Somber Prelude to the Fourth

By KURT ANDERSEN

A faulty bridge and an untamable river claim eight lives

Every era looks back to good old days, often foolishly. The memory of earlier Fourths of July, with their pop-bottle rockets and Black Cat firecrackers, is apt to be a lot more cheerful than the real thing. Still, viewed from an often difficult present, it seems that not many years ago, an ear of sweet corn and a gin fizz were enough to turn Independence Day into pure bliss.

By that wistful reckoning, the last such ingenuous summer came along about 1960. American self-confidence was at its zenith. Ambitious public works were in vogue. The brand-new Interstate Highway System was growing by 40 miles a week. In Arizona's Glen Canyon, just over the border from Utah, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had started building the dam its engineers believed would finally tame the wild ups and downs of the Colorado River.

Consider the state of things in 1983. Last week, in Greenwich, Conn., a 100-ft.-long slice of an Interstate bridge fell away, dropping three motorists 70 ft. to their deaths in the Mianus River. In the Southwest, melting snow and bureaucrats' miscalculation produced a deluge: Colorado River water was gushing through dam spillways at almost three times the normal rates, flooding towns in California and Arizona, causing $12.2 million in damage and threatening to rise higher. In both cases, behind the sadness of immediate events was a niggling sense of disillusion with U.S. engineering know-how: Glen Canyon Dam is only 20 years old, the Mianus River Bridge just 25. By contrast, the Brooklyn Bridge, a full century old and solid, was celebrated in May with the best fireworks show of the year.

Last week's mishaps could have been far more disastrous. The six-lane Interstate 95 is a main route for tens of thousands of Connecticut suburbanites who commute daily to Manhattan. When the bridge collapsed just before 1:30 a.m., however, only four vehicles were zooming over the affected eastbound lanes: two tractor-trailers and two passenger cars. A few hundred feet away, Gordon Oilman was drawn to his home's riverfront window. "I thought I heard an explosion," he says. "I looked out and saw a truck and a car coming off the bridge."

Dead of injuries was Louisiana Trucker Harold Bracy. Drowned in their car were Luis Zapata and Reginald Fischer, both area residents. Driving abreast was Truck Driver David Pace, hauling a load of empty beer bottles to Hartford and accompanied in the cab by his wife. "I felt my wheels going soft on me," Pace told his father later from a hospital bed. "I screamed to Helen to duck and grab the pillow because we're going down." Eileen Weldon of nearby Darien, driving alone in her car, sailed off into the dark river too and survived. The Paces, seriously injured, were snatched out of the water by a fisherman who had been asleep in his boat. "I heard all kinds of noises," said the rescuer, Billy Ebrech. "I heard screaming and yelling."

The bridge had undergone inspection last September, but J. William Burns, Connecticut's transportation commissioner, suggested a likely cause of collapse: a structurally crucial steel pin, 10 in. long and 7 in. in diameter that, he said, "is missing or sheared off." The accident has already prompted unscheduled bridge inspections and maintenance in several states. As well it should: the Federal Government says that of 564,499 U.S. bridges, 21% are "obsolete" and 23% are "structurally deficient." Officially, the Mianus River Bridge was neither.

In the Southwest, five lives have been claimed so far by the swift Colorado River, which is sluicing over dikes, sandbag barriers and splashboards. William Wert was on a raft excursion with 14 other vacationers shooting the Grand Canyon's Crystal Rapids when the 33-ft. rubber raft flipped; all passengers except Wert made it to shore. Farther downstream on the 1,450-mile river, in Mexico, four people drowned. "We cannot blame the Americans," said Francisco Gonzales, deputy police chief of the town of Luis B. Sanchez. "They did not make the rain and snow that are causing the river to rise."

American officials do, however, attempt to manage the Colorado, and in the process have been forced to trigger much of the flooding. Engineers at the Glen Canyon and Parker dams have had to open their floodgates wider than ever before. Last winter's Rocky Mountain snowpack was up to three times its usual thickness, and since Memorial Day it has been melting unusually fast. Southwesterners blame Bureau of Reclamation dam managers for not releasing more of the runoff earlier. Says William Claypool of Needles, Calif.: "Anyone over the age of eight who watched TV this winter should have known we would have problems."

Heavy thunderstorms last week made matters worse. Water was rushing out of the Glen Canyon spillway at about 700,000 gal. per sec., more than twice as fast as normal. With Lake Mead rising to record levels, water was about to surge over the spillways at Hoover Dam for the first time since they were tested in 1941.

To the north, in Grand Junction, Colo., floods broke a dike and prompted the evacuation of more than 1,300 residents. Downstream, hundreds of houses and businesses in Arizona and California river settlements were flooded, and vital tourist business was badly crimped. "This is a man-made disaster, and there's no excuse for it," says Sandy Fields, owner of the Castle Rock Shores Resort in hard-hit Parker, Ariz. "It's just plain stupidity."

In March, Government computers forecast that the snowmelt would be 4% below normal. A month ago, they predicted 31% above. The most recent predicted overflow: 110%. "Our estimates," admits Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Robert Broadbent, "were wrong. The flows this year just didn't fit into that computer model. It was winter clear up to the 20th of May, and then all of a sudden it turned to summer."

In the minds of most Americans, it does not really turn to summer until the Fourth of July. And in fact not all of the omens for the holiday were grim. San Diego was shaken by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded there (4.6 on the Richter scale), but only some vases and plumbing were broken. Neither the new lava flow from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano nor the tornadoes that swirled through eastern Iowa and northern Illinois killed anyone. Not good news, but not disasters either: if those were acts of God, at least he pulled his punches. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Steven Holmes/Hoover Dam, with other bureaus

With reporting by Steven Holmes/Hoover Dam This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.