… South Braddock Avenue at Forbes Avenue
… South Braddock Avenue at Forbes Avenue.
Check for an accident there.
Caller reporting a vehicle off the bridge. Said the bridge gave out. Bad connection.
The female was screaming on the line.
Tyrone Perry eased his pickup through the empty streets of Pittsburgh’s East End, headlights cutting through the predawn darkness. Flecks of light snow speckled the air as music from an R&B CD drifted through the Ford F-150’s speakers. Tyrone was partial to the smooth vibes of musicians like Isaac Hayes and the Isley Brothers. Outside, the temperature hovered in the upper 20s.
Tyrone’s wife, Velva, sat beside him dressed in black from head to toe. She took pains to color coordinate, right down to her black duffel bag.
Stereo humming, the truck wound through Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar, Homewood and Point Breeze. Down Oberlin Street, over to Frankstown Road and then to Braddock Avenue before turning on Forbes Avenue toward Downtown.
It was shortly before 6:40 a.m. on Jan. 28, 2022, minutes away from one of the worst infrastructure disasters in Pittsburgh history — the collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge.
Its abrupt failure dumped a half-dozen vehicles into a wooded gorge 100 feet below and transformed a pastoral scene into a rubble-strewn landscape. Strangers to each other, the victims — among them a set of grandparents, a dentist, a bus driver and a recent college graduate — miraculously emerged from the woods. Survivors all, they now share a terrifying experience that stunned a city, drew the attention of a nation’s president and immediately became etched into Pittsburgh history.
Tyrone and Velva were traveling to the city’s New Homestead neighborhood, tucked just below an oxbow bend in the Monongahela River. Tyrone’s mother lived there. She has Alzheimer’s, and Velva was going to care for her.
Velva, named partly because her hair as a baby looked like velvet, had packed her laptop and some clothes for an overnight stay.
Tyrone hung a right onto Forbes. Velva peered down at her phone, passing the time playing Candy Crush as the pavement rolled by. The glowing screen lit the tidy cabin, neat and clean, just the way Tyrone liked it. The pickup, fire-engine red, was his baby.
A daughter of the Hill District and Homewood, Velva had driven on Forbes plenty of times. But it had never occurred to her that right there, at that corner of Frick Park, she was actually traveling on a bridge crossing a deep ravine roughly 10 stories above Nine Mile Run.
Few people knew the 447-foot-long span by its proper name; its origins have been lost to history. Connecting Squirrel Hill to Regent Square, Point Breeze and Wilkinsburg, the Fern Hollow Bridge straddled property owned more than a century earlier by Gilded Age industrialist Henry Clay Frick, whose mansion, Clayton, still sits nearby.
Just as the pickup and a red Port Authority bus heading in the opposite direction passed each other, Velva heard a terrible sound.
BANG!
It was like the twisted metal-on-metal crunch of a car crash. She thought they had been hit.
And then Velva Perry went flying, still belted into the front passenger seat of the pickup as it rode a collapsing bridge deck down, down, down into the darkness of Fern Hollow.
“The President has been briefed on the bridge collapse in Pittsburgh, and the President called both Governor Wolf and Mayor Gainey prior to departure to Pittsburgh.”
President Joe Biden was already scheduled to be in Pittsburgh that morning.
Among other things, he planned to tout a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package recently passed by Congress that represented a core initiative of his administration.
America’s skeleton — the roads, tunnels and bridges critical to commerce, tourism and everyday life — were crumbling from coast to coast. The president hoped to reinvigorate those old bones by targeting aid to the country’s long-neglected infrastructure.
Pennsylvania’s nearly 23,000 bridges certainly needed a lift. Almost 15% were in “poor’ condition — more than double the national average of decrepit spans. A 2018 report card by civil engineers rated the state’s bridges a woeful D+.
The Fern Hollow Bridge had long drawn a poor rating. No major improvements were undertaken, however, to bump the span’s condition up a notch on the national bridge rating system.
In the eyes of inspectors, the Fern Hollow Bridge could still function despite being considered “structurally deficient” — a term that experts say does not mean in danger of failure or inherently unsafe.
It had been years since the nation’s last major bridge disaster. Collapses among the country’s more than 600,000 spans are exceedingly rare; they draw investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, the small independent federal agency charged with probing plane, train, boat, highway and pipeline accidents.
