DUNDALK, Md. — A boom. A rattle. A shake.
That’s how people who live in Turner Station describe what they heard and felt around 1:30 Tuesday morning when a cargo ship ran into the Key Bridge, and the bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River.
The Turner Station neighborhood in Dundalk sits on a peninsula at the foot of the Key Bridge. Mt. Olive Baptist Church sits at the tip of the peninsula, about 500 feet from where the bridge was.
“The community is shaken up,” Mt. Olive’s pastor, Rev. Rashad Singletary, said Tuesday morning.
“It was like a boom and a vibration,” says Demond Bradford, who lives near the entry to the neighborhood. “It actually set my dogs off, and that’s why I woke up.”
Bradford is the fourth generation of his family to live in Turner Station, and his home is about a seven-minute walk to the bridge, he says. The Key Bridge has been there his entire life.
“It’s crazy to me because I never thought the bridge would fall,” he says.
Standing outside of his grandmother’s house on the 700 block of New Pittsburg Street, Bradford says when they heard the noise, his mother called to check on his grandmother and uncle, who live closest to the bridge.
“My uncle was in the Army, and he served in Afghanistan, so he said he thought it was a bomb,” Bradford says.
The bridge’s shadow has loomed over the neighborhood since it was built 50 years ago. Now, all you see is open air in the backyard of Bradford’s grandmother, Veronica McCullough.
“I heard something like it was crumbling and hitting against things,” she says.
At first, McCullough thought it was bad weather and assumed high winds had blown a tree down, she says. But the noise grew.
“I was laying in bed thinking to myself, what is all that noise?” she says. “It was just like crunching, twisting. That part I could hear really well. I had no idea it was the actual bridge.”
McCullough watched the bridge being built and says she knew then that the bridge would collapse one day.
“I used to tell my mother that one day, this bridge is gonna fall,” she says. “And she said, ‘Why do you say that?’ I said, I just have a feeling, that feeling.”
McCullough says it was “divine intervention” that the bridge came down when it came down – overnight, offseason, with little traffic.
“I feel it happened for a reason and saved a lot of lives,” she says. “It could have been worse if it had been at rush hour time or later in the season when people are going to the beach. I think God intervened.”
