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SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLERAs highway officials tried to defuse fears of falling concrete, some commuters said the collapse won't affect their drives.
TAMPA - Mary Lou Luce, a retired Apollo Beach resident who takes the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway to Tampa International Airport and Hyde Park shops, figures she'll keep using the highway despite Tuesday's sinkhole mess.
And when the reversible elevated expressway being built in the Crosstown median opens next summer, she might even use that, too.
Even so, news that a bridge support for the commuter expressway under construction dropped 20 feet into a sinkhole Tuesday morning has made her uneasy about traveling that route.
"It's kind of like flying," said Luce, 64. "You either don't do it, or you do it but you're white-knuckled the whole way. This whole thing is scary. It really is."
Pat McCue, executive director of the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority, tried Wednesday to convince drivers that there's nothing scary about the Crosstown or the expressway being built above it.
He insisted that when the Crosstown reopens to normal traffic Monday morning, and when the double-decker expressway opens next summer, drivers can use them without fear of another sinkhole.
Yet he conceded one of the authority's greatest challenges in the months ahead will be convincing the public to actually use the toll roads between Tampa and Brandon without fear of flying, falling concrete.
McCue started the no-fear campaign during a press conference Wednesday. He and Linda Figg, head of the bridge design firm Figg Engineering, stood before reporters and cameras and vowed that safety is "the No. 1 priority." Figg said the segmental design - it is made of 3,000 precast pieces fit together like a puzzle - did "exactly what it was supposed to do" when the sinkhole opened up.
McCue said the segments of the 6-mile elevated expressway already built "have experienced the greatest stress they'll ever experience" and show no signs of sinkholes. As the authority moves ahead with the remainder of the project, it will take further safety measures, McCue said.
One option under consideration is to bore deeper into the ground to set the piers into place.
Scott Laugherty commutes every day from his Brandon home to north St. Petersburg, where he works at Jabil Circuit.
He did not hide his annoyance with the sinkhole-related traffic delays Wednesday morning, when it took him two hours to get to work.
But Laugherty said he'll use the elevated expressway when it opens.
"Even though the bridge did collapse, the entire thing is still intact," he said. "It did not break in two - it bent. To me that says a lot about the integrity of it. So no, it's not going to bother me to get onto that bridge."
McCue can only hope more drivers think like Laugherty.
"You don't live your life with the expectation of winning the lottery," he said. "You certainly can't live it with the expectation of the bridge falling. What are you going to do? Never go on a bridge again? Well, you'll have trouble getting home tonight."
- Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at 813226-3373 or svansickler@sptimes.com