3/17/2023 0 Comments Webber falls ok bridge![]() ![]() “I know so many of us went through so much during that time,” Terry Angier with the Oklahoma Department of Transportation said. Although 20 years have passed, many still remember the pain of that day. Her niece was among the 14 people who were killed when an errant barge hit the pillars of the I-40 bridge pier near Webbers falls, causing a section of the bridge to collapse over the Arkansas River.īarlow said her niece was coming from a barrel racing competition in Fort Smith, Arkansas and was on her way to Stockdale, Texas when the incident happened. “The emotion of it still is within,” Barlow said. “I mean I sit here, I stand here, I come here, I look down there at that bridge and I say…no, but yes.it’s real,” Janette Barlow, aunt of one of the victims, said as she looked at the memorial.īarlow would give anything to have her niece, Gail Shanahan, here Monday. The memorial also honors the lives of those who survived. ![]() The Webbers Falls community held a memorial ceremony Monday to remember the lives of the people who lost their lives when the I-40 bridge collapsed 20 years ago after it was struck by a barge. May 26 marks 20 years since a tugboat hauling two barges slammed into the Interstate 40 (I-40) bridge over the Arkansas River.WEBBERS FALLS, Okla. The bridge collapse and the nearby town of Webbers Falls were the focus of international news coverage over that Memorial Day weekend. Love slammed into Pier 3 of the Interstate 40 bridge, just downstream of Webbers Falls at 7:45 in the morning. 500 feet of the bridge came crashing on to the barges below. A National Transportation Safety Board report shows he lost consciousness, possibly because of an abnormal heart rhythm, while he was piloting the ship. It is estimated Dedmon was unconscious for several minutes. When Dedmon woke up, he said he remembered seeing a vehicle plunging off the edge of the broken bridge and sounding an alarm. It is hard to find video from May 26, 2002, without seeing a silver Dodge Dakota that did not go off the edge. In an interview just a month before she died, Goldie Alley told Dave Davis she and her husband were on their way to Arkoma when the bridge collapsed in front of them. “Hey, we didn’t make it."ĭespite a broken back, broken rib and punctured lung between them, Max survived and preached regularly for another ten years. “And I said, 'We’ve got to do something.'” She remembers Max saying, “Goldie, we can pray." "We stood there and watched the traffic go in that water,” Alley recalled. The NTSB determined 11 vehicles with 19 people inside went off the bridge. In his decades of service in the Navy, as the current Verdigris police chief and as a firefighter in Muskogee, Jack Shackelford said he has still never seen anything like the bridge disaster.Ģ0 years later, Shackelford remembers the smallest details from those days he spent on the scene. Someone he could never forget is the youngest victim, 3-year-old Shea Johnson. It was hard because I had a daughter at that time that was about 3 years old and it kind of hit home" "I actually picked her up off the airboat and put her in the body bag and carried her up to where they had a temporary morgue set up," Shackleford said. Jewell Horne-Hall was Webbers Falls' Mayor in 2002. She lobbied for funding for a memorial and still organizes annual reunions. “He's with us and He strengthens us for whatever comes our way." She said when disasters happen, the town looks to a higher power. No one was ever charged with a crime for the I-40 bridge collapse.
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