Russ Bynum and Emily Wagster Pettus of the Associate Press are reporting Georgia authorities said Sunday they are investigating the “catastrophic failure” of a dock gangway that collapsed and killed seven people on Sapelo Island, an island off the state’s Atlantic seacoast, where crowds gathered for a celebration by the island’s tiny Gullah-Geechee community of Black slave descendants.
Accessible only by passenger ferry, Sapelo is a state-managed barrier island, the fourth largest in the chain of coastal Georgia islands between the Savannah and St. Marys rivers.
There has been some speculation as to why the dock collapsed, but according to this article, a structural failure caused the tragedy.
“It is a structural failure. There should be very, very little maintenance to an aluminum gangway like that, but we’ll see what the investigation unfolds,” Georgia Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Walter Rabon said at a news conference, a day after the tragedy on Sapelo Island.
Benjamin Payne of GPB is reporting, a resident of Southeast Georgia’s Sapelo Island in McIntosh County said that he warned the Georgia Department of Natural Resources last summer that the agency’s ferry dock gangway on the island was in poor condition.
JR Grovner told GPB that he notified a DNR captain three or four months ago that he thought it was in poor condition.
“I said, ‘This dock is going to collapse;’ I sure did,” Grovner said of the aluminum gangway. “I was walking on it, and it was bouncing. So, I stood in the middle of it and bounced up and down for the captain. And he said, ‘Ah, it ain’t going nowhere.’ Yeah. Look what happened.”
McIntosh County Coroner Melvin Amerson on Sunday confirmed the identities of the seven people who died in the dock collapse as:
- Jacqueline Crews Carter, 75, of Jacksonville, FL
- Cynthia Gibbs, 74, of Jacksonville, FL
- William Johnson, Jr., 73, of Atlanta
- Isaiah Thomas, 79, of Jacksonville, FL
- Carlotta McIntosh, 93, of Jacksonville, FL
- Charles Houston, 77, of Darien, GA
- Queen Welch, 76, of Atlanta
Home to about 30 full-time residents, Sapelo Island is among the nation’s last intact communities of Gullah Geechee people — descendants of enslaved West Africans who scholars say were able to maintain many of their native customs because they worked on relatively remote island plantations, including on Sapelo Island.
This story is developing.
This news alert was curated by Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D., founder & editor-in-chief of The Burton Wire. Follow Nsenga on social media @Ntellectual.
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