John Delach

John Delach

April 2024

Number 510

I awakened on Wednesday, March 27, 2024 to the news that earlier that morning, the MV Dali, a large container ship outbound from its terminal in Baltimore had struck the Francis Scott Keys Bridge. Seemingly, the force of the strike was sufficient to collapse the entire 1.6-mile-long main truss sections that spanned the channels leading into the port in a manner of seconds.

This catastrophe closed the port to all marine traffic and other maritime activity for the foreseeable future until the wreckage that once was the bridge and the damaged Dali could be   removed. The bridge, itself, can’t be rebuilt and must be replaced by a more modern and safer span than this 1974 relic.

The only good news – the death toll at this early hour was limited to four of the six workmen repairing the roadway.

 But that’s still a developing story for another time.

Today, I want to share with you a different ship versus bridge story. Soon after the disaster became a national headline that morning, I heard from two old business friends, Louise Varnas and Geoff Jones,  who took to the internet to share their recollections of this bizarre incident that we all remembered from 1977.

That bridge was named after Benjamin Harrison, a past Governor of Virginia and the father / grandfather of two Presidents. It was a vertical lift draw bridge that spanned the James River carrying vehicle traffic between Hopewell and Richmond, Virginia.

The ship was a war-built T-2 tanker, converted to a bulk carrier and renamed the Marine Floridian by its new owner, Maritime Transport Lines, or (MTL)  MTL was a client of Marsh & McLennan, our employer and Louise and I were familiar with their operations. Geoff worked for one of the insurers responsible for settling the loss.

The Marine Floridian finished unloading its cargo of chemicals into the tanks at the Allied Chemical Plant in Hopewell in the early morning of February 24, 1977. Fredrick Luke, the James River pilot boarded his charge on time and set sail down river about 6:30 am.

As the ship approached the bridge, the Floridian experienced steering malfunctions. Ultimately, the National Transportation Safety Board determined the cause was an electrical failure that led to a loss of power to the steering motor.

Mr. Lake, the pilot, radioed a Mayday, ordered the engine into reverse, dropped both anchors and alerted the bridge tender, Henry C. Frazier, that he had lost control of the ship.

Frazier’s station was on the top of one of the two towers that could lift and lower the main deck of the bridge. He realized that his best chance for survival was to stay at his station. He told the Coast Guard Board of Inquiry that he remained in the control house atop the north tower when the ship struck the bridge. “For a while, it looked like I was going to eat breakfast off the captain’s table.”

The out-of-control Marine Floridian missed the main channel and struck the bridge to the left of  the center. That section was high enough for the body of the bulk carrier to pass underneath until it reached the superstructure. At that point, the voyage of the Marine Floridian came to a halt, but not without a souvenir, a 241-foot section of the bridge that fell onto the main deck of the ship.

The vertical lift’s main section still remained in its open position, but precariously so. Frazier, the bridge tender, made it out of this office and away from the bridge. Lucky for him, as the following day, the central span and the entire northern tower dropped into the river.

Reconstruction of the bridge took 20 months and cost $9.5 million. The bridge reopened to traffic in the fall of 1978.

Someone out there whose identity has been lost to history, produced a tee-shirt that for a short while became a collector’s iitem:

The front and back had images of the Marine Floridian and the bridge:

On the front, it said: “I was there when the ship hit the bridge,

and on the back: “and when the bridge hit the ship.”