Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay's Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought It Down

Skyway

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers

Florida International University, Miami

Florida State University, Tallahassee

New College of Florida, Sarasota

University of Central Florida, Orlando

University of Florida, Gainesville

University of North Florida, Jacksonville

University of South Florida, Tampa

University of West Florida, Pensacola

SKYWAY

The True Story of Tampa Bay’s Signature Bridge and

the Man Who Brought It Down

Bill DeYoung

Copyright 2013 by Bill DeYoung

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book may be available in an electronic edition.

18  17  16  15  14  13  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeYoung, William Leonard, 1958–

Skyway : the true story of Tampa Bay’s signature bridge and the man

who brought it down / Bill DeYoung.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8130-4491-0 (alk. paper)

1. Sunshine Skyway Bridge (Fla.)—History. 2. Bridges—Accidents—Florida—History. 3. Marine accidents—Florida—History. 4. Bridge failures—Florida—Tampa Bay—History. 5. Tampa Bay (Fla.)—History. 6. Lerro, John. I. Title.

TG25.T35D49 2013

363.12'30975965—dc23    2013015082

For my parents, Bill and Jeanette

See the dark night has come down on us

The world is living in its dream

But now we know that we can wake up from this sleep

And set out on the journey. Find a ship to take us on the way.

The time has come to trust that guiding light

And leaving all the rest behind,

we’ll take the road that leads down to the waterside

And set out on the journey. Find a ship to take us on the way.

And we’ll sail out on the water, yes we’ll feel the seas roll

Yes we’ll meet out on the water, where are all strangers are known.

If you travel blindly, if you fall

The truth is there to set you free

And when your heart can see just one thing in this life

We’ll set out on the journey. Find a ship to take us on the way.

And we’ll sail out on the water, yes we’ll feel the seas roll

Yes we’ll meet out on the water, where are all strangers are known.

Gerry Rafferty, The Ark

Contents

Preface

1. Ambush

2. Hands across the Bay

3. Warning Signs

4. The Combat Zone

5. Captain Lerro

6. Shoot for the Hole

7. Tough Old Bird

8. The Abyss

9. The Only Fool Who Went in the Water

10. Red Alpha Zulu

11. The Court of Public Opinion

12. Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

13. A Pound of Flesh

14. Do You Know Who I Am?

15. Back to the Sky

16. That Stinking Bridge

17. The Last Victim

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes on Sources

Index

Preface

There are no mountains in Florida. As a matter of fact, there’s very little terrain you could even call hilly, except perhaps the gentle slopes of green and grassy horse country in the north-central part of the state or the bosomy ranges of sand dunes along the Atlantic Coast. No, Florida is flat, and it’s wide, and because so much of it is only a few feet above sea level, the sky seems a million white miles high and a billion blue gallons deep.

In the early 1950s, before construction of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, you could stand at the edge of lower Tampa Bay, at the tip of the Pinellas County peninsula, and gaze across fifteen miles of sparkling aquamarine water, where flocking pelicans dive-bombed into the waves and the silver scales of leaping tarpon reflected an afternoon’s brilliant sunlight.

On a clear day, and with a good squint, you could just make out the treeline and water towers of Manatee County and try to imagine what in the world those people—whoever they might be—were up to down there. It was a different world, across the bay.

The Skyway was built, in the name of progress and expediency, to shorten the distance between these two growing metropolitan areas. Local and state government were interested, too, in a highway that would deliver tourists farther south, to spend their recreational dollars on the only Florida coast that did not have world-famous Miami Beach at its sandy terminus.

Much has been written about the adverse effect of unchecked growth and the population explosion in Florida, how tourism ultimately bit its feeding hand by destroying most of what was unique about the state in the first place.

And there’s an argument to be made that constructing a fifteen-mile bridge across Tampa Bay—in the process interrupting one of the busiest shipping channels in the United States—wasn’t such a great idea, regardless of its higher commercial purpose or its value as a photogenic landmark, a totem of tourism in an area that had nothing more spectacular to advertise than the sun and the sand and a whole lot of old people.

That’s not the point of this book.

The Travel Channel lists the Sunshine Skyway at no. 3 among The World’s Top Ten Bridges, and residents of Florida’s middle-western coast are rightfully proud of the majestic cable-stayed bridge, the fifth-largest such structure on the planet. Its bright yellow cables, set against the azure blue of the bay waters, or pink-and-orange Gulf sunsets, make for stunning landscape paintings and art photographs suitable for framing. It has indeed become an iconic Florida image, these days emblazoned on everything from T-shirts and coffee mugs to expensive limited-edition porcelain collectors’ plates.

