Raleigh woman's father traveled over Baltimore bridge hours before collapse
BALTIMORE (WTVD) -- Many ABC11 employees have close ties to the Baltimore area, and one of our workers grew up in Baltimore and her family still lives there. Her father, Kevin Perry, regularly takes the Francis Scott Key Bridge and drove over it just hours before it collapsed.
Perry uses the bridge to get home from the airport, and flew in Monday night, causing him to use the bridge around 11 p.m. The bridge collapsed at 1:30 a.m. the next morning.
"We definitely heard the boom from the house and felt the rumble," Perry told ABC11. "It definitely woke us up."
He later learned what had happened, and it hit close to home.
"There's days where I've been on the bridge waiting for traffic to get over it, so it's kind of scary seeing how it fell and knowing that if it had happened at a time that I was on it, it would've been a bad situation," Perry said.
Perry said he had to take an alternate route to work Tuesday morning and knows traffic will be affected for the foreseeable future.
He also mentioned that aside from the traffic issues and the concerns with the port being closed, the bridge also represents an important part of history for those who live in Baltimore.
It's named after Francis Scott Key because it's believed to be close to where he saw the bombing of Fort McHenry, which inspired him to write the national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner.
