The Sunshine Skyway Bridge Disaster | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror

The image of that car stopped inches short of the gaping void is absolutely heart-stopping.

The actual distress call to the coast guard can be found on YouTube. It's actually pretty chilling. When the captain says, "Stop all the traffic on the Skyway Bridge!" He's literally yelling it, as he had just witnessed a pickup truck drive off the fallen span and bounce off the deck of Summit Venture. The driver, Wesley Macintire, miraculously survived.

My husband was on the bridge when this occurred. He was picking up a large commercial motor and was coming back to the East coast. Luckily for him when the incident occurred traffic was able to come to a halt. All vehicles were told they would have to turn around by law enforcement. Hubby was driving a semi and no way to just turn around. The bridge had to be cleared so he could back it up. He said that was scary too!

My grandparents died in this accident (smith, NJ) orphaning my mother. She doesn’t talk about it much but we’re glad you covered it. Keeping the memory alive. Edit: it’s pretty crazy this showed up in my recommendations too. I’ve never watched this channel or searched for info on it. I found this purely by algorithm. 0.0

It's at least refreshing to hear a captain being in an incident and immediately thinking about the risk to lives rather than covering their ass.

The fear of being completely helpless as you watch your life come to an end is the stuff of nightmares. RIP to all those who perished. 😢

My Mother and Father were Paramedics who worked this call. My mother told me about it when I was a teen in the 90’s. I remember her crying and telling me how useless they felt as all they could do was stand by and watch them recover the bodies. It was a terrible tragedy.

I have vivid memories of riding over the original bridge as a child. I would lay in the back of the station wagon, looking up at the huge Iron pillars above us as we passed under them. It seemed almost unbelievable when it collapsed. I was almost 7 years old and lived in St. Petersburg, when the Skyway was struck. I remember that morning vividly. My mother always put my older brother on the high school bus then, woke my brother and I to get us ready. That morning, when she put my brother on his bus, the weather was fine. By the time she woke us, 15 minutes later, the TV was issuing tornado warnings & this torrential storm had come from out of nowhere. It was the first time I ever saw my mother scared and upset. She told me she had a gut feeling something bad was gonna happen. She was calling the bus compound and my older brothers school frantic to make sure his bus arrived safely at school. This storm was so sudden and so severe that she had decided to keep my other brother and I home. We were told to sit on the couch while she made the calls to search for my brother's bus. I remember looking out the front window, the yard was flooding, the wind was grabbing garbage cans and debri. It was literally worse than the lower grade hurricanes I saw later in life. I remember thinking, I've never seen a storm like this before. Suddenly, the TV made an emergency announcement, "The Sunshine Skyway has just been struck by a barge!" My mothers premonition was right, but, it wasn't about my brother's bus, he made it to school safely. I stayed home that day while the news slowly informed us of what had actually occurred. It showed the pictures of this bridge I thought was indestructible, just torn in half. It was the first time I had witnessed mass grief that lasted for days. The stores were so weirdly quiet. There was either complete silence or quiet talk amongst strangers about the Skyway. The remaining span was turned into 2 way traffic across the bridge. My father drove the family over it to see the other spans destruction. It taught me nothing is indestructible no matter how strong it may seem. I am almost 50 years old and this memory is vivid like yesterday. I have a special connection to this bridge because of it. My heart goes out to everyone who lost their lives that day.

Probably my favourite disaster channel along with Plainly Difficult. I like it how you don't seem to try to make things dramatic, it's just a level voice all the way through.

For those who might be curious - this bridge connects the St. Petersburg (Pinellas County) area with the Manatee County area, and there are still remnants of the old bridge used today as fishing piers on either side of where they used to connect. Thank you for telling this story! I've been over this bridge hundreds of times having grown up in Bradenton, and I've heard countless stories of what happened but never heard such an all-encompassing version of the entirety of the events.

I have a weird bridge phobia and this is of no help at all. How terrifying for those people, and devastating for their loved ones.

I remember first hearing about this when my parents took my brother and I to Florida in the early 1980's. The story I heard was the driver who first noticed something wrong when the car far in front of him (about 100+ feet) just disappeared. I can't even imagine just driving along in the fog, not thinking about anything other than getting home, and then going into a freefall into grey nothingness.

The fog around the Skyway is still scary as hell. I was taking my dad to the airport one time, and the fog just was suddenly there. It made me so anxious that I couldn't drive back across the Skyway to go home.

So happy that this channel is almost at 1 million subscribers. So well deserved - no fluff, all content. What a great creator

My big brother was flew into Tampa-St Pete that morning;heading to see my other brother who was in the hospital in Venice clinging to life. This horrible tragedy happened a few hours before he was to cross it and it was before cell phones. We saw it on the news but heard nothing from him for hours and the terror for all reasons was indescribable. He finally arrived (having seen the wreckage and felt the horrors)-we got him to the hospital in time for him to be at my brother’s side. He passed away 2 hours later. Somehow he held on even though he was in a coma(despite the Bridge tragedy)so that my big brother could say goodbye. I will never forget that day worrying about losing two brothers..

Florida is my home state. As a teenager I crossed the old Sunshine Skyway bridge both going to and returning from Sarasota. I went across this bridge again after the new expansion was installed. The newer span is beautiful. Who ever designed it did a great job. Thank you for this documentary on our Sunshine Skyway bridge. It was very informative.

As a Tampa native and child of the 70s, this is still the first disaster that's embedded in my mind. The footage of the bus being craned out of the water is as vivid a memory to me as the plane hitting the second tower.

The lesson from this incident, as well as the 1975 Tasman Bridge disaster, is that if you see someone going the wrong way on a bridge waving at you, you should stop.

My grand father was a rescue diver on this mission. He was never the same after recovering people out of the water.

I was a junior in high school when this happened. I knew the captain that hit the bridge. He was one of the kindest men I have ever known. This tragedy gutted him. My father was a harbor pilot and the president of the association at that time. Before that he was a captain on the Great Lakes and knew many of the men that went down with the Edmund Fitzgerald. RIP