It was Friday, May the 9th, 1980, at 7:33 a.m.

Marianne Delemonde's wide blue eyes darted back and forth, scanning across the five options presented to her: TRUCKS ONLY, EXACT CHANGE ONLY, EXACT CHANGE ONLY, EXACT CHANGE ONLY, and last, but not the least, FULL SERVICE. 

The metal signs suspended above the freeway wavered back and forth, quivering in the harsh gusts of wind.  In less than half a mile, Marianne would be entering the starting gates for her favorite element of her daily commute.  The bridge was her personal raceway, as far as she was concerned, and the blinding sheets of rain only thrilled her even more; the challenge was totally new, for never in her two years of living in Tampa had she witnessed such chaos spreading across the Bay during her morning drive.

The Sunshine Skyway Freeway soared across the Tampa Bay, traditionally providing motorists with rather dramatic surroundings during most sunrises and sunsets.

This particular Friday, however, was not quite so pristine.  Weather forecasters had noted that both the hardest rainfall and the strongest winds yet recorded for the year were roaring across a disconcerting skyline dominated with ominous clouds that suggested that perhaps the Sun had decided not to rise that morning.

Marianne glanced down to the glowing digital dashboard and promptly realized that fifty - two miles per hour was perhaps a bit too excessive of  a speed as she approached the tool booth plaza.

But it was certainly far too late to properly address such minor issues, now wasn't it?

Miss Delemonde's deep gray Cadillac Seville sedan came to a rather rushed halt at the rather plain looking tollbooth.

The whitewall tires of the bustleback sedan made a sharp-sounding squeal which turned into a very loud slosh as the front wheels skidded in the water that was pooling around the toll booths' area.  The front end of the car dipped down several inches as the sedan plowed into the rain soaked plaza.   A spray of water flared up from the tires, and a wall of water coursed into the metal sliding door of the toll booth, nearly missing the face of Miss Millie Fielding, Plaza Attendant of booth number five.

Not being a young woman whom would ever consider wrinkling her skirts with the annoyance of a seat belt, Marianne was abruptly tossed forwards into the glossy plastic of her steering wheel.

Pleasantly dramatic, for an entrance, she thought, although slightly painful.

The Seville's windshield wipers flipped back and forth with a furious nature, and the wind blew a substantial amount of mist into the pillowed velour interior of Marianne's newest toy.

The automobile was, in fact, a delayed graduation gift from her father, an attorney whom had immigrated to America in 1970 to protest the oppressive policies of Apartheid in his native land of South Africa.

The seven second event of the wallowing sedan bouncing up to the toll booth was certainly the most dramatic approach that the twenty-nine year - old booth attendant on duty, had yet witnessed in her three years with the Bridge Authority.

"Goodness ma'am!  You're almost worse than this darn storm!", shouted Millie, with her left arm extended from the booth window and her right hand bearing down on her head, trying to keep her orange hat from flying off.  The gushing wind was stronger than she had ever remembered experiencing on the Friday morning shift.

Or perhaps any shift, for that matter.

The response from Marianne was at first presented by her car, once again taking the stage as the multi - dimensional status symbol that it was.  She had failed to turn down her customized sound system, which had the very expensive luxury of a cassette player built within the digitally - tuned stereo radio.  The cocaine-induced song of "Rush, Rush, Get the Yeyo", Debbie Harry's latest disco hit, was echoing out of the car into the concrete overhanging of the toll plaza.

"What did you say?!", shouted Marianne, as her teased and sprayed hair began to push about in the roaring wind.  The overdone mass of deep golden blonde hair had taken almost an hour to perfect, and Marianne began to panic in her mind that only a few seconds' worth of the wind and rain would nullify the effort she had invested in front of her tremendous bathroom mirror.  

Maintaining a strong gaze into the eyes of her overworked counterpart, and trying to salvage some sliver of civility, Marianne fumbled her right hand around the center console, and finally managed to mash her palm into the volume knob.

The sudden withdrawal of the syncopated rhythms of the dance club left only the roaring winds to compete with to manage a conversation.

"I said that you're almost worse than this storm!  Your driving, I mean.  You shouldn't go so fast, ma'am -- it's terrible weather this morning!  Just terrible!", yelled Millie, maintaining a firm grip her orange hat.

