Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Pictures Of The Old Days

Just due to interest shown..

There was a single survivor that went off the Skyway that stormy morning. He was across the top of the bridge when it fell.

His little Ford Courier blazed off the end of the bridge and slammed into the side of the ship that had taken the bridge out.

His truck sunk to the bottom of the bay with him inside, but he managed to escape and save his own life.



This is his story...

At 7:34 a.m. Friday, May 9, 1980, Wesley MacIntire was driving his Ford Courier pickup over the southbound span of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, headed for his job at a meat-delivery business. Just after he threw his two quarters into the tollbooth basket, he would later testify, the steady rain turned cyclonic.

As I went way up to the top of the bridge, the center part where the grating work was, the pickup started to bob up and down. And at the time, I thought it was just the wind blowing up through the bridge, or something like that, made it blow around. But then I started to drop over a high part, and at this point I looked and there I seen the ship. And I knew what had happened.



Instead of the familiar downhill slope of the Skyway, and the flat, winding causeway that would carry him to the other side of Tampa Bay, MacIntire saw the black broadside of a massive ship, the words SUMMIT VENTURE painted in white letters along its bow.

I hit my brakes, but I guess the truck wasn’t even on the bridge any more. I was in the air, probably. And the only thing I remember is saying “Oh God!,” and I felt a thud, which I believe, or thought maybe I hit … it bounced off the ship or something. After that, I just remember sinking in the water.

The 56-year-old had been trained as a swimmer in the Navy – before there were things called SEALs – and it all came back to him as he found himself inside a broken vehicle filling quickly with water, on the muddy bottom of the shipping channel.

It was probably no more than two minutes, but it seemed like an eternity, as he bent the buckled frame of the driver’s seat door, squeezed himself out and swam as hard as he could for the weak rays of sunlight at the surface. He exploded from the water, vomited and dogpaddled.

Wes MacIntire understood what had happened to him, even as his brain struggled to make sense of it. He grabbed hold of a section of silver steel protruding from the water, looked up and noticed a large yellow sedan, 150 feet up and stopped awkwardly at the very edge of the jagged bridge.

“I guess,” he thought to himself, “I’m the only fool who went in the water.” Still, he looked around for heads bobbing in the choppy water, someone, anyone he could rescue.

He was fished out by Summit Venture crew members. They threw him a rope ladder, which he wrapped himself in, and they hauled him up the side of the ship like a prize catch. Aside from a nasty gash over his right eye, and salt water in his lungs, Wes MacIntire was undamaged. Physically.

He was not the only person who went in the water. He was the first of 36. And all the others were dead.

From the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office accident report: The final positions of the fallen vehicles. Summit Venture struck Pier 2S, at right. The location of McIntire’s pickup – No. 8 – indicates that he was on the descending slope of the southbound bridge at the time of the collision.

Wesley's survived but he was never the same man.
He was awarded $175,000.00, after his attorney fees and hospital bills were paid he came out of it with $75K.

He suffered 'Survivors Guilt' and it truly changed his life.
If that interests you, the rest of his story can be read here. <<click