Pinellas County, Florida -- The sounds and images are still so disturbing, all these years later. The captain's frantic mayday call. The bridge skeleton, mangled, with a horrifying open gap over the water. The wreckage of a bus being hoisted from Tampa Bay.
This weekend marks 35 years since a ship slammed into the base of the original Sunshine Skyway Bridge in a rainstorm, sending the bridge's center section collapsing into Tampa Bay.
Thirty-five people lost their lives in cars, trucks, and a Greyhound bus.
There has never been a memorial to those people. Until now.
A new memorial commemorating the Skyway Bridge disaster's victims will be unveiled Saturday morning.
Family members from as far away as California are expected to gather at the new Skyway Bridge's north rest area to dedicate the monument at 11 a.m.
Emotions will flood back as the group comes together around the four-foot granite monument, which sits along the edge of Tampa Bay.
Enormous tanker ships, like the one that took down the original bridge, move silently in the distance.
Journalist and author Bill DeYoung told me he was writing a book about the Skyway Bridge collapse when he realized there was no monument anywhere to the victims of one of the worst tragedies in the history of the Bay area. So he organized an effort to create one.
"The entire thing was funded by private donations. All we did was say, 'We're trying to raise money to put this up. And they rallied around it," DeYoung told me. "It took about 30 days. That's all it took."
When it's revealed, the marker will have the names of the 35 victims and an engraving of the original Skyway Bridge, which was a pair of side-by-side bridge spans made out of steel frames akin to an Erector Set toy.
On May 9, 1980, in an awful storm, the tanker Summit Venture smashed into one of the concrete supports for the southbound span. Tons of steel and vehicles came down in seconds, in a cascade of cars and metal carnage.
Tammie Pryor King was 22 when she rushed to the shattered bridge from St. Pete to look for her father, James, who had been taking the Skyway to work in Manatee County.
"We expected to find maybe him, helping others. We had hoped that we would find him. But, instead, we found his briefcase," King remembered. James Pryor was 43.
"At a very young age, I learned to appreciate life and respect, daily, my life."
The new, graceful and iconic Sunshine Skyway Bridge opened in 1987, incorporating lessons learned from the disaster seven years earlier. Protective barriers called "dolphins" sit out in the water, to stop ships from hitting the bridge itself.
Even the way the shipping channel passes below the Skyway was changed, so captains would have an easier time aligning their ships to pass under the bridge.