Marianne burst out into a haughty laughter, almost inappropriately.  However, it was of her character to react oddly to strange situations; perhaps more so since she had rolled out of bed to three lines of cocaine on her night stand.  It was her morning breakfast, as she thought of it.  'The Breakfast of Champions', at least in the business world of Metropolitan Tampa.

"You're telling me!  I thought I was going to be buying your guardrail as a souvenir to commemorate the occasion!", said Marianne, all the while pushing her hair out of her face.  Marianne's eyes were brighter than any Millie had ever seen at 7:35 a.m., even on a Friday.

Millie, however, was not a discotheque-addicted socialite such as Miss Marianne Delemonde.  In fact, the car that Marianne was driving cost more than Millie would make in more than two years.

The women were polar opposites in the social world of Tampa in 1980.

Yet for a few brief moments, they were great company for each other.

Thunder shattered the air and bounded around the concrete toll plaza as lightning blazed across the vast bay.  In that second, both women were jolted back to the reality of the weather, and pulled away from the colloquial bond that had formed so quickly.  This was the worst storm of the year.

And as far as Millie was concerned, it could very well turn out to be the worst storm of the entire decade to come.

Ironically, she was quite right in her assessment of the situation at hand.

So correct that it was to be bitter in retrospect.

Millie laughed and said, "As much as I might like Deborah Harry myself, you might just end up crashing your pretty car if you're not careful about how much distraction you have in the car with you!"

Marianne always felt a rush of liberation when she had a chance to converse with a black person.  As a child in South Africa, there was no place to be so informal in one's interaction with any person of color.  She pondered for a moment, how intriguing it would be, to have a black friend.  Millie seemed like a charming young woman.  It was only the social structure of world politics which had led Miss Fielding to be a labor - class position in life; that was Marianne's analysis.  She drew in a breath, and looked into Millie's beautiful brown eyes.

"Miss Fielding, do you ever per chance frequent any of the discotheques in the metro area?", cooed Marianne.

Millie grinned quizzically and replied, "Let's go down to the Odyssey...," and then paused to test if Marianne would detect the opening line of one of the latest hits in the clubs of Downtown Tampa.

Marianne bounced in her seat with excitement, and squealed, "...they've got some people you 'oughta meet!", her face flushing with the thrill of the moment, and continued, "Millie, I absolutely cannot live without Cheryl Lynn -- her music is the soundtrack to my life!"

She quickly dug into her purse and retrieved a business card.  She handed it to Millie and said, "Try not to let this get wet -- but do call me some night this weekend, we just have to go out for a night on the town!"

Miss Fielding happily accepted the small white card, and look carefully at Marianne's name.

"I might just have to do that!" said Millie. 

"BLAHHHOOONNNK!",  echoed the dual - tone horned behemoth of  a car that had pulled up behind Marianne.  It was a 1977 Buick Park Avenue, all two and a half tons worth, and the man behind the wheel was apparently yelling a few profanities. 

Thankfully, the wind,  rain, and general escalating chaos muted his hoarse shouting. 

The exuberant conversation with Millie was placed on hold due to some jerk who was in a hurry to hit the streets of Downtown Tampa.  "Where on earth could HE possible need to go at this time of day, down to 40th Street or some shit?!", thought Marianne to herself as she stared heavily in her rear-view mirror.

The storm interjected and a six - second long tumult of thunder shook the toll booth plaza.

Millie's eyes widened, and she appeared to be caught in a mixture of emotions -- ecstatic in one way,  and quite frightened of the colossal storm front that wasn't calming down for anyone or anything.

Marianne bit her bottom lip in a millisecond admission of fear, and abruptly yelled, "Yes, Millie, really do call me, tonight or tomorrow, ok?"

Millie smiled a broad smile and her teased, perfectly round "Afro" hair bounced as she shook her head up and down, never breaking eye contact with the wild rich foreign stella that had slid into her booth.

With a quick push of a button under Millie's thumb, the yellow metal bar raised up and the red light glaring into the plush Seville turned into a legal green.  Marianne gave her 'million dollar smile', and with her own push of a button, the power window whirred upwards.  And in her eccentric ways, something she was known for among the droll masses of the Tampa club scene,  Marianne blew a kiss towards Millie as she pressed the accelerator into the floorboard.

