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Webber falls ok police department4/30/2023 ![]() ![]() Unable to capture the attention of the oncoming traffic with their voices, Wilhoit and Washburn pulled their boat back away from the bridge so they could try and see the top of the bridge better. “What we came to realize was that there were more and more cars coming off the bridge, and that was the frustrating part.” “At first it was just disbelief, like it was in slow motion,” said Washburn. ![]() “They just crested the arch and went off.” ![]() “I think the semis were the most dramatic,” he said. Wilhoit estimated that he saw at least nine vehicles pile over the end of the broken bridge, including several semi trucks. For several minutes they watched helplessly as cars, trucks and semitrailers continued to plunge some 62 feet down into the river. It was a futile effort no one could see or hear them. Wilhoit and Washburn maneuvered up to the bridge and began yelling and screaming in an attempt to get traffic to stop. Several tournament boats in the area – including those occupied by Wilhoit and Washburn, and Barton and Graham – saw what happened and moved into action. When they hit the water, there would be an explosion of water and then there wouldn’t be anything – no bobbing or anything. They were just driving off into thin air. “They would come off the bridge and go a long ways,” said Washburn. Vehicles moving at 70 mph close to the collapse didn’t have a chance. The break occurred at an arch where the road comes to a rise, particularly for westbound traffic. The way the bridge collapsed and the way the roadway is situated left travelers with zero warning that they were about to plunge into the river. According to transportation officials, the bridge has an average traffic count of 18,500 vehicles per day in the westbound lanes and 19,200 in the eastbound lanes. Situated not too far from the Arkansas border, that section of highway is part of the main artery carrying traffic between Oklahoma and Arkansas. The I-40 bridge over the Arkansas River is located about a hundred miles east of Oklahoma City. Said Barton, “They just kept plunging off the bridge. “As we were running over there, we saw one truck with a horse trailer go off the east side of the bridge, then a motor home,” said Washburn. “We fired up the (boat) motor and we were there in 15 seconds.” “All I could think of was to get over there as quick as we could,” Wilhoit said. Then we realized that they were cars going down.” “I thought it had blown up and those were pieces of the bridge hitting the water. ![]() “I kept seeing splash, splash, splash,” said Barton. The crash caused a 580-foot gap to open up as the bridge collapsed into the river below. About 170 boats had taken off from the nearby river town of Webbers Falls earlier that morning.Īt 7:45 a.m., a hundred-foot tugboat pushing two 500-ton barges slammed into bridge supports on the western end of the 2,000-foot span of I-40 over the Arkansas River. They were all fishing in a Jimmy Houston Outdoors team tournament that Sunday. I just turned to my partner and said, `I-40 just fell.'” “I knew right away what it was when I saw it happen, but I didn’t comprehend it. “I grew up here,” said Barton, who calls nearby Vian, Okla., home. When we turned around we were looking for a bad accident or something on the bridge, but it was in the process of collapsing.” “Actually, we could even feel it,” said Wilhoit, also from Harrah. “It didn’t sound like there was any metal scraping or anything like that.” “We just heard a low boom,” said Washburn, who hails from the Oklahoma City suburb of Harrah. were running south at close to 70 mph toward the same bridge. At the same time about 600 yards upriver, anglers Randy Graham and Norman Barton Jr. Oklahoma bass anglers Alton Wilhoit and Kirk Washburn had just set up camp along the bank of the Arkansas River about a hundred yards north of the Interstate 40 bridge that spans the river in eastern Oklahoma. It was 7:45 Sunday morning, May 26, Memorial Weekend. Bass anglers save lives following Oklahoma bridge collapse ![]()
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