The first major bridge disaster it investigated happened in December 1967, just months after the board formed, when the Silver Bridge gave way in Point Pleasant, W.Va., home to the fictional paranormal entity known as the Mothman. Witnesses heard a noise like a gunshot. It took less than 20 seconds for a 1,460-foot section to crumple, folding like a deck of cards, according to an account by the West Virginia Department of Transportation. In the chaos and wreckage, 46 people were killed as 32 vehicles tumbled into the Ohio River far below.
The calamity eventually led to the creation of national bridge inspection standards.
Forty years later, in the nation’s most high-profile bridge failure of the Generation Z era, the heavily traveled I-35W Highway Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed during the evening rush hour, sending 111 vehicles plunging more than 100 feet into the Mississippi River. Fourteen people lost their lives; 145 were injured.
In 2018, a pedestrian bridge in Miami gave out, crushing eight vehicles, killing six people and injuring 10.
Pittsburgh would be next.
Biden’s Jan. 28 schedule called for him to stop by Carnegie Mellon University’s Mill 19 research and development center in Hazelwood, in part to discuss infrastructure.
But when the Fern Hollow Bridge fractured nearly an hour before sunrise, breaking into warped slabs of concrete and twisted rebar jutting up from a snowy gorge, his plans changed.
The irony could not be missed: On the very day Biden was visiting Pittsburgh, a critical piece of infrastructure in that city — a bridge along a major thoroughfare that daily carried 14,000 vehicles — failed.
Not only would the catastrophe draw an impromptu visit from the president, it also would play on TV screens across the nation and lead to an urgent top-to-bottom review of the 147 spans owned by the City of Pittsburgh.
By the time Air Force One got underway at 11:30 a.m. from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, bound for Allegheny County Airport, Biden had already spoken to Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, then-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey.
For Gainey, inaugurated just 25 days earlier, the disaster marked his first crisis as Pittsburgh’s leader.
… Forbes Avenue and South Braddock.
… Forbes and South Braddock.
It’s not clear what’s happening. We could either have a partial bridge collapse, the bridge that goes over Frick Park, or we got a vehicle that wrecked off of the bridge and fell approximately 100 feet into Frick Park, so we’re not 100 percent sure.
We are getting multiple calls that part of the bridge may have collapsed, so the first unit on the scene please give me a sitrep …
It was supposed to be Daryl Luciani’s day off.
The 59-year-old bus driver had already worked Sunday through Thursday that week. But not one to idle, he had decided to snag an extra shift.
Luciani had spent 30 “grueling” years driving a truck and making deliveries for Wonder Bread. After a hip replacement in 2012, he learned to drive a bus for Mid Mon Valley Transit Authority and switched to Port Authority, now renamed Pittsburgh Regional Transit, the next year. The money was good, and he loved to drive.
In July, six months before their lives would be derailed, Luciani and his wife, Karen, made a big decision: They bought an eye-catching blue and purple Victorian house in West Newton. The house, more than a century old, promised to keep them busy.
With seven grown children between them from previous marriages, the Lucianis suddenly had a new — and expensive — dependent. Still, refurbishing the house would be a labor of love.
Come January, Luciani planned to “hit the overtime hard.” But things started on a sour note. Just days into the new year, Luciani contracted covid and was off work for more than a week. Then he had to pass on the first available overtime day so he could take Karen to the doctor.
Finally, on Friday, Jan. 28, he was clear to pull an extra shift.
That morning, Luciani followed his workday ritual. Wake up around 3 a.m., brew a pot of coffee, fill a metal travel mug and thermos, and set out for the half-hour trek to the transit agency’s garage in West Mifflin, a hub for more than two dozen bus routes. Karen had packed him a sandwich, tuna on Italian bread, and left it for him in a blue Giant Eagle bag.
Nosing his burgundy Subaru Legacy through the borough, a scenic spot for cyclists along the Great Allegheny Passage bike trail, he crossed the West Newton Bridge over the Youghiogheny River, noting the weather.
Luciani didn’t like driving buses in the snow. One bad experience during the winter of 2020 had rattled him, and he wasn’t eager to get in a bind again on some steep Pittsburgh hill.
Luciani pulled in at the depot just before 4 a.m. Drivers often showed up at that hour looking for premium pay.