The deep gray sedan lunged ahead as though it were a racehorse in the Kentucky Derby.  Marianne reached over to her volume control and once again the impulsive beat of Debbie Harry flooded the luxurious automobile.

Marianne needed to be in the office by 8:00 a.m., and as far as she could tell, she was going to make it.  In the trunk was a Kodak slide projector and a box of slides she had been working on throughout April and March.  Marianne was on a project to develop an advertising campaign for a Southern chain of department stores.  Ironically, the chain was entitled "Southern's".  Very unimaginative, thought Marianne.

This was a client that would be hers by 10:00 a.m. at the latest, and then it would be off to Aldophos' Bistro for a quick and fashionable Italian brunch meeting with her newest love interest, Steven Maddox, one of the prime public relations consultants in the entire Bay area.

This was how the morning would unfold before Marianne, at least in her estimation.  In reality, it would exist in the ponderings of her mind alone, for fate had marked her for the most unexpected of mornings.

The expansion joints of the concrete roadway elicited a terse double-thump noise each second as the Cadillac soared along the wet roadway at nearly sixty miles per hour.  The bridge speed limit was clearly posted as fifty miles per hour; however, that was for the public at large.  It certainly didn't apply to Miss Marianne at 7:36 a.m.  In any case, how would any police officer stake out the Skyway Bridge?  There were no medians to hide in, only four concrete lanes divided by a six foot gap of open space.  Marianne loved the Sunshine Skyway, it was the quickest part of her daily commute to the business district of Tampa.  She snapped her red fingernail onto the button for the cruise control and bounded along the crème colored road.  It was 7:37 a.m.

To her right was a northbound Greyhound bus, traveling with 28 passengers.  It gently wallowed up and down as it hit the expansion joints, and then forcefully settled on its suspension as the Seville and the bus hit the beginning of the concrete hill that led up towards the central span of the bridge.  This was a metal segment, over one thousand and four hundred feet in length.  At the peak, the roadway surface it stood nearly fifteen stories above the water, and thus provided large ships more than enough clearance.  As car tires flew across the girded metal, there was a shrill humming noise, quite different from the concrete wail.

Perhaps two car lengths in front of Marianne was a large domestic sedan, it's red taillights blurred in the incessant motion of her windshield wipers.  Several passengers on the bus were reading newspapers or books, and the soft glow of the overhead lights escaped from the tinted windows.

The sky was a horrid mixture of colors; shades of gray, some of deep blue, and touches of opaque black swirled around overhead.  Neon blue streaks of lightning zipped along the horizon, and the rumbling din of thunder rolled around the Bay.  It was now 7:37 a.m. and 15 seconds.

The entertainment provided by the spectacular weather was no match for the intense drama that was unfolding below the steel decks of the center span.

Hercules Carriers Limited, a Liberian shipping firm, had bought the S.S. Summit Venture in 1975 from her bankrupt owner, a Greek business.  During the time between that balmy day when she was purchased and this moment five years later, the Summit Venture had never experienced any kind of newsworthy event, neither good nor bad.  Her crew was certainly not especially thrilled to be working on such a mundane piece of machinery, but they possessed the usual amount of devotion to the ship. 

As custom was, when they neared the entrance to the Bay, the ship's crew had turned over the helm to a local captain.  On this particular morning, it happened to be Captain Thomas Raan, a contracted pilot who entire job was safety guiding large vessels through the shallow waters, and through the difficult, narrow passage allowed by the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

Perhaps Captain Raan was not paying as much attention as he should have been during the worst intensity of the storm.  Maybe the incessant roaring whoosh of the winds pounding around the windows had been mesmerizing, and he was not as attentive as he should have been.  Arguably, there was zero visibility, and the rain was coming down in blinding gray sheets, so perhaps it was simply an odd sort of destiny for the S.S. Summit Venture, and its fate had been written in the stars.  No matter what the case, the elements for disaster had been set that morning, regardless of whom had been sitting at the wheel during the moments leading up to 7:38 a.m.

