Relatives of seven people who drowned in waters off a Georgia island after a ferry dock walkway collapsed announced Wednesday they filed a lawsuit against the companies that designed and built it.
Dozens of people were standing on the metal walkway over the water between a ferry boat and a dock on Sapelo Island when it snapped in the middle. Many plunged into the water and got swept away by tidal currents, while others clung desperately to the hanging, fractured structure.
The tragedy Oct. 19 struck as about 700 people visited Sapelo Island for a celebration of the tiny Hogg Hummock community founded by enslaved people who were emancipated after the Civil War. Reachable only by boat, it’s one of the few Gullah-Geechee communities remaining in the South, where slaves worked on isolated island plantations retained much of their African heritage.
“It was supposed to be a celebration of Black pride, but it became a day of great, great, great Black loss of humanity and life,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers behind the lawsuit, told an Atlanta news conference. “We’re filing this lawsuit to speak to that tragedy.”
Attorneys for the families of those killed and more than three dozen survivors say the 80-foot (24-meter) walkway was weak because of a lack of structural reinforcement, poor welding and failure by the Georgia firm that built it to follow design plans.
The walkway was “so poorly designed and constructed that any competent construction professional should have recognized the flimsy and unstable nature of the gangway,” the lawsuit says.
Regina Brinson, one of the suing survivors, said she was on the crowded walkway when she heard a loud crack and saw family friend Carlotta McIntosh plunge into the water holding her walker. Brinson and her uncle, Isaiah Thomas, also fell. Brinson recalled prying her uncle’s fingers from her shirt to avoid being dragged underwater. Both Thomas and McIntosh died.