The dispatcher told Luciani not to get comfortable and soon handed him paperwork for his route: 61B Braddock-Swissvale.
The route’s normal driver had taken the day off. His fill-in was off, too. So it fell to Luciani.
Wearing a blue, button-down Port Authority shirt and black zip-up transit agency cardigan with his ID number on the breast, Luciani went to the bus, parked outside and idling.
The bus was a 2013 model — just like Luciani. He had started his job at Port Authority that same year, on 11-12-13 to be precise. It was a 60-foot-long New Flyer articulated bus, the kind that looks like two halves joined by an accordion.
Twenty feet longer than a regular bus, it might appear more daunting to drive, but some operators prefer it for its tighter turning radius. Luciani didn’t like how the “artic” handled in the snow, though. Plus, he knew it would be too much bus for the few passengers he expected that morning.
Luciani could have asked to switch to a regular bus. He was about to request a swap — when something told him not to.
To this day, he and Karen believe that being on a larger bus when the bridge failed helped keep him and his passengers alive.
Luciani performed his pre-check and then climbed behind the wheel.
At 4:52 a.m., just as Velva Perry was stirring in her second-story apartment, Luciani swung Bus No. 3309 out of the garage and into destiny.
There wasn’t much traffic. Schools had already called for a two-hour delay because of the weather, removing school buses, students and parents from routes that normally would have jammed them all onto the Fern Hollow Bridge. Among those who might have been right behind the Perrys: their daughter Angel and her 18-year-old twin girls, who in clear weather might have been on their way to Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill.
A short time after the school notification, Port Authority warned its drivers about slick roads. Light snow had been coming down since about 3 a.m., falling steadily enough to coat the wooded hillsides of Frick Park.
Luciani had already crossed the Fern Hollow Bridge once that morning, heading inbound. Just like Velva Perry, Luciani — raised in Monessen — never realized he was high over Frick Park on that stretch of Forbes.
When he reached the span on the outbound portion of his route, only two early-bird passengers kept him company: Matthew Evans and Anna Nichols. They sat toward the front.
At 6:40 a.m., as the Perrys reached Fern Hollow, Luciani did, too. In moments, a bridge that had stood for half a century would come crashing down around them.
All right, yeah, this whole bridge collapsed.
We’ve got families out here. We’re gonna walk up from here.
We just need another unit on the other side of Forbes and Braddock to block that off. All the power’s out here and obviously there’s a lot of rubble coming from somewhere.
No one screamed as the bridge gave out. Not Velva. Not Tyrone, who in his youth was with the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg. Not the bus driver or his passengers.
For 121 years, a bridge had stood in that spot along Forbes Avenue. Opening in 1901, the original span lasted until 1971 — a year after Velva graduated from Allderdice — when officials shut it down and razed it because of severe deterioration.
A $1.2 million remake took time, with the new “K frame” bridge opening in 1973. The next year, the American Institute of Steel Construction chose it as one of the most beautiful new bridges in the nation. The annual compendium of winners featured a glamor shot of its underside.
“This very handsome bridge blends well into its rustic setting,” jurors wrote. “The sloping piers and their relationship to the hillsides give the entire structure a sense of logic and beauty.”
Over time, though, the bridge degraded. Parts corroded. Pieces rusted through. Sections leaked. Holes opened on its legs. Year after year, starting in 2011, inspectors slapped it with a poor rating.
Kostas Papakonstantinou, a Penn State University engineering professor, described it this way: If a new bridge is like a 20-something professional athlete, the collapsed bridge was like someone in their late 60s with a pre-existing condition.
Nearly a half-century after traffic started flowing over it, the snow-slicked bridge was snapping apart, its four lanes tearing into ugly, jagged pieces that plummeted into the ravine.
There had been a bang and an impact, as if something had struck the pickup. Then the Perrys were falling.
To Velva, it felt like the truck kept rushing down through the blackness.
“Why haven’t we stopped?” Velva wondered aloud.
“The bridge fell,” answered Tyrone.
It wasn’t like the abrupt, stomach-churning dip of a roller coaster or the white-knuckling shock of airplane turbulence. It was more like a visceral bodily confusion — perpetual motion that wasn’t ending.
“It was just that we hadn’t stopped. We just kept going, so there was no connection for me that we were plunging down,” Velva would later recall.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” she said over and over.