In any case, Captain Raan should have been aware of his ship deviating from the set course that would have theoretically placed them at the dock at 7:55 a.m.  The impending disaster was one which began almost five minutes earlier.  The instruments registering the wind speed and direction had been acting temperamental throughout their journey from Mexico, so it was simply ignored when they began to report a wind speed of zero miles per hour.

Little did the skeleton crew at that moment realize the gravity of their actions; little did Captain Raan realize the situation at hand when, at 7:33 a.m., he had he pressed a red button to mute the Sensor Failure Alarm that was emitting a meek wail of protest amidst the chaos of the storm.   It was quite certain that nobody on board would have believed that they were each a member of a voyage destined for doom.

Although they were technically innocent of the events of the next sixty seconds, the crew members would forever be forced to reflect upon those final moments as having been of their responsibility. 

Or, perhaps more correctly, their irresponsibility.

The bottom line in the situation was that the wind had picked up to the point that the instruments on top of the ship were not merely malfunctioning; they had been completely sheared off by a dramatic blast of wind more intense than anyone on board could have imagined.

The hurricane force winds had appeared out of nowhere, as if conjured up by an evil presence.  Slowly the immense tanker was no longer moving ahead on a straight course.  Instead, the tanker was gracefully drifting in a diagonal direction, directly towards the pair of concrete columns supporting the metal span of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

As Summit Venture was slipping sideways into history, Marianne Delemonde was just reaching the midpoint of the rain-soaked incline that lead to the central span of the Sunshine Skyway.

At 7:38 a.m., the atmosphere aboard the S.S. Summit Venture drastically changed.  In one moment, the crew members were gazing out into zero visibility conditions.  The large vertical windshield wipers that were blazing back-and-forth across the wall of windows looking towards the bow of the ship were doing no good to provide any idea of where the massive tanker was headed.  The only indication of their direction was available on the radar screen.  The green line swept around in a clockwise motion each several seconds, indicating that while moving slowly, the Summit Venture was theoretically making progress towards the International Port of Tampa Bay.

The next moment, the ship suddenly heaved to the right, throwing the crew members across the floor.  The wall of windows that gazed out into sheer gray nothingness suddenly revealed that they had pushed through the ill-conceived barrier system that was intended to keep ships from hitting the twin columns that held up the Northbound lanes of the Sunshine Skyway.

This noise was something completely unworldly, mysterious and inexplicable.

There was a tremendous roar coming from the sky, intermixed with sharp squeals of metal girders being twisted into oblivion.  The noise was not thunder, and it was a noise much worse than the rumble of the tanker flexing as it pressed into the concrete supports.  Holding onto the control panels lining the bridge, the three crew members and their Captain pulled themselves against the windows in a vain effort to understand what the noise was.  No sooner had they pressed their faces against the glass did they receive an answer from the seemingly endless gray hell that surrounded the ship.

Only two seconds passed before there was a horrific booming noise echoing from the still invisible bow of the tanker.  It was the sound of one hundred tons of metal collapsing right onto the very bow of the ship where Captain Raan had just minutes before sent a senior member of the crew to check the forward holds.  

Captain Raan was thrown from his high chair at the helm and he tumbled across the floor, his coffee cup hitting the floor and shattering.  An entire chorus of electronic alarms began sounding.  The chaos was soon drowned out by a noise much worse than the sirens that were echoing around on the decks the ship.

The weather sensors were in failure mode, completely inoperative.  The forward holds were suddenly registering as being seriously overweight and multiple sensor failures were compounding the uncertain situation.  The electronic cacophony of alarms continued to compound.  The television monitors that were on a framework attached to the ceiling were displaying nothing more than a sickening mess of gray static.  The closed-circuit cameras that were stationed at the forward of the bow had been obliterated.  The radar screen was littered with scattered green dots all around the ship.  A collision avoidance alarm pierced the air, almost as an electronic insult, far too late to do any good.

Captain Raan realized in absolute horror that the dots were not small boats or rafts, but instead the shattered wreckage of the fourteen-hundred foot metal span that his ship had just obliterated.

