DUNDALK — A few hours after Teresita Santana and her family drove across the Francis Scott Key Bridge, they felt their house shake.
“As if something had exploded,” Santana said.
Santana and her family, including her children and mother, got back to their home in Dundalk late Monday night after a trip to Washington, D.C., to get their passports and see the cherry blossoms. It was only a few hours after they crossed the Key Bridge on their way home that the bridge collapsed.
Santana was not the only one to feel her house shake, waking up to a loud boom as a container ship slammed into the iconic bridge just before 1:30 a.m. Tuesday. Within seconds, the bridge crumpled into the chilly waters of the Patapsco River at the entrance to the Baltimore Harbor.
Tuesday morning, Santana looked out on the now collapsed bridge from a hill on Dundalk Avenue, across the street from the Logan Village Shopping Center.
“It was scary because it could have been us,” Santana said.
Santana wasn’t the only one looking at what’s left of the I-695 bridge. People filtered in and out Tuesday morning to see it for themselves. “Shock” was a word repeated often.
“Shock and dismay,” were the words Judy Corkhum used to describe the emotions of residents she had talked to.
“Nobody in a million years thought we would wake up this morning to something like that,” said Corkhum, who also viewed the collapsed bridge from off Dundalk Avenue. “It brings back emotions from 9/11. ... You saw that and the first thing you think is, ‘Oh my god. The people. The workers.’”
Corkhum, who recently moved to Baltimore from Dundalk, said she heard about the bridge collapse via a text from a neighbor at 4 a.m. Tuesday. She said her friend’s son, a truck driver, “literally just got over the bridge before it happened.”
“She said, ‘I was having a heart attack this morning thinking he was out on the road last night,’” Corkhum said.
Corkhum said her friend went into surgery this morning, so she was happy to know her son was OK.
Anthony Meeks, a Dundalk native, said he heard about the collapse as soon as he woke up.
“The Key Bridge is a very iconic piece of Dundalk,” he said. “It’s something that everybody who’s from Dundalk or this city even has at one point in their life crossed.”
Meeks remembers being scared to cross the bridge when he was younger. These days, he crosses it every two weeks.
“It (will) make me go out of my way to find a different path to get to where I need to go,” he said about the collapse. “It could make my trips be a lot longer.”
Meeks called the incident an eye opener.
“Because it’s like you don’t really expect these kinds of tragedies and stuff to happen and occur in your neighborhood,” he said.
Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society President Jean Walker said this is the first time Dundalk has experienced a large disaster like this.
Historical Society Vice President Joe Stadler called the event “unbelievable.”
“It takes a while to fathom it,” he said.
For both Walker and Stadler, the bridge has been a big part of Dundalk. They said the founder of the Historical Society, Ben Womer, was “instrumental” in getting the bridge named after Francis Scott Key, the author of the national anthem.
“It’s the backdrop for everything around here,” Stadler said about the bridge.
Standing on the hill, looking at the wreckage of the bridge, Corkhum said she had to make the trip from her new home in Baltimore to see what had happened with her own eyes.
“I’m so used to seeing that pretty view out there every day,” she said. “It’s going to be horrible seeing that no view anymore.”
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