Then, a thunderous jolt. The pickup hit bottom. Velva’s phone went flying, her glasses, too.
She popped up in her seat. The belt caught her. The pickup had landed atop a broken slab of the bridge, right side up and settling on all four wheels in the middle of the Frick Park woods.
Velva spotted a car to her right. And looking through the windshield, she saw another car straight ahead.
It was shooting toward her.
Port Authority dispatch. I have Bus 3309 that’s on that bridge with several passengers inside. He is confirming the bridge has collapsed.
With sunup still nearly an hour away, Luciani’s bus, all 22 tons of it, had trundled partly across the bridge when he realized that something wasn’t right.
Suddenly, he felt like he was in free fall, with no control. Then Luciani was sliding down a hill, bouncing and banging along. He remembers it was dark, something he considers a blessing. He couldn’t see a thing. To Luciani, it seemed as if he were riding the whole length of the bridge downward.
Seven video cameras on the bus — standard equipment — were whirring as the vehicle crossed the span.
One pointed backward, recording grainy footage of the gap left where the west end of the bridge had broken off the abutment moments earlier. The forward-facing camera captured an ominous dark line in front of the bus — what federal investigators called an “opening expansion joint.”
When the plunge ended, Luciani felt disoriented.
The bus sat at a sharp angle, facing the sky as if it were about to drive into space. Luciani jammed his foot on the brake pedal and “pulled the pin” — slang for setting the air brake to keep the bus from rolling. He didn’t realize that he wasn’t going anywhere. A big slab of buckled concrete at the rear of the bus was blocking it.
Luciani opened his window. He heard a whooshing sound, like a plane taking off. He checked his rearview mirror. The two passengers looked OK. Evans approached and asked what happened.
“The bridge collapsed,” Luciani replied.
He called the transit agency’s traffic control room and reported the situation. The laughable response, as he recalls it: Try to back the bus out.
He dialed his wife. It was quick — “Just know that I love you,” he said — and then hung up so he could call the traffic center again.
Once he got his bearings, Luciani looked up at the new gap in Forbes Avenue.
“Boy,” he thought, “I hope no one drives off this.”
As if on cue, the headlights of a car high above cut through the blackness.
Luciani watched in horror as a car soared over the embankment.
“I can see other vehicles on North Braddock. I’m on the other side of the bridge … From my understanding there’s people beneath it.”
“OK, that’s copy.”
“Yeah … multiple vehicles that collapsed with the bridge.”
“Unfortunately, I think so. There is a bus that went over as well?”
“I can’t see to confirm that but I do see lights down there, multiple vehicles, that’s affirmative.”
“OK, received.”
Clinton Runco was turning onto Forbes, planning the day’s dental appointments over the phone with his office manager, when his Toyota Corolla suddenly careened into the black hole of Fern Hollow.
“Oh my God, what’s happening?” the dentist cried over the Bluetooth connection.
His perplexed employee had no idea what was going on.
The Corolla started tumbling end over end over end. Somewhere below, Luciani watched.
For more than 30 years, Runco had followed the same route along the Parkway East from his home in the eastern suburbs to his Squirrel Hill dental practice. Sometimes he would pull off before the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, ride up Braddock and cross the bridge.
This time, when he made the left onto Forbes, he fell into pandemonium.
Runco didn’t have time to process things, whether the bridge was there or gone or collapsing. All he knew was that his car was flipping uncontrollably into the void.
Had it been any other day of the week, Runco might not have been caught in the collapse.
But Fridays were his early days. He started at 8, an hour earlier than usual. Runco would wake up at his Monroeville home around 4:30 a.m. so he could arrive at his clinic by 7.
The Corolla came to rest on its roof. Runco opened his window. Shrugging off his winter-weight sport coat, he managed to squeeze through. Cold stung him.
Disoriented, Runco stood there, how long he’s not sure. Maybe five or 10 minutes. He leaned against one of the Corolla’s tires. The 10-year-old car had made it roughly 123,000 miles; this would be its final trip.
After a time, someone came down the hill, put his arm around Runco and walked the dentist to the top.
Today, Runco, 75, tells the story calmly. He has no jitters driving by the intersection, which he does practically every workday.
He wonders whether his childhood experience of facing some close calls on airplanes now lets him take the experience in stride.
