SAPELO ISLAND ― J.R. Grovner felt some give as he crossed the gangway connecting the Marsh Landing pier to the floating dock where the ferry that provides access to his island home ties up.
He boarded the boat minutes later and says he relayed his concerns to the captain on duty, assuming his report would trigger an inspection and maintenance.
On Saturday, some four months and three tropical storms later, that gangway suffered what officials have deemed a “catastrophic failure.” The aluminum bridge buckled somewhere along its span, pulling the end that rests on the floating dock into the Sapelo River and dumping 20 passengers waiting for the ferry into the water.
The landing’s operator, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, reported seven deaths from the incident. Commissioner Walter Rabon said Sunday morning that three others who fell off the gangway remain hospitalized with critical injuries. All 20 who went in the water have been accounted for, he said.
The deaths happened during the annual Sapelo Cultural Day celebration and left the island’s year-round residents in a state of mourning — and outrage.
Sapelo is home to several dozen descendants of freed slaves, or Gullah Geechee, who have lived on the island for generations in the small community of Hog Hammock.
About 10 Sapelo Gullah Geechee, including Grovner, attended a Georgia DNR news conference Sunday morning at the Sapelo Island Visitors Center, adjacent to the ferry dock on the mainland. During a question-and-answer session, Grovner told Rabon of his complaint about the gangway and asked if it had been addressed. Rabon said he was not aware of previous concerns voiced about the landing.
The gangway was installed in November 2021 as part of a larger landing rehabilitation project and undergoes “almost daily” visual inspections by DNR staff, although those probes don’t involve structural reviews of the underside of the platform.
Asked if a comprehensive structural analysis had been done following Tropical Storm Debby in August, Hurricane Helene in September or Hurricane Milton earlier this month — all storms that generated strong surf conditions — Rabon said he was not aware of any inspections being done.
The DNR confirmed in a separate statement that the gangway was inspected in December 2023, by Crescent Equipment Company.
“We will continue to work with local, state, and federal agencies on the response and investigation to determine the cause of the collapse. We are keeping all those involved, their families, and the entire Sapelo Island community in our thoughts and prayers,” the agency added.
Later in the news conference Sunday, another Gullah Geechee resident, Reginald Hall, spent nearly two minutes chastising the state officials in attendance, which included Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns (R-Newington), for ignoring a multitude of public safety concerns on Sapelo Island that hindered emergency response efforts Saturday.
Hall cited a crumbling helipad, which was in such disrepair that a critical medical care helicopter used an empty field to land and pick up injured victims Saturday, as well as the absence of on-island emergency medical facilities.
“We don’t feel ignored, we are being ignored,” Hall said following the news conference. “We’ve been talking about some of these things for a year and a half.”
DNR has no record of recent complaints about the Sapelo Island landing or the gangway, a spokesman confirmed after the news conference. The other concerns — the helipad and the emergency medical facilities — are documented and involve the local McIntosh County authorities as well as the state.
Credit: Courtesy of Steve Taylor
Credit: Courtesy of Steve Taylor
The county agreed two years ago to build a new helipad as part of a lawsuit settlement but has yet to start the project. As for medical services, the island’s community center is to include two rooms for a medical clinic, but the county repurposed the building last year, leasing it out to a bar and grill. A health care provider that had previously shown interest in operating a small clinic there told Savannah’s WTOC TV in June that it would not share space with a restaurant.
The lack of access to medical supplies led to a “mad scramble” during Saturday’s recovery efforts, said Josiah Watts, a Gullah resident.
“We ran out of backboards pretty quickly and we were moving the injured with whatever we could find —sheets from our homes,” he said. “And then there was no place to take anyone for treatment. People were just laying out all over the dock.”
Another Sapelo resident, Maurice Bailey, indicated the gangway collapsed at an opportune moment in the tide cycle — near low tide, with the outgoing current pushing those in the water to the exposed shell beaches flanking the landing. First responders such as Bailey were able to move several hundred yards along the shore to help those in the water.
With Sapelo’s tides swinging more than 6 feet in a 12-hour span on Saturday, had the incident happened later, the recovery would have been much more challenging.
“We’ve never experienced something like this on Sapelo,” Bailey said. “The aftermath was controlled chaos. Everybody who was able to help, helped. Our training kicked in.”
Bailey declined to comment on the safety concerns expressed by his neighbors, saying “this is not the right time for that.” He did note that a gangway is like a bridge, designed to carry people as they walk back and forth from one end or the other and not for people to stand stationary on, as about 40 would-be ferry passengers were on Saturday.
“I’m not an engineer and I don’t know if all that weight caused it to fail or not,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s designed for that.”
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