'Very surreal, tragic time': ODOT spokeswoman remembers 2002 Webbers Falls bridge collapse

Terri Angier knew how to respond to emergency situations.

In 2002, Angier had worked for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation for 12 years when her telephone rang on a Sunday before church.

That morning it was Director Gary Ridley. The Interstate 40 bridge at Webbers Falls, about 30 miles west of Fort Smith had been struck by a barge and vehicles had plummeted into the rushing Arkansas River waters below.

Angier recalls packing a suitcase before she hung up the telephone.

A few hours later she would be by the bank of the river. Fourteen people had died. There were 11 people injured and rescued.

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In the brown water of the river, she saw a child's diaper floating on the surface.

She recalls the telephone call.

"I was gathering my stuff and getting ready for church and drinking my coffee and the phone rang. And it was the director, Gary Ridley. And he always talked very fast," Angier recalled. "I was used to getting calls from over the weekend, sometimes little emergencies. But he was speaking as fast as I'd ever heard him because he had a lot of other calls to make."

He said there was a crisis. Angier was the second or third call he made. A bridge lost a 600-foot portion. The bridge over the McClelland-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System would be the location of search and rescue efforts. Interstate traffic on a major east/west corridor of the nation was shut down. People were at area lakes and resorts for Memorial Day. The word would have to get out about the detours and interstate travel of course, but then there was also the multiple loss of life involved. She would be needed on scene.

"I had done enough of these. And this one obviously was one of our most tragic. So I knew what this meant. I started packing as he's talking to me I'm packing because I know I'm going to be at Webbers Falls for a while."

After hanging up, Angier's telephone "blew up" with media calls about what was happening.

Radio reports filled regional airwaves and then national news within hours as TV crews and reporters headed toward Webbers Falls.

The eastern part of Oklahoma is a region in the state where there is marine traffic that crosses under a bridge or roadway as found along the McClelland Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System in Sequoyah County where the swift rushing currents span a distance of nearly 300 yards from bank to bank east of Sallisaw at the Muskogee County line. Rivers in other parts of the state are not wide or deep enough for a barge to travel. A barge had never knocked out a major interstate before in Oklahoma.

"It was a very, very surreal, tragic time for me," Angier recalled a few weeks from the 20th anniversary of the disaster as she worked in the ODOT media relations office. "I have done many crises. When you work in transportation as long as I have as a spokesperson you deal with many crises. This one had a different look to it with the tragedy involved. Because I knew when I got the call and he (Ridley) knew there were a lot of lives lost."

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Interstate 40 crosses the Arkansas River about 30 miles west of Fort Smith. A family of three, the Johnsons, with a 3-year-old girl from Lavaca were on their way to the Tulsa Zoo when they approached the portion of the bridge that was missing. It was raining, and the bridge rises to a crest over the middle of the river, making it too hard to see the pavement had disappeared. They plunged into the swift currents of the river below.

Others from across the country lost their lives, and the death toll would be 14 people and 11 injured.

One of the first details Angier noticed after arriving at the river was a diaper floating in the water. The work to be done immediately involved alerting the public and motorists about what had happened to the bridge. It was a bridge where more than 21,000 vehicles cross each day. And over a Memorial Day weekend the traffic would normally increase by 30%, Angier said.

"On-site at Webbers Falls, my attention was immediately first of all traffic. How were we going to get this information out to people that there is no I-40," Angier said.

It was a holiday weekend, too.

"We were looking at having 30,000 cars, having to get this information out to them, many of whom were at the lake and they weren't really necessarily watching TV or listening to the news. So that was our challenge. That was our big challenge," Anger said.

She said there were questions about whether the bridge had been deficient or there had been structural problems. The barge operator had suffered a medical event before the barge hit the bridge columns and the span of it collapsed.

Hundreds of reporters and photographers from media outlets nationwide arrived at Webbers Falls. Memorial Day was taking on a new meaning quickly as news spread of those who had died. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol closed the area and the investigation into what happened began.

"There were a lot of attacks on the bridge. We knew at the time that the bridge had been in great shape and the mistake was on the part of the operator, the towboat operator. But I was being very, very careful to be sensitive to the families who had lost lives. And at times it was a balance of how do I answer these questions, defend the reputation of the department but at the same time not come across as insensitive to the families."

Interstate 40 is a major east/west traffic artery in the center of the United States. Memorial Day is the first holiday weekend of the summer season, Angier said.

The Arkansas River Valley in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma depends on Interstate 40 commerce, and there were no good detour routes. A massive rebuilding job was ahead for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation.

As Angier recalled the days after the tragedy that followed, she spoke with a photo of a transportation department truck driving through the white ribbon over the new bridgework once it was finished.

Angier said Ridley "immediately went to work to find creative ways to expedite the work and amassed an amazing group of people on the site. Mobile homes were set up for offices.

"It was a major feat for us to be able to do this," Angier said.

There were countless heroes in the recovery efforts.

One ODOT worker remembered for his response to the bridge disaster was Hoppy Dean Lockhart. A memorial marker honors him at the Oklahoma Tourism rest area, just west of Fort Smith off westbound I-40.

Tina Cassady, of Sallisaw, was Hoppy Lockhart's step-daughter. She was the administrative assistant for the ODOT Sequoyah County maintenance division for Sallisaw Interstate 40. Lockhart was the superintendent for maintenance for the bridge part of McClellan-Kerr Navigation System on the Arkansas River.

"I remember I was sitting on my couch in the living room and I got a call from Hoppy that said the I-40 bridge had been hit and cars had fallen into the river," Cassady said.

Cassady said she became ill shortly afterward. She remembers bass fishermen during the tournament looking for volunteers for people to help stop traffic right after the barge hit the bridge.

"It was really unbelievable. The workers were there so quick because we respond so quickly to accidents. That is a pretty horrific thing to go on. And many of the workers saw what was going on right afterward, the bodies," Cassady said.

She said the experience took its toll on him, but he loved working for ODOT, and he was proud of his career.

Angier said "Hoppy Lockhart is one of those names that to ODOT means so much. He's an absolute representative of the dedication oftentimes we see with workers in the field. He was probably the first call the highway patrol made because he was the maintenance superintendent and that is the first line of defense for emergencies," Angier said.

"Those guys worked so hard for so long for 64 days nonstop. They really worked around the clock. Hoppy is the epitome of what you would know during an emergency as someone you would want to lean on."

Not long after the bridge was rebuilt, Lockhart died of a heart complication.

"Is that attributable to some of the stress of the type of work he was involved in? We will never know but a lot of people wondered about that," Angier said.

The work was expected to be completed in 64 days. It was done in 47 days. There was a $6,000 an hour incentive for the contractor to finish early. Jensen Construction was there first and then Gilbert Central Construction was awarded the bridge replacement job. The bridge reopened on July 29, 2002.

"Partnership of everyone, the engineering community, the locals, the Mayor Jewell Horne (Webbers Falls) she did so much in the background that made it easy for us to do our job," Angier said.

The detour routes for traffic added about 30 to 60 miles out of the way and had 49 deficient bridges with sudden interstate traffic. Crews had to work on the bridges at night while there was less traffic.

The bridge project was about $15 million. The work on the other bridges on the detour routes was about $15 million, she said.

Terri Angier is the special assistant to the Secretary of Transportation of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. She has served as media relations director for ODOT and she has also taught media relations courses as an adjunct faculty instructor at the University of Central Oklahoma.

This article originally appeared on Fort Smith Times Record: ODOT spokeswoman recalls 2002 Webbers Falls bridge collapse