Born in Wheeling, W.Va., Runco moved around a lot as the son of an Air Force dentist. He lived at air bases across the country and in Taiwan and Turkey. He flew often, and every once in a while there were scares.
Injuries suffered in the collapse left him in the hospital for a week. Two broken bones in his neck. Broken ribs. Broken sternum. It hurt to breathe. His neck still aches, worsening as the day wears on, as he bends over looking into peoples’ mouths.
“I feel extremely lucky and blessed,” Runco said. “What did I do to deserve this? I owe somebody something.”
It’s blowing out. There’s gonna be an explosion if they don’t get here ASAP and turn this off.
As the car bore down on the Perrys, Velva, a devout Baptist, prayed.
“God,” she said, “please don’t let it hit us.”
She believes that her prayer was answered. The car turned on its side and came to rest within inches of the truck’s crumpled hood.
Until that day, Velva had never been in a car accident. Now she had survived a 100-foot fall during a bridge collapse and a second near-death experience from a plummeting car.
OnStar activated. Velva heard Tyrone say that she was injured. The pickup’s airbags had deployed. Velva’s back hurt. She didn’t know it, but two of her vertebrae in her back were broken. She felt cold.
Loud noise punctuated the air. Velva described it as sounding like “the most intense fan blowing.”
A pipeline extending through the bridge abutments and buried underground had ruptured. Now there was a danger of an explosion. Natural gas hissed from the 16-inch coated steel line. Emergency workers who were starting to descend on Fern Hollow heard it, too. It would remain a hazard until utility workers shut the flow an hour later.
Velva watched as a man popped up from the car that had nearly collided with them. He also heard the racket and urged them to move.
Tyrone got out through the driver’s side. Velva’s door had jammed, but Tyrone managed to wrench it open.
Velva found her phone and glasses. She called Angel, one of her three children, and calmly said that they had been in an accident, then handed Tyrone the phone. He told Angel that the bridge had fallen. “He didn’t give her any other information,” Velva said. “He scared the heck out of her.”
We have one 23-year-old male, self-extricated from a vehicle, he climbed up the hill, he’s in the back of our truck, he’s stable.
Joseph Engelmeier wasn’t planning to be on the Fern Hollow Bridge that day.
A year earlier, he had graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a communications degree. After moving around thanks to a father in the Air Force, Engelmeier’s family eventually settled in Ohio Township. He graduated from Avonworth High School and then the University of Pittsburgh. That January, at age 23, he was employed as a patient care coordinator at Pivot Physical Therapy.
Engelmeier usually worked out of Pivot’s East Liberty location on Baum Boulevard. Having spent the night at a friend’s house on Hobart Street in Squirrel Hill, his route shouldn’t have taken him anywhere near the span.
But early that morning, his supervisor texted a change of plans, redirecting him to the company’s Swissvale location on South Braddock Avenue, according to Engelmeier’s lawyer.
Around 6:30 a.m., Engelmeier got into his SUV, a Hyundai Venue. He set off for Murray Avenue before turning right onto Forbes Avenue a short distance away.
Engelmeier was just a few minutes away from work when, suddenly, he felt himself in free fall. One moment, the road was white. Then it went black.
His descent might have lasted only seconds, but to Engelmeier, it felt as if he were plunging for a long time. When the SUV hit bottom, it landed on the driver’s side near the Perrys’ pickup. The impact triggered the Hyundai’s side airbags.
Engelmeier tried the sunroof. It wouldn’t open. He tried the passenger door. No luck. So, facing the windshield, he coiled his legs and kicked the glass away.
He clambered from the vehicle and spotted the Perrys’ pickup. Engelmeier checked to see if they were all right. Then he heard the whoosh of natural gas escaping the ruptured pipeline.
The ominous noise sent him scrambling. At the top of the ravine, he could see flashing lights. Engelmeier climbed up the wooded hillside and emerged above the rubble, close to the spot where minutes earlier he had been driving across a bridge.
Only then did he realize that his back hurt. Tests would show that he had compression fractures of three backbones. He was sore but alive.
A year later, Engelmeier has returned to the classroom. He’s enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh. Physically, he’s OK, his lawyer, Richard Schubert said. But he can’t escape the nightmares.
You got multiple police units from the City of Pittsburgh and the Port Authority police there. You also have a Port Authority bus on scene there giving these updates that the bridge did collapse and they got persons on their bus.
