PORT ISABEL — Time may have dulled some of the pain from the deaths of eight people killed in the Sept. 15 partial collapse of the Queen Isabella Causeway in 2001.
But residents and leaders here are not going to forget.
Local officials were in attendance Thursday morning along with a large contingent of police officers and firefighters, the latter hoisting a giant American flag on their ladder truck that hung nearly still in the windless morning.
Bagpipers played a solemn musical epitaph for the eight people who lost their lives, as well as for their surviving family members.
“You want to have this event to remember those who were lost,” Port Isabel Mayor Martin Cantu Jr. said. “To give not hope for the family members, but at least you get to mourn with them and let them know we haven’t forgotten, and we’re never going to forget.
“We’re going to keep them in our prayers and thoughts and try to do this every year, whether it be on South Padre Island or here, but we want to show them it wasn’t just devastating for the family members, but for all of us,” he added.
The early-morning tragedy occurred Sept. 15, 2001, and was lost to most of the world, if not the Rio Grande Valley, by coming just four days after 9/11.
The eight who were killed met their fates in the pre-dawn darkness, plunging through a 240-foot gap in the Queen Isabella Causeway when part of the structure collapsed after being struck by an ocean-going barge.
Six vehicles plunged into the Laguna Madre, with three people surviving.
Killed were Robert “Bob” Harris, Hector Martinez Jr., “Harpoon” Barry Welch and Chelsea Welch, all of Port Isabel, and Julio Mireles of Los Fresnos, Robin Leavell of Mercedes, Stvan Francisco Rivas of Humble and Gaspar S. Hinojosa of Kingsville.
The causeway was renamed the Queen Isabella Memorial Bridge.
If any positives came from the tragic deaths it may be seen in new safety measures, said John Sandoval, assistant city manager in Port Isabel.
“Coming from those events there’s lighting on the causeway and it also has a seismic system to be able to identify any movements or shifts or movements in the bridge, anything that’s large enough will automatically shut the causeway down, or we send an alert to our CAD (computer-aided dispatch) system at the PD and of course we shut down the causeway,” Sandoval said.
In the aftermath of the causeway’s partial collapse, cooperation became instantly necessary, and it brought the cities of Port Isabel, South Padre Island and Laguna Vista closer.
“The relationship between South Padre Island and Port Isabel hadn’t been that great in the past,” Mayor Cantu said. “Now, we’re there, we have a great relationship with them.
“When this happened, we needed to come together, and the community came together as a whole and helped out, whether it was the ferries moving people back and forth, trying to get people across, and fixing the causeway itself,” the mayor added. “The county did a great job too, stepping in. So we all came together.”