In 2012 the United States Postal Service put the Sunshine Skyway on a Priority Mail stamp, using a digital illustration by Chicago artist Dan Cosgrove.

Today there is little in St. Petersburg, or Bradenton, or any of the Tampa Bay cities, to explain that this beloved structure, this world-renowned marvel of engineering, is in fact the second Sunshine Skyway.

For a little over thirty-four years the opposite sides of the bay were linked by a bridge that was a state-of-the-art structure by the standards of the year it went up (1954). It too was considered an engineering marvel, and its unique design was proudly festooned on all the Florida souvenirs of the day, along with the requisite orange blossoms, flamingos, alligators, and water-skiing bathing beauties.

A booming population, and a related desire to make the area Interstate Highway–ready, resulted in the quickie construction of an adjacent twin Skyway in 1971. This happened to be the same year as the gates opened at Walt Disney World, which would radically change the face of Florida tourism.

And the population continued to swell.

By the end of that busy decade, however, red flags had been raised over the Skyway’s construction and its conspicuous lack of protection against the unending procession of shipping vessels that passed beneath it every day of the year.

When the freighter Summit Venture struck the nine-year-old twin during a freak storm in 1980, the lamentations, recriminations, and hostile finger pointing became moot. Out of horrible necessity, yesterday’s potential and what-ifs were made irrelevant.

I grew up in St. Petersburg and made my first Skyway crossing as a tot, in the back seat of my father’s blue and white 1956 Chevrolet.

It was awesome. And, particularly for a little kid, it was terrifying.

At either end of the Skyway, in Pinellas or Manatee County, the driver’s journey began with an innocuous five-mile ride over a series of small drawbridges and filled causeways, with tree-lined rest areas and shady picnic spots, broken by sandy stretches and mangrove stands with foot access for fishermen who enjoyed a rubber-boot wade into the waist-deep bay. Once you got on the over-water stretch of road, however, the picture changed dramatically. The Skyway was a ribbon floating tenuously on the blue-green surface, a lone thin highway with no buildings, no billboards, nothing to divert attention for the slightest instant.

As you moved along, in either direction, down those two puny lanes of asphalt, your eyes were drawn to the gigantic monster that seemed to rise up unnaturally in your path, arching out of the flat landscape toward the clouds, inevitable, immovable and getting closer all the time. You couldn’t help but stare at it.

My earliest memory of that painfully drawn-out approach is of the crown of superstructure, the silver trestlework that sat atop the already impossibly high roadway.

It looked like a roller-coaster. Do we have to ride on that, I asked my father, and coast up and down on top of those terrible metal rises and falls that seem to scrape the clouds?

We didn’t, of course, but the Skyway was very much like a roller-coaster. That 5 degree ascent, to which photographs don’t do justice, was like the inevitable clack-clack up the slow climb of a coaster. You were committed. The anticipation and dread swelled in the back of your throat.

You’d reach the top—swallowed by the yawning maw of the silver superstructure—and have only a couple of seconds to admire the view before your downward dive began.

Even as an adult, I was always relieved when the road flattened out again, and I passed the sign that said I had made it to Manatee County.

And there were no lights on the bridge.

Now, I think about Wes MacIntire, and how his heart dropped into his stomach as the Skyway collapsed underneath him.

I think about John Lerro, who knew, as it was happening, that ramming the Skyway was the worst thing that could happen to a harbor pilot on Tampa Bay.

And I wonder about the thirty-five people who lost their lives that morning, and what must have been going through their minds. Were they dreading the roller-coaster, too?

SKYWAY

1

Ambush

John Lerro knew he was in trouble.

Squinting out through the slanted wheelhouse window of the freighter MV Summit Venture, the deputy harbor pilot couldn’t see anything. Not the five loading cranes that stood at mute attention along the empty deck, which stretched out for five hundred slick feet of ship in front of him, five stories below where he stood.

Not the grumbling Chinese lookouts in heavy rain gear he’d posted to the bow of the heaving, 19,734-ton vessel less than fifteen minutes before.

Certainly not the lighted buoys tossing in the churning Tampa Bay waters, the markers that would tell him when it was time to turn this massive, unwieldy pile of steel awkwardly to port, in order to stay inside the invisible lanes of the shipping channel.

