‘The Key Bridge is us’: For those who grew up in its shadow, bridge was a lifetime connection

BALTIMORE — For almost as long as the Francis Scott Key Bridge existed, Roy Plummer could see it from his kitchen window. If it had rained the night before, the bridge would shine in the morning when the sun rose to touch it.

When he was a senior in high school, his friend’s father got him a job helping with the bridge’s construction. On weekends, he and a classmate would make a few bucks on the Patapsco River, taking a motorboat to the concrete pylons supporting the bridge to check if the sump pumps had enough gasoline.

Early Tuesday morning, Plummer woke to the sound of his German shepherd growling. Blearily, he looked across the street to see that his neighbor had turned on her porch light. After checking his motion sensor lights, he went back to sleep.

Later that morning, when the sun had risen, his neighbor told him what had happened. Just before 1:30 a.m., a 984-foot cargo ship experiencing power and mechanical failures plowed into a support column for the 1.6-mile bridge, sending a small crew of construction workers tumbling into the frigid water below. Two people survived, but the bodies of two workers were recovered from the river on Wednesday. Four other workers are presumed dead.

Plummer’s voice became thick with emotion on Wednesday when he spoke about the workers who had died and their families. But on Tuesday, he said, he had also cried for the bridge.

“Because that’s us in Dundalk,” said Plummer, 68, the former maintenance supervisor for Dundalk High School. “The Key Bridge is us.”

Two days after the bridge’s collapse, residents of Dundalk and the nearby communities of Turner Station and Sparrows Point are mourning the workers who died – one of whom, Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, lived in Dundalk. They’re also fearful for what the future will hold for their many neighbors who work at the Port of Baltimore, one of the nation’s busiest ports, where vessel traffic is now suspended.

But in all the tragedy and uncertainty that has followed the collapse, longtime residents of the communities surrounding the bridge are grieving the loss of the structure itself, which has been a fixture in the Baltimore skyline for close to 50 years.

“It’s like losing your best friend,” said Shirley Gregory, president of the St. Helena Community Association, a neighborhood of about 1,000 houses that stands next to the port.

Gregory and her husband don’t know a Dundalk without the Key Bridge towering above – they moved to the area about 28 years ago. She used to drive it every day to the Maryland Department of Transportation office by BWI Airport, where she worked until 2013 before retiring.

Gregory said she would look forward to seeing the bridge as she drove up Merritt Boulevard, headed toward Holabird and Wise avenues. The sight has “been imprinted in my brain,” Gregory said. She still hasn’t gone to see what remains of the bridge. It’s too painful.

Construction started on the bridge in 1972 to relieve congestion from the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. In the years leading up to its opening in 1977, Ben Womer, a retired steelworker and the founder of the Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society, lobbied state officials to have the bridge named after Francis Scott Key, who historians believe watched the bombing of Fort McHenry within 100 yards of the structure’s footprint. The battle inspired Key to write the poem that later became the national anthem.

“He was told by former Gov. Harry R. Hughes, then secretary of the Maryland Department of Transportation, that the bridge would be so named and to please stop writing him letters on the subject,” read Womer’s 1994 obituary in The Baltimore Sun.

Gloria Nelson and Bobby DeWeese both remember watching the Key Bridge go up – Nelson from Turner Station and DeWeese from Greektown, where he grew up. On Wednesday, they recalled their shock upon hearing the news of its collapse.

DeWeese, a safe technician and locksmith, shed tears. He’s lived in Dundalk since 1995 and is used to taking the bridge a few times a week. Even when it would be faster to take the Harbor or Fort McHenry tunnels, he’d choose to drive over the bridge instead. It made him feel close to God, he wrote on Facebook. To his right, he’d see the town where he grew up. To his left, he’d see the steel mill where his mother once worked and Sparrows Point, where his father was a police officer.

The loss of the bridge might make driving to Annapolis and Southern Maryland for jobs more inconvenient in the future, but for DeWeese, 64, the emotions hit harder than the logistics.

“It’s weird,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Why does a grown man cry over a bridge?’ That bridge just meant so much to me.”

There’s an “unbelievable emptiness” in the sky without the bridge, said Nelson, 73, president of Turner Station Conservation Teams. She grew up in Turner Station, where she and her friends went crabbing on a platform in Fleming Park that once held materials for the bridge’s construction. Early Tuesday morning, she was awoken by phone calls about the structure’s collapse. The following hours were stabbed with fear as she wondered how many people had been on the bridge and how many were hurt.

The next day, she and other community members brought coffee and donuts down to the first responders working at the site.

“It was a quick reminder that life is precious,” she said of the collapse. “We need to be mindful of that.”

To Russ Dukan, who was born in Ukraine and moved to Dundalk with his family in 1997 at age 10, the Key Bridge represented something monumental.

“It was like a beacon of America, ” said Dukan, 36, who now lives in Ellicott City. “And it always felt strong and just impossible to move or break.”

Keith Taylor, a former steelworker, was a senior in high school when the bridge opened. He used to drive across it with his parents to visit family on his dad’s side. Now, he’s a 66-year-old grandfather himself, with children and grandchildren across the Patapsco in Arnold. Some days, he’d drive across the Key Bridge two or three times to run errands and visit family. It was a wonderful place to go fishing and crabbing, and – as president of the Sparrows Point/North Point Historical Society – he appreciated the structure’s ties to the War of 1812 and Key.

Taylor has also used the bridge as a marker during trips – when he crossed it, Taylor said, he knew he was almost home. That took special significance in 1979, when he landed at BWI and drove over the bridge after being stationed in Korea for 13 months.

“Just to see the bridge and the horizon of Baltimore – it just gives you the chills,” he said. “You almost bawl about it. It’s heartbreaking to see that it’s in the water now.”

Courtney Speed, 84, remembers watching the bridge be built when she was in her 40s, living in Turner Station. It was devastating to watch it collapse like a children’s toy, she said. Even more terrifying was the thought of the ship colliding with the bridge later in the morning, when thousands of commuters – including her son, Hartwell Speed – were going to work.

The younger Speed was awake when the collapse happened. At home in Turner Station, he and his wife heard a loud “whoosh!”.

All night, the sounds of emergency vehicles bled into his dreams. The next morning, he awoke to the sound of his phone vibrating with texts and calls from friends and family, who were worried he had been driving home late from work.

When he was 7 or 8, Speed remembers watching the bridge under construction while skipping rocks into the Patapsco with his older brother.

Now, it’s gone.

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(Baltimore Sun reporter Abigail Gruskin contributed to this story.)

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