ATLANTA — The families of the people who died when a gangway collapsed last fall on Georgia’s Sapelo Island have filed a lawsuit in Gwinnett County against the companies that designed and built it.
Channel 2’s Berndt Petersen reports that the lawsuit suit alleges the structure was not safe.
Regina Brinson, who was on the structure when it collapsed, calls it a bad dream, except it was all too real.
“And all of a sudden, I heard a crack. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’” she said at a news conference Wednesday announcing the lawsuit.
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Brinson was in the middle of an 80-foot gangway that collapsed into the Duplin River on Sapelo Island last October.
Twenty people went into the water. Seven people died.
“This tragedy was totally preventable,” civil rights and personal injury attorney Ben Crump said. He’s representing four of the families.
At Martin Luther King Park Jr. National Park in northeast Atlanta, he announced lawsuits against the bridge designers and builders.
The lawsuit claims that although the gangway was only a few years old, it was not safe. While it was supposed to be able to hold a 100 pounds of weight per square foot, it couldn’t support even one-third of that.
The collapse that claimed seven lives and left others injured happened as hundreds gathered for the annual Cultural Day event honoring the Gullah-Geechee community.
Brinson said she lost her uncle in the collapse, and though she tried to save him, she could only save herself.
“I said, ‘Grab my hand.’ He grabbed my hand, but he also grabbed (my shirt) and he kept pulling me and pulling me and pulling me under the water. And I said to myself under the water, I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m getting ready to die.”
Killed in the collapse were Jacqueline Crews Carter, 75, of Jacksonville; Cynthia Gibbs, 74, of Jacksonville; Charles L. Houston, 77, of Darien, Georgia; William Johnson, Jr., 73, of Atlanta; Carlotta McIntosh, 92, of Jacksonville; Isaiah Thomas, 79, Jacksonville; and Queen Welch, 76, Atlanta.
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