Day: December 15, 2023

That evening it was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridge as cars and trucks hurried home from work or a day of Christmas shopping.

Then, at about 5 p.m., the unthinkable happened.

Charlene Foster, who lived in Kanauga on the edge of the river, in sight of the bridge, told the Gallipolis Daily Tribune that she was preparing dinner in the kitchen of her home when her two sons suddenly screamed, “Mommy! Mommy! The bridge is in the water.” She looked toward the bridge, and “It was just like a snake slithering down into the water. It seemed to go down in slow-motion.”

Ann Davis, who worked in a beverage store near the bridge, was watching the heavy traffic cross the bridge when she heard a large boom. She told the Plain Dealer that it sounded like a sonic boom, and then “the bridge started to crumple and sink like a set of dominoes falling. Cars were being crushed like toys in the girders.”

It took just twenty seconds for the entire bridge to fall into the river.