Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
The Brooklyn Bridge, despite taking a punch, isn’t going down. After the Cuauhtémoc, a tall ship used for training sailors in the Mexican Navy, crashed into the bridge deck on Saturday night, the bridge was closed to traffic for a couple of hours, reopening around 10:30 p.m. “Minor damage” was inflicted, said the city; presumably, that means scratches and paint scrapes. That is no surprise. The Brooklyn Bridge is notably robust, dating from the age when engineers did their calculations with less sophisticated tools than today’s; their solution, when in doubt, was to overbuild, and more recent analyses suggest that it has a safety factor of around six times its rated load instead of the customary three. There was less of a margin for the comparatively fragile masts of the Cuauhtémoc, leading to the deaths of two sailors and injuries to dozens more.
The sturdiness of the bridge did not make it any less unsettling to those crossing the river as the crash happened. Selena Sturdivant was driving from Manhattan to Brooklyn with her 9-year-old that night and turned onto the bridge from the FDR just as the Cuauhtémoc came around. Her daughter, she says, pointed out the ship, lit up and conspicuous, as they passed the South Street Seaport, where it had been moored. A couple of minutes later, as they turned up onto the bridge, they saw it again: “I saw the lights on my windshield and thought, Why? The boat is back there — and I turn to my right and the boat is right there. And then I saw the first piece of it go” — that is, the top of the mast snapping off. She did not feel a huge shock or vibration, she says: “I did feel some movement, but the bridge always has some movement. But the back still had to pass under the bridge, and then I could see to the other side that the boat is just completely destroyed. My daughter said she saw someone hanging.”
Traffic started moving, Sturdivant said, as drivers sped up to get off the bridge; she could hear pedestrians on the center walkway shouting about what they were seeing. She tried to keep her cool, and her daughter, she says, was pretty steady despite it all. “She didn’t know what was going on at first, but I told her, ‘We’re okay—we’re getting off the bridge.’ I think I was more freaked out than she was.” Sturdivant adds that she’s been taking the BQE for the past couple of days and avoiding the trip high above the water for now: “I’m not a bridge person.”
The Brooklyn Bridge has been hit quite a few times in its past. Why? Probably because it’s the southernmost of the four East River bridges, so if you’re piloting in from the Atlantic, it’s the first one you encounter. Only the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is farther out, and it’s almost a hundred feet higher above the water line. (The Brooklyn Bridge has long been a bottleneck for ships going into and out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, acting as a limit on their size.) The Times coverage mentioned three previous similar incidents: one in 1921 (when it was struck by a schooner with six masts, the foremost of which got bent), one in 1935 (a freighter whose captain blamed an unusually high tide), and one in 1986 (a cargo ship that scraped the underside of the bridge). Just over a decade ago, in 2014, another freighter called the Rainbow Quest did the same, closing down the bridge to traffic for a couple of hours. Then there’s the story of the Nyassa, a Portuguese refugee ship that in 1941 lost the top ten feet of its foremast as it brought 690 passengers, some of whom had done time in the work camps of Europe, to safety in America.
If any part of the Brooklyn Bridge is vulnerable, it’s less the deck (because it has some give and has survived all these hits without major damage) than the footings. They too are at risk of being struck by a vessel gone off course, as we saw in the Francis Scott Key Bridge crash last year. The good news, however, is that the immense container ships of the type that caused that collapse are also much too big for the East River and its crossings. They can’t get anywhere near it.