In the water were not only the sinking debris, but the crushed, imploded remains of several automobiles.  Captain Raan was seconds from vomiting, and quite possibly several seconds past loosing his entire career.  It occurred to the captain that they had broadsided the Northbound superstructure, and that if they drifted further, the Southbound bridge, which ran parallel to the Northbound lanes, would be destroyed next.

"Full speed astern, now, damn it!  All engines reverse, do you hear me?!", shouted the red faced captain who was now shaking and beginning to cry.

The entirety of the S.S. Summit Venture shuddered as the massive turbines ground to a halt and began to spin in reverse, churning against the raging sea in a desperate battle to avoid a double disaster.

Marianne at first thought that perhaps she was beginning to hydroplane.  The odd shudder that was vibrating her car was unlike anything she had experienced while driving.

She pressed her foot on the brake and felt the tires struggling to not lock up on the sloppy roadway.  An inexplicable panic began to swell within her and she forced her foot all the way down.

Through the waves of rain that were sweeping across the roadway, her eyes detected the many white strobe lights of the center span.

They were going down.

They were falling faster than the elevator had fallen at Lakecross in 1975 when Marianne was in the science building on the worst day of her college career.  The lights stopped flashing as the electrical wiring was shredded away from the rest of the bridge and it all simply disappeared.

Marianne gripped the steering wheel and stopped breathing.

Before she could begin counting to one hundred to calm down and rationalize what her eyes were telling her, the entire massive metal span, which normally towered one hundred feet above the roadway was racing downward, totally out of control.

The span began to flex at each end as it shredded apart and large metal beams began to burst apart, flying through the air like a horrid shower of sparkling confetti.  Bolts and rivets that had held firm since 1958 blew out like bullets.  One slammed into the windshield of the skidding Cadillac and a shattered mess of lines exploded across the laminated glass.  Marianne let out a shrill scream that was so intense it left her throat feeling raw.

The metal segments squealed in a terrifying manner as they were bent into oblivion.  And before Marianne could even begin to think, the towering lightening rods at the peak of the massive span simply slipped away into the canyon that had magically taken the place of Marianne's usual route to work.

Her car slid to a stop at a slight angle, and she jerked the door open before the car was even fully stopped.  Stunned, she threw herself out of the Cadillac and fell down on the endless puddle that was her freeway.  Rainwater was streaming down the roadway around her, and cascading down fifteen stories to the swelling sea.  Marianne could feel her stomach turning and she gasped for breath as she rushed the four feet away from her car to the concrete wall that was the left edge of the roadway.  She backed herself against the 4-foot high wall like an animal facing death, and in many ways she was exactly that.

The echoing destruction of the thousands of tons of former bridge sections meeting the stormy sea was bad enough; the tremendous explosion of the bridge slamming into the deck of the S.S. Summit Venture was terrifying; but the sound of the damned cars imploding as they suddenly ended their 150-foot decent was nothing less than traumatizing.  Marianne began to hyperventilate as she looked to her right to see headlights racing towards her stopped sedan.  The sound of the car's horn blaring as it flew towards her was the only thing that momentarily drowned out the sounds of the hell below that were the background for Marianne's shrill screams.

"Oh My God!" was all Marianne managed to get out before the approaching car slid sideways into the trunk of her Cadillac.

The red sedan slammed into her gray 'Kitten', as she referred to it, and 'Kitten' burst forward in a tremendous output of energy as it launched over the edge of the precipitous.  The bent trunk burst open on impact and the 85 photographic slides she had worked all night on fluttered out of their box and gently spun down towards the sea in a second showing of disgusting confetti.  Marianne's brown fur coat, a trophy she used to flaunt her success in the humid heat of Tampa, fluttered out of the trunk and gracefully flipped through the blowing rain as it too fell into the pit of hell that had opened up before Marianne's eyes.

The woman driving the red sedan that had launched 'kitten' to her grave fell out of her car, hysterically crying and screaming.  She collapsed on the fractured roadway, the front right wheel of her car hanging over the edge of the canyon.  Her face was bloodied from the impact of hitting the windshield, and the crumpled front end of her car let out a death cry as its horn refused to stop echoing out over the Bay.  Steam was hissing out from the shattered radiator of the automobile, and it was now an auditorially extreme situation in addition to being visually horrific.

