Walking on a portion of the Interstate 40 bridge, Bob Doucette looked down the sloped road as it plunged into the Arkansas River.
Twenty years later, the imageand the terrorremain sharp in Doucette’smemory.
“If you look across the broken span, you see the chasm opening up before you,” he said. “... I just can’t imagine how terrifying that must have been for those people.”
Doucette, an editorial writer and columnist for the Tulsa World, was working for The Oklahoman in 2002 when a barge hit the Interstate 40 bridge, killing 14 people as cars, trucks and semis fell into the river.
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The aftermath of Webbers Falls bridge collapse
The Oklahoman sent Doucette with a team of reporters to cover the aftermath of the tragedy. Along with examining the damage, he spent days in Webbers Falls, interviewing officials and emergency responders.
Doucette described the scene as crowded and likely overwhelming with many first responders and journalists pouring into the town of less than a thousand people.
Remembering the scene, he thought about the drivers, especially those who came upon the bridge shortly after the collapse.
“They couldn’t really see what was happening,” Doucette said. “... They probably just rolled right up on it and had no idea what was happening until it was too late.”
Remembering the victims of I-40 bridge disaster
The Oklahoman’s coverage of the 14 people killed in the bridge collapse was informed by previous tragedies in the state: the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the May 3, 1999 tornado.
Rather than simply stating the facts of someone’slife, the reporters worked to humanize each person through the stories of those who loved them, Doucette said.
“A lot of times, with these types of deals, they’re a name, a face, an age and where they are from,” he said. “Their identity gets trappedin what happened to them. If that’s as far as you go, it’s a little bit of a disservice.
“When you try to understand who these people are – and that often means calling their families, sometimes their friends, trying to get an idea of who they are as a person outside of the tragedy – that is a very helpful thing to the folks who are left behind.”
Doucette added that this experience of sharing their loved one’s story can be cathartic for those who are grieving.
“They get a chance to talk about somebody that they love and know in a way that goes beyond what happened to them,” he said.
Emphasizing the importance of infrastructure
After the bridge was repaired, Doucette would cross I-40 when covering other stories and remember interacting with first responders following the tragedy.
“The little, tiny, edgy feeling I had maybe for a year or two going back that way, cringing as you go across the bridge … that’s just a tiny, tiny fraction of what some other folks have to deal with on a daily basis,” he said. “It adds up for them.”
Doucette said that Oklahoma officials are seeking to address the impact of trauma on first responders by increasing access to mental health resources.
One of the key things Doucette remembers from his reporting was the importance of paying attention to those who manage infrastructure.
Doucette saw parallels during the historic flooding in 2019 across the Arkansas River watershed and when barges collided with the Webbers Falls Dam.
“Traffic goes up and down that waterway on a daily basis without incident, but you have to design that stuff in such a way that if the worst does happen, that infrastructure can handle it,” Doucette said.
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He said the public and media should keep tabs on and ask questions about major engineering projects.
“It’s expensive to deal with stuff like that, but you can’t let the day-to-day humdrum of everything going like it’s supposed to outweigh yearly chipping away at the structural integrity of dams, levees or things like that,” he said. “... It’s way better to spend the money now and make sure that it’s safe than to wait for something bad to happen again.”
