Remember when a ship hit and collapsed the Benjamin Harrison Bridge in Virginia: 'It was chaos'

NORTH PRINCE GEORGE, Va. -- When a cargo ship slammed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge last month, sending it into the water below, most people had never seen anything like it.

But the disaster brought back vivid memories for those in one part of Central Virginia.

Back on Feb. 24, 1977, Donald Hunter was a 30-year-old sergeant in the Prince George County Police Department.

He was getting ready for work that day, when something came over the police scanner that caught his ear.

“I heard that a vessel had hit the bridge and there were vehicles in the water,” said Hunter.

The young officer got in his car and drove as fast as he could to the Benjamin Harrison Bridge, then just a decade-old passageway spanning the James River between Prince George and Charles City.

Hunter got there about dusk, parked at the foot of the bridge, and started to walk.

“That was nerve wracking because I had no idea what to expect.”

As he neared the top, he could see part of the bridge laying on a ship.

The vessel was the Marine Floridian, a 25,000-pound sulfur tanker that had just delivered cargo to the Allied chemical plant in Hopewell.

But as it approached the bridge, the crew lost control and the massive freighter rammed into the structure, causing one section and multiple vehicles to plunge into the cold water below.

A VDOT report from the time says that the ship sounded a loud, repeated distress signal. But Hunter, the literal first responder to the scene, recalls only a ghostly silence by the time he arrived.

“There was nothing crashing, nothing falling, nothing,” said Hunter. “It was eerie, no doubt about it.”

His mind then began to race.

“I was just praying that the thing didn’t collapse further,” said Hunter. “My concern was ‘What are we going to do?’”

The call for help went out, and Hunter immediately began working to stop the flow of traffic.

“It was chaos, that’s the best way I could describe it,” said Reed Foster, who was a 20-year-old volunteer firefighter the day of the incident.

He rushed to the bridge with his father – who was the game warden – and their boat, fully anticipating a rescue mission… or recovery.

“I was in awe, I could not believe what I was seeing,” said Foster. “The biggest concern was they had eyewitnesses that two vehicles went in the water and whether that was people in the water, in those vehicles.”

Some people who lived near the marina had already taken their own boats out to search for possible victims, but it was difficult to determine exactly who was doing what, and nearly impossible to communicate with officials on the other side of the river.

Fortunately, after a few hours it was determined that the people who had been in the cars had gotten out and run to safety before the bridge collapsed.

While amazingly no one was hurt, crews were left to deal with wreckage the likes of which they had never seen.

“I had traveled over that bridge many times and now a section is laying on top of a boat, and one tower is sitting there dangling,” said Foster. “It was amazing in one way, but in another way it was ‘Oh crap, what is going to happen next?’”

The following days and weeks were long. But Foster says dealing with the disaster brought out the best out in people.

“I will say that the county as a whole came together and worked hard.”

And there was, and still is, a sense of relief, because it could have been much, much worse.

“That time of morning you had people from Charles City, Henrico, over that way coming to the plants,” said Foster. “They usually did shift change at 7:00am, probably a lot of people had already crossed that bridge before it happened.”

In the aftermath of the collapse, an old ferry system was revived to take people and their vehicles across the river.

The Benjamin Harrison Bridge reopened in August 1978.