He couldn’t see the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, two thin ribbons of concrete, silver steel, and asphalt that crossed fifteen miles of the open bay and rose to more than 150 feet at their pinnacle—easy enough to pass under with a good day’s weather, but a target that required a sharpshooter’s eye when an unanticipated squall like this one turned everything into unfocused black and white and terrible saltwater boil.

But John Lerro knew the bridge was there, in front of him somewhere.

It was 7:30 in the morning, May 9, 1980. A Friday. The sun had been straining to peek out from behind the ominous gray fog for almost an hour.

The gale had begun as hard, steady raindrops falling in rough rhythm from an opaque sky; within seconds Summit Venture was being suffocated by blowing white water coming from every direction at once, howling like a pack of hungry wolves trying to sniff out an opening to roar through. This was predatory weather, and it had pounced on Summit Venture at the worst possible moment.

As a veteran merchant mariner who held a full captain’s license, Lerro had been in hard and sudden blows before. He knew that keeping calm, steadying his twitching nerves, was essential.

In his three years with the Tampa Bay Pilots Association, he had gone under that bridge almost a thousand times, safely guiding mammoth shipping vessels from all over the globe through the tricky inland channels and into—or out of—the Port of Tampa and the smaller ports in Pinellas and Manatee counties.

Flying a Liberian flag, the four-year-old Summit Venture—forged in a Japanese shipyard, 606 feet long and 80 feet abeam—had a thirty-man crew, all of them Chinese. As federal and state maritime laws mandated, the captain had consigned his vessel to the Tampa Bay pilot group to reach the port, where the holds were to be filled with pulverized phosphate rock. That morning it was John Lerro’s turn in the pilot rotation.

He was thirty-seven years old, the youngest pilot in the organization. A third-generation Italian American from the Bronx, Lerro stood out among the rugged southern men who had been navigating the bay for decades and the leather-skinned tugboat captains who’d been hired as pilots through the back-slapping recommendations of their longtime friends in the group.

Resentment toward Lerro ran deep among the veteran pilots. Not because he was a fast-talking, opinionated New Yorker, with the wavy black hair, deep-set brown eyes, and square jaw of a movie star. Not because he liked to talk about classical music and ballet.

Fig. 1. MV Summit Venture, 20,000 gross tons and 606 feet in length, known as a handysize bulker and built in Nagasaki, Japan in 1976. On May 9, 1980, flying a Liberian flag, it was to take on a load of pulverized phosphate at the Port of Tampa. Courtesy of www.swiss-ships.org.

Not because he was aloof or unfriendly—on the contrary, Lerro had a quick wit and a generous nature.

Many of the other men didn’t like him because of a 1975 law that took the hiring of new members out of the pilots’ hands and placed it under Florida’s Board of Professional Regulation. Lerro had been the first pilot hired by the state body under what was, in effect, affirmative action. He wasn’t one of them. He had been forced on them.

Taking Summit Venture into port was Lerro’s only assignment for May 9. He was to close on a loan in the afternoon, in a Tampa bank, and use the money to buy stock in the Tampa Bay Pilots Association. After three years as a deputy he had earned the right to become a full pilot, share in the profits, and more than double his $40,000 annual salary.

He had an observer on board. Bruce Atkins—like Lerro—had decided to change his career course and become a harbor pilot. Even though the thirty-two-year-old Atkins had been a ship’s master with Gulf Oil for years, he still had to spend thirty days as a trainee on Tampa Bay, riding with each of the association’s pilots and deputies on routine transits, familiarizing himself with the bay. Atkins didn’t want to be on Summit Venture on May 9—it was the thirtieth day, and he felt more than ready to begin piloting on his own.

Besides, Lerro had been his pilot during many Gulf Oil transits into Tampa, and Atkins didn’t think much of the wiry New Yorker’s handling technique. On more than one occasion Atkins had come within seconds of taking back control of a ship, as he just didn’t think Lerro was making the right decisions.

Ah, what the hell, he’d finally decided. It was just one more trip up the bay.

Once docked in Tampa, the crew—aided by the longshoremen at the port—would fill Summit Venture’s five cargo holds, a three- or four-hour procedure. Then the next pilot in rotation on the Tampa side would negotiate the ship back out of the bay, and disembark at the Egmont Key pilot station, before the big freighter sailed for South Korea to unload at the Port of Pusan.

There was, of course, no need for harbor pilots on the open ocean. The sea is a wide highway with no designated lanes. No shoals, no tides or tricky currents to be concerned with.

Captain Liu Hsuing Chu had picked up Lerro and Atkins at 6:20 that morning, anticipating a routine transit up the roughly forty miles of water to the assigned port terminal.

