 Pontiac. She had driven across the bridge to check on her parents who lived in Point Pleasant and was now heading back home to Ohio. People were down there in the water.”Ĭharlene Clark Wood of Gallipolis had just finished the day working at a hair salon. There were all kinds of cars floating, then everything was so quiet, like nothing had happened, but I knew I had seen it. “The car started vibrating, there was an awful noise, I went out and looked. The Plain Dealer reported that he was on the West Virginia side of the river, headed for work and only two car-lengths from getting on the bridge when the structure collapsed in front of him. It took just twenty seconds for the entire bridge to fall into the river.Ĭecil Newell, 24, worked as an orderly at Holzer Hospital in Gallipolis. Cars were being crushed like toys in the girders.” She told the Plain Dealer that it sounded like a sonic boom, and then “the bridge started to crumple and sink like a set of dominoes falling. It seemed to go down in slow-motion.”Īnn Davis, who worked in a beverage store near the bridge, was watching the heavy traffic cross the bridge when she heard a large boom. Then, at about 5 p.m., the unthinkable happened.Ĭharlene Foster, who lived in Kanauga on the edge of the river, in sight of the bridge, told the Gallipolis Daily Tribune that she was preparing dinner in the kitchen of her home when her two sons suddenly screamed, “Mommy! Mommy! The bridge is in the water.” She looked toward the bridge, and “It was just like a snake slithering down into the water. That evening it was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridge as cars and trucks hurried home from work or a day of Christmas shopping. The span had been built to carry US Route 35 across the river. It soared 102 feet above the river’s surface. Built in 1928, it was a unique eye-bar chain suspension bridge, strung from towers on both sides of the river. It was called the Silver Bridge because of its paint job. A tiny, unincorporated community outside the county seat of Gallipolis that sits on the bank of the Ohio River, across from Point Pleasant, West Virginia.Ī 1,750-foot-long bridge carried people and material across the deep waters of the Ohio River between the two states. Families were Christmas shopping, and it was also the end of the workday, so many people were headed home. It was early evening, and the streets in this small Southern Ohio community were crowded. Book Excerpt From Ten Ohio Disasters, by Neil Zurcherĭecember 15, 1967, just ten days until Christmas.
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