07/28/2023
WAY BACK MACHINE:
Oil Tanker vs. Bridge in Chesapeake City, 1942
Spoiler alert: The bridge lost that battle. I mention this incident in one of my books, the second collection of "Eastern Shore Road Trips:"
"On a July afternoon in 1942, 10-year-old R. Harper Hazel was playing outside on his family’s nearby farm. 'I heard a sort of dull clanking sound coming from town. … Back then, I could always see the black lift bridge looming in the distance, outlined against the sky. My grandmother came outside and I pointed and yelled. She said, “My word, where’s the bridge?”'
That old bridge wasn't like the steep, swooping structure that folks drive over today when crossing the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal at Chesapeake City, Md. It was a vertical "lift bridge," set much lower, with a draw that opened for passing freighters by rising at its midsection straight up in the air to a height of 135 feet above the water. There were towers on either side of the bridge.
A passing oil tanker, Frans Klassen, crashed into the bridge on July 28 while being towed by a trio of tugs. I recently spent a little time with old newspapers from those days in search of more detailed eyewitness accounts of the accident. A few things I learned.
The crash could be heard five miles away, along the Elk River.
• The crash was followed by a series of explosions. This was wartime, so the tanker was armed with an anti-aircraft gun. Five shells blew one after another.
• No one in town knew whether the tanker was loaded with oil and what might happen if the whole thing blew. It turned out that the vessel was either mostly or entirely empty. Crew members were able to douse fires with hoses and fire extinguishers.
• One newspaper article: "Cries of men were heard as the mass of wreckage toppled, shearing twenty-four-inch sections of steel as though they were cheese and hurling one-hundred-pound pieces of steel over a broad area."
• Miraculously, no one died. Only one minor injury was reported. Two men had died in a similar accident two years before in St. George's, Del.
Patrolman N.P. Benson watched the scene from the shore.
• "As I heard the crash I looked up at the great tower on the south shore. A forty to fifty-foot section just broke off like some giant knife had sliced it."
• "It looked like [one of the tugs], which was caught between the abutment and the tanker, would be crushed to bits by the onrushing tank ship. How the skipper got out is a miracle. He must have given her all her engines had."
• Another tug on the starboard side of the tanker looked like it was in trouble, too. "But with a burst of speed she somehow got out from under."
Mrs. Marie Dean:
• "It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen -- particularly the sight of seamen scurrying to get away from the toppling, twisting steel."
• "I was just so scared. I just turned and ran. ... I never want to experience anything like that again."
The canal would re-open to traffic in one short week, but it would take seven long years for a new replacement bridge to open. That's seven years of drivers having a choice of short ferry ride (but often with long lines waiting to board) or a detour over to St. George's, Del. That replacement bridge is the one we drive over nowadays.
