Transport: Bayou Bridge

• Share

Rupert Lewis was pounding along the smooth Jackson-Vicksburg highway in his truck one night last week, trailing a car ahead. Suddenly the twin taillights in front of him melted into the road, disappeared. Driver Lewis caught a quick glimpse of a black gap in the concrete before his own truck plunged. The lights went out, water rushed into the cab. He smashed a window, somehow came up in a turgid flood.

As he struck out through driftwood for the shore, he figured it out. Clear Creek Bayou, a peaceful Mississippi stream in dry weather, was on the rampage, had washed clear away the centre section of a concrete highway bridge. While he stumbled back through the underbrush to the highway, other cars zoomed smoothly up to the bridge—and vanished. Frantically he tried to flag three others. Their drivers ignored the dripping, scarecrow figure and sped on into the void. Each time there followed a single booming splash, sometimes a few hoarse shouts and screams.

Finally a car stopped. On the other side of the bayou, another pulled up. The road was blocked. A few drenched survivors of the eeriest U.S. highway tragedy of 1939 joined Truckman Lewis on the road. Later divers and wreckers took his truck and ten pleasure cars from the receding stream, recovered 14 bodies—men, women and one infant. Some had smashed through windows to drown in the flood. Others had been trapped where they sat. One woman had died half out of the back window of a sedan which had landed on its nose on the bayou bottom.