Jennifer Mansfield saw the photo that her uncle took while fishing off Kent Island, a snapshot that made a Chesapeake Bay Bridge support look like it was shifting.
So she posted it on Facebook Saturday night.
“I posted it because I hate bridges and thought to myself that it didn’t look right or safe,” she said. ”I had no intentions of it making any noise.”
Twelve hours later, the image had been shared more than 1,500 times. TV stations in Baltimore and on the Eastern Shore started asking questions.
The folks at the Maryland Transportation Authority saw it that morning but didn’t sound the all clear until more than 36 hours after Mansfield’s post.
Old news.
“We knew there was always that condition,” Executive Director Bruce Gartner said. “It looks odd. Some of us recall something like this ... six years ago.”
And a new bridge legend is born. It’s slipping!
Bodies in concrete. Planes beneath the spans. It can’t stand straight in a breeze.
No matter the facts, a good story about the bridge takes on a life of its own. Stories with facts? Even better.
That’s because the bridge looms so large in the collective imagination of Maryland, we’re willing to believe almost anything.
Parallel spans, crossing the bay together at quake-inducing heights. Wind warnings, low guardrails sometimes shot through with rust. Terror of all terrors, periodic two-way traffic with just a dotted yellow line to keep you safe.
Even the Francis Scott Key Bridge, made larger in our minds by the tragedy of its collapse, takes second rank to that 4.3-mile crossing between Sandy Point and Kent Island.
We used to tell our kids, as we crossed the bridge on the way to Ocean City, that no one had ever driven off it.
At least until 2008.
That was the year a truck driver died after swerving off the bridge to avoid another car. Five years later, a woman landed on the rocks below the bridge in another crash.
No wonder people avoid it.
“I crossed it as a kid when my grandmother would take us to the ocean or to visit family in Bethany Beach,” Mansfield said. “But, since I’ve become an adult, I do not cross that bridge at all. I go the long way through Delaware every time.”
The worries come to Steve Eskew, whose Kent Island Express Service drives squeamish motorists eastbound and westbound over it. He saw Mansfield’s photo, too.
“We’ve taken calls about it,” he said.
Of course they did.
Eskew wrote high school papers about the bridge, long before he and his wife took over a relative’s business. The internet regularly drives questions to its website, from E-ZPasses to mismatched construction elements.
“The information pipeline almost always finds its way to us,” he said.
He’s heard the tale about construction workers buried in the concrete, and a plaque somewhere in their memory.
Not true. But there is a memorial to dead steelworkers at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, although no one is buried in that bridge either.
Eskew has heard about helicopters and planes flying beneath the bridge, and swears he knows someone who knows someone.
That one is true.
In 1999, a pilot from Wilmington, Delaware, flew a seaplane between the two spans, slipping down to fly the 450-foot-wide gap separating them.
It wasn’t the first time.
The late John Lacouture once recalled that he and others testing the first Navy fighter jets at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in 1952 flew under the bridge before it opened.
Future astronaut Alan Shepard did them all shame.
“He was reported first for looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in his Banshee” fighter, Lacouture wrote in the journal Proceedings, three years after Shepard died in 1998. “Many of us had flown under the bridge, but he, as far as I know, was the first to loop it.”
It’s true, too, that the bridge sways, ever so slightly.
When thousands of people cross it during the annual Bay Bridge Run on Nov. 9, they’ll discover their feet don’t always land where they expect.
The bridge acts like a sail, and swaying with the wind dissipates the energy of a strong blow.
“Yeah, all bridges move,” Gartner said. “The ones that don’t are the ones you don’t want to be on.”
Dan Hutson didn’t know any of this when he was fishing Saturday morning next to Pier 69, just off Kent Island. He crossed the bridge almost daily during his career in Washington. Now retired, he spends more time under it than over.
Hutson snapped that photo as a curiosity, not because he was worried about collapse.
“It’s the only one like that,” he said.
Engineers and police at the bridge started hearing about it Sunday, as did the State Highway Administration. Just to be sure, inspectors checked it.
A construction error but not a significant one.
“It’s kind of an oddity of the original construction,” Gartner said. “It was the early ’70s, right?”
We live in the age of mistrust.
It’s social media, it’s technology. Navigation apps show the switch to temporary two-way traffic for beach traffic as “construction.”
“And people are saying, how are they doing that in the middle of the busy season?” Gartner said.
The message gets garbled, nuance lost in the noise.
The bridge is nearing the end of its lifespan. Don’t worry, it’s safe. Hurry up and build a new one, though.
A collision couldn’t knock it down, like the Key Bridge. Wait a minute. Yes, it could.
“Most never see the underside of bridges or the structures that hold them together,” said Mansfield, who kicked this thing off. “We just trust the officials in charge blindly.
“Well, most do.”
In little Maryland, the bridge is just too big to ignore.
“I cross the Bay Bridge 60 times a day,” said Eskew, the driver escort. “And, when I come home, I say, ‘Ahhhh, it’s nice to be here.’”
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