The firefighters came first, followed by a police officer. Luciani saw them making their way through the woods with a ladder.
They helped him climb down from the bus.
Luciani snapped a few pictures with his phone. His back hurt. He wasn’t feeling pain in his shoulder yet, but that would come. Luciani just wanted to go home.
Today, Luciani continues to work through his trauma. He’s going to need shoulder surgery. He’s depressed sometimes. He considers himself a big, strong guy, but now he can’t even do the work around his house.
Luciani, used to being happy-go-lucky, now has to force his smiles, more to reassure others. There’s turmoil under the surface.
He’s never going to drive a bus again, that much he’s sure of. Luciani has been by the bridge a few times — the “death bridge,” he calls it, even though no one died. It always gets him. Tears well in his eyes. He’s been so overcome with emotion that he’s had to pull over.
Luciani gets upset when he feels that people — politicians, commentators, the public — seem to brush off the collapse because no one was killed. You didn’t have to die for it to be an ordeal. Luciani knows this.
Surviving a bridge collapse does funny things to a person’s mind. Luciani thinks about the bridge every day. At first, he couldn’t sleep. Now, he has odd dreams.
In one, he’s back at work hoping that he won’t get picked to drive; when he’s assigned a route, he becomes riddled with anxiety. In another, he follows a supervisor off a bus, which starts drifting down a hill. Luciani is outside, chasing it. In yet another dream, Luciani has his old Wonder Bread route, but he can’t service all the stores in time and he’s late and the stores are closing. You can hear the anxiety in his voice.
He tries not to dwell on the accident, to think of happy things. Despite his best efforts, the collapse is always in the background.
“I can still feel that sliding down the hill, like it was yesterday,” he said. “I can still feel that initial free fall, where you just have no control over anything.”
Luciani didn’t meet Biden that day when the president showed up at the collapse site at 1:20 p.m. for a 10-minute survey. But the White House contacted Luciani in late October when Biden was returning to Pittsburgh to check on the $25.3 million reconstruction of the bridge, which reopened last month ahead of schedule.
Biden wanted to meet him there. But Luciani couldn’t bring himself to go. He wasn’t sure how he would react. Instead, he has a letter on White House stationery with the president’s signature.
Dated Nov. 9, 2022, it reads: “Dear Mr. Luciani, I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet at the Fern Hollow Bridge event in Pittsburgh. I completely understand why it would be difficult to return to the bridge, and I hope I can see you at a future event.”
Despite the high-ranking attention, Luciani is modest about his place in Pittsburgh history — one that he never sought. He’s just a bus driver who was happy that he and his passengers escaped with their lives. He’s just a guy who wants his life back.
“I’m no hero,” Luciani said. “I’m just a survivor, like anybody else that was on that bridge that day.”
“Our patient is reporting an additional two people in a pickup truck, that they are conscious.”
As a youngster, Velva Perry was the tallest girl in her class. Whip-smart but self-conscious, she would hunch forward. Her mother always told her to stand tall.
She knows exactly what her height used to be: 5 feet, 6¾ inches.
Not anymore. After spending six weeks in a back brace, waiting for her fractured bones to mend, doctors told her she would never stand straight again. These days, she feels the weather. She can’t sit for long periods — not for car trips or plane rides, like the one she wished she could have taken to see her father in California as he lay dying.
She remembers how first responders helped get her out of the pickup, how they carried her down an embankment, seated her on a bench.
It was freezing. Her sore back made her moan. She had never before broken a bone. Noise, probably from the seeping gas, intensified. Someone gave her his gloves — black, of course. Someone else handed Tyrone a jacket.
Hands placed Velva in the bed of a truck, which whisked her up from the ravine, up out of a snowy, surreal landscape. She was put in an ambulance, checked out and taken to the hospital.
Velva Perry dreams about the bridge collapse occasionally. There’s no specific trigger. The terrific impact sticks in her mind. So does the car tumbling, tumbling, tumbling toward her.
Perry tries to compartmentalize the incident. It unnerves her to think about it.
“Though I am the same, I am forever changed because of that day,” she said. “It doesn’t define me, but it’s a part of who I am now.”
Published Jan. 22, 2023
Jonathan D. Silver is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jonathan at jsilver@triblive.com.