SAPELO ISLAND, Ga. — What went wrong that led to the deaths of seven people in Georgia last weekend when a gangway to a floating dock collapsed on Sapelo Island?
The gangway was built in November 2021 and inspected last December, according to the Georgia Division of Natural Resources.
“How could this have happened with a three-year-old dock?” asked Reginald Hall, a Sapelo Island resident and advocate.
A DNR spokesperson said the cause of the collapse is still under investigation. While awaiting responses on a number of public records requests, First Coast News brought Hall’s question to Jacksonville structural engineer Ron Woods.
“The length of the gangway, it’s pretty long,” Woods said.
The aluminum gangway was 80 feet long and eight-feet wide, according to the Georgia Division of Natural Resources. It connected from a dock to a floating dock where people would load onto a ferry. It apparently collapsed in the middle. Woods wonders about the welding there.
“It’s not very old so I wouldn’t expect fatigue to be that much of an issue unless there was some type of fabrication anomaly that was built into this when it was constructed,” he said.
According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, water levels at the gangway normally fluctuate up to six feet twice a day. After Hurricane Milton, they fluctuated up to nine feet.
“Six to nine feet is a significant movement for, essentially, any structure," Woods said.
Woods said that can put stress on the gangway.
“If there was an anomaly of some sort in the fabrication, then that all gets magnified by the movement and the span of the gangway,” he said.
A combination of the movement with water level fluctuations and the length of the gangway, coupled with any possible fabrication problem, could have led to the collapse, Woods hypothesizes. The Georgia DNR and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation are still conducting their investigation into the cause of the collapse.
The gangway was created to hold 64,000 pounds, which would have been hundreds of people, according to the Georgia DNR’s engineering firm. There were 20 to 40 people on it at the time of the collapse, a DNR spokesperson said.