Summer Street Bridge disaster
Summer Street Bridge disaster | |
---|---|
City Point to Downtown | |
Operator | Boston Elevated Railway |
Statistics | |
Deaths | 46 |
On November 7, 1916, a streetcar loaded with passengers ran off the open Summer Street Bridge, a drawbridge, into Fort Point Channel near downtown Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Forty-six passengers were killed, making it the deadliest disaster in Boston's history until surpassed by the Cocoanut Grove fire in 1942.
Background
By 1916, the
The line from
Incident
At 5:13 pm on November 7, 1916, Car #393 began an inbound run from City Point with
The bridge was in the midst of opening to allow a ship to pass; the inbound roadway was already slid to its furthest position. Walsh failed to obey a small stop sign located at Melcher Street, though he slowed for a boarding passenger. Walsh noticed the open bridge too late to stop; the wheels locked and the streetcar crashed through a set of metal gates and into the channel. Heavy with passengers, it sank quickly into the cold waters of the channel, some 30 feet (9.1 m) deep.[2]
Walsh, McKeon, and around fifteen passengers managed to escape the car and were rescued by tugboats and passing pedestrians. Forty-six passengers drowned, many still inside the crowded streetcar.[2]
Aftermath
Divers from the Hugh Nawn company began work at 9 pm; bodies were removed from the wreckage from 10 pm to 12:40 am. Forty-five bodies were discovered in the channel and the sunken streetcar; the forty-sixth victim did not wash ashore until May 1917. Boston newspapers, each vying for the best story, reported body counts as high as 60. The streetcar was removed from the channel at 3:30 am by a crane on the wrecking lighter Admiral.[2]
Boston's Public Service Commission ruled the accident to be the fault of Walsh for failing to stop at the posted sign, but noted that such signs were hard to notice and that many drawbridges lacked them entirely. Walsh went on trial for manslaughter in October 1917, with witnesses differing on many aspects of the accident.[2] The bridge tenders claimed the required red lantern had been hung on the gate to warn streetcars of the open bridge, but Walsh claimed he saw no such lantern. Some questioned how the glass lantern had survived the impact of the trolley with the gates, which broke a 4-inch (100 mm) iron post in two; they alleged that the bridge tenders may have actually hung it after the accident.[4] Walsh was declared not guilty, but he never ran a streetcar again and died around 1932 at age 41. McKeon died in combat in France in July 1918.[2]
The disaster was the first major accident involving the BERy.
Car #393 was returned to service but most operators refused to run it; it was converted to a work car and later scrapped. The streetcar route was converted to bus on June 20, 1953. After several reroutings between 1968 and 2005, the modern
See also
- List of bridge disasters
References
- ISBN 9780738504629.
- ^ Boston Globe. Retrieved November 7, 2016.
- ^ a b "Fatal Drawbridge Accident At Boston". Electric Railway Journal. 48 (20): 1034. November 11, 1916 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ "Trolley Car Victims Buried". The Telegraph. November 11, 1916. p. 7 – via Google Newspapers.
- ^ Belcher, Jonathan (September 30, 2016). "Changes to Transit Service in the MBTA district 1964–2016" (PDF). NETransit.
External links
- Boston Globe coverage on the 100th anniversary: article, images, list of victims