At the Sea Buoy, before he’d started in, Liu had ordered the ballast tanks emptied. Normally the tanks are filled with seawater, to make an unladen ship ride more heavily—and steadily—on the sea. Discharging the ballast was standard procedure before an empty vessel was brought into port to load up. In the shipping business, time is money, and the real estate at the loading docks came with a high price tag: the sooner Summit Venture got in, the sooner it would get out, and another ship could put in at Rockport Terminal to start the whole process all over again.

As 7:30 approached, Lerro understood implicitly that his options were limited. The number one priority, for every one of the association’s eighteen senior pilots and six deputies, was don’t hit the Skyway. He was well versed in Tampa Bay’s spider web of dredged deep-water channels and the treacherous shallows that could leave a ship stranded and helpless.

Both spans of the magnificent traffic bridge were crowned by complex configurations of silver steel girders that resembled the superstructure atop an old-time railroad trestle, or something a boy in the 1950s might build with his Erector Set. This distinctive feature, which made the Sunshine Skyway one of the most instantly recognizable tall bridges in America, was integral in holding the separate sections of cantilever arch together.

The black storm materialized when Summit Venture was a little less than a mile to the west of the Skyway. Monitoring the ship’s radar, Atkins had just announced that he’d spotted buoys 1A and 2A, marking the tricky dogleg turn into Cut A—18 degrees to port—that would keep Summit Venture in the shipping channel and deliver it safely under the bridge’s highest point before continuing to Tampa. They were almost there.

In that instant the curtain dropped. Visibility was zero. Blowing white water assaulted the thick windows and small wheelhouse portholes, dimly illuminated for a second at a time as if someone were flicking a light switch on and off in an adjacent room.

Bursts of static from the marine radio, crackling with the hard weather, punctuated the stale air in the small, white-paneled wheel-house, competing with the baying wind and explosions of chest-rattling thunder for the attention of the five men on duty, each standing tense and hard-knuckled at his station.

Captain Liu and his crewmen looked nervously at Lerro, who stood fixed at the window, raising and lowering his binoculars, and at Atkins, whose eyes never left the starboard radar screen. Atkins was watching not only for the turn buoys but for the bridge itself, which would appear as a straight yellow line.

To Atkins’s horror, as the radar made another sweep the center of the screen became solid yellow—damnable interference from the weather cell that had descended on them without warning.

Where was the turn?

Lerro raced between the radar and the window, the window and the radar, and began to consider his options. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge was up there, a fixed object, with Friday morning rush hour traffic poking along in both directions.

He issued orders for the bow lookouts to report sighting of a buoy on the starboard side—that would be 2A—and to make the anchors ready, just in case something drastic was necessary.

Like all big ships, Summit Venture had its own unique handling characteristics. But the mathematical logic was indisputable: a 20,000-ton ship, light in ballast and proceeding at half-ahead (about 9.5 mph) requires half a mile to come to a complete stop.

Turning hard to port, reversing back across the width of the channel, was not an option. Pilot Jack Schiffmacher was outbound with the empty gasoline tanker Pure Oil, Lerro knew, and was likely to be in the channel and coming his way just as Summit Venture was swinging around. A collision with a fuel ship could cause a massive explosion that could cripple or destroy both vessels.

A hard turn to starboard might be the best course of action, although with the wind out of the southwest, at his stern, Lerro would then risk having his ship—riding high with less than a dozen feet of draft in front—blowing broadside into the bridge. And the immediate depth of the spoil area, where the bay bottom sludge dredged from the channel had been deposited, was unknown. In the best-case scenario, Summit Venture would ground in the mud and wait out the storm.

The risk would be great, whichever way he turned.

A cry from Atkins broke his concentration. The radar had cleared, for one crucial sweep. It’s all right, Atkins said, his calm, professional voice belying the urgency of the situation. I have the buoys. We’re in the channel.

Just as quickly, on the next sweep, the yellow clutter returned, and the buoys were gone again.

The rain blew harder. Summit Venture plowed ahead.

Over the crackling onboard communication circuit, Captain Liu heard from the bow lookout. A turn buoy had been sighted.

Immediately Liu relayed this to Lerro, whose steely eyes were fixed on the window, as if staring hard enough would reveal the crucial turn markers’ whereabouts through the darkness and wet ferocity.

Where, captain, where? Lerro replied, without turning his head. I have to know!

He didn’t wait for the answer.

Summit Venture was now two-tenths of a mile from the Skyway Bridge, with no radar and no visuals. Because it