Yesterday we went out on my Dad’s boat. He’d heard about the truck that flipped over the bridge and brought us down to check it out. Here’s a slide show of the pictures we took:
As you can see from the photos, we didn’t get very close. When we arrived, the police did not have any perimeter buoys set up. We didn’t want to interfere with the authorities, and we didn’t want to get close enough that if the bridge collapsed we’d be in trouble. This caution however, was not enough for the larger police boat, which (I hope) is an interesting story.
The boat started to approach us as we were in the process of turning around to head back and away from the bridge. I think they did this because we turned around pretty slowly to port side (towards the bridge) instead of starboard due to the other boats on that side (one of which was in the process of passing right by us). I guess it seemed like we were going in for a closer look or that we were going to sit there and spectate a little longer.
We were actually pretty shocked they did this, because the depth of the water where we were was fine for our boat, but might not have been for theirs. When they approached, they also didn’t use the proper signal for passing starboard (two 1s beeps, see pg 23), so Dad started to port until he realized what they were doing. After a barely intelligible discussion due to the noise, we indicated we were turning around and were waved off.
Dad believes the operators were MTA police, not DNR, who tend to be a bit more knowledgeable and probably would have hit us up on CH. 13, signaled appropriately, or laid buoys. It’s unfortunate that we distracted them, assuming they weren’t there solely to ward people away. It’s a good thing nothing else disastrous happened.
It’s sad that the poor driver of the truck died. You can read more at the Baltimore Sun story linked above.