Marianne was now descending into an asthma attack and she crawled on hands and knees towards the hysterical woman from the red car.  Crying desperate tears of confusion, her makeup running down her cheeks, teased hair smearing down her face, her dress tearing on the rough pavement, and her hands aching from having held them in such tight fists for what seemed to have been so long, Marianne moved towards the nameless woman.

"Oh God!  Are you alright?!  Ma'am?!", shouted Marianne to the woman who was now laying on her side, convulsion slightly and still wailing the agony of looking death in the face.

The car's echoing horn was atrocious, and it made Marianne's ears ring with slight pain as the situation continued to escalate.  The woman from the red car had yet to really respond to Marianne, and the blood running from her forehead was visibly flowing.  She had perhaps fractured her skull, thought Marianne.

The circumstances were as close to hell as Marianne had ever been, and far outdid the horror she had experienced in 1975.  In May of that year, the elevator of the newest building on campus broke loose from its cables and plummeted Marianne down four stories in a nightmarish freefall at 3 a.m. on an exam study night gone too long.  A broken leg and bruised ribs were the largest physical results of that incident.  The resulting lawsuit she had fought against the manufacturer of the defective elevator had given Marianne her first taste of real money under her control and hers alone.

This moment, however, was far worse in her opinion because at least in the elevator Marianne had not sustained a head injury.  The woman of the red car was perhaps more unfortunate than Marianne, but they were both among the luckiest persons in the world at that moment in 1980.  Marianne looked into the crossed, defocused eyes of the woman as she continued to shake uncontrollably.  It felt as if she was looking even closer into the abyss that death was in her mind, and the experience was now bordering on being supernatural.  Marianne had only been to a few funerals in her twenty - five years, and had never witnessed the actual death of another human being.

The feeling of helplessness was devastating and Marianne silently prayed in her head for someone to come soon to help the woman.

There wasn't a shred of the former Northbound metal section left at all.  Not even a trace.  The guardrail was twisted and shredded at the end of the concrete roadway that Marianne was laying on.  It reached out perhaps four feet and it seemed to be a horrific symbol of the nightmare that was unfolding in reality.

She lifted herself up enough to look towards the Southbound bridge, which was, for the moment, still in existence.

Cars were stopped all along the double lane structure, and people were crowding under umbrellas to look at the worst disaster to hit Tampa in perhaps a decade, maybe more.

The bystanders saw Marianne's head peering over the concrete wall and they began to shout and scream to her.  Several seemed to be crying and all of them felt more helpless than ever due to the eight foot-wide gap that lay between the Southbound and Northbound concrete freeways.  Marianne lifted her hand and waved to them, trying to indicate that at least she was unharmed.

The woman from the red car crawled up to her and rested against the short wall that Marianne was looking over.

"My God, are you okay?!", stuttered a stunned Marianne.  She had assumed the woman was in shock and might not ever move from her supine position on the roadway.

"I think so.  I'm not sure.  I just don't know.  Did that bag of pears from the A&P have a coupon deducted from it....because I'm sure I had one in my purse, just over there...", drifted off the woman, who was lightheaded and on the edge of incoherence from the loss of blood.  Her face was smeared with a mixture of blood, tears, and rain.  It was a tormenting sight for Marianne to look into.

Yet with a sudden burst of connection to her surroundings, the mysterious woman looked over towards her left and jerked in surprise, her head spinning back towards Marianne.  With a maroon hand she pressed back some hair that was tangled in front of her face, and mashed the dripping blood across her cheek and into her ear.   Her torn shirt made for an unusual amount of cleavage, and the shiny texture of her blood made the entire spectacle mind blowing for Marianne.

Yet she couldn't freak out, not just yet.  She held onto some shred of sanity and tried to focus on the drowsy looking eyes of her newest companion.

"Hey! Where the HELL did the Skyway go?!?", the woman burst out in a blunt style that almost had Marianne laughing at the ridiculousness that the two women were faced with on what should have been the most mundane and boring of all May days.

Marianne couldn't think of a logical response.

There apparently was no logic in Tampa on this morning of damnation.

"I guess...I guess that tanker hit the bridge.  Maybe the wind blew it over...I have no idea, Jesus Christ."