‘How did it break?’: Turner Station Girl Scouts visit Key Bridge wreckage

The Porter House nosed out of Jones Creek, threaded Old Road Bay and motored toward the expanse of the Patapsco River, where the Francis Scott Key Bridge once loomed over the horizon. But all the Girl Scouts onboard could see were fragments, the roadbed seemingly snapped in two unconnected pieces.

Kira Brooks, 7, had one question: “How did it break?”

Her mother, Berkshire Elementary School Principal Cheryl Brooks, explained that a boat ran into it. On March 26, 2024, the container ship Dali struck the 47-year-old truss bridge. Within seconds, a major transportation artery in the Baltimore region folded like an accordion.

The collapse killed six workers and incapacitated one of the county’s biggest ports. More than two years later, with a rebuild still years away, its absence has complicated travel patterns from Dundalk to Glen Burnie.

Investigators spent months poring over the question Kira Brooks asked, and the answer has resulted in criminal charges and lawsuits. What Kira knows is that she and her mother could see the bridge from their neighborhood. Now they can’t.

The trip to the bridge’s remains was the culmination of a summer partnership between the Girl Scouts of Turner Station and the Pleasant Yacht Club, a historically Black marina and clubhouse at Sparrows Point. Arkia Wade, who leads the troop, and Lafon Porter, a longtime captain with the club, wanted to reconnect Turner Station children with the waters that were crucial to the community’s origins.

Porter and his fellow commodores took the girls fishing, many for the first time. They toured a Maryland Department of Natural Resources boat to learn about boating safety.

“I love creating firsts for the children,” said Wade, who is running for County Council in November. “They live on a peninsula, so connecting them to the water was one of the things I was looking for.”

Tradepoint Atlantic, the logistics hub in Sparrows Point, connected Wade with the yacht club, which she hadn’t known about. Tradepoint already had a relationship with the Girl Scouts. The yacht club has long been involved in civic life at The Point.

The Girl Scout partnership marks something of a turnaround in the yacht club’s relationship with Tradepoint. A year ago, Tradepoint — which leases the land to the club — was planning to end the lease for Pleasant Yacht Club and North Point Yacht Club, the historically white marina next door. The logistics juggernaut wanted to donate the Pleasant Yacht Club’s property to Baltimore County for a boat ramp and deposit dredge material at North Point.

Porter led both clubs in fighting the plan. They are still negotiating the lease agreement with Tradepoint, but he feels optimistic.

“Nobody understands what we have until they come out here and they touch it. We have the trifecta — we are a Black yacht club that has the land, the clubhouse and all the boats in one place. No other place has that,” he said. “And that’s why it is worth fighting for.”

Porter added that building such a facility would be impossible today because the land is too expensive.

In the 1950s, after Bethlehem Steel built North Point Yacht Club for its white employees, the company would not allow in the six Black steelworkers who asked to join. As a consolation, the company agreed to provide materials and about four acres of land next to North Point where the Black workers could build their own club.

The six men dug the pier with their hands. They fixed up a bungalow that Bethlehem Steel discarded. They engineered a boat lift that would accommodate their vessels.

Descendants of those steelworkers — along with one of the original six, 98-year-old retired ironworker Johnnie Mathis — have been frequenting Pleasant Yacht Club ever since.

Experiencing the water with Black mariners — especially when the captains let the girls steer — is something Cheryl Brooks believes Kira and her twin sister, Kina, won’t soon forget.

“It’s a rare experience, even for me, to see Black captains. And for them to experience it, at age 7, it exposes them to the possibilities of a career. I want them to think, ‘I can be a captain, too,’” she said.

The girls seem to have already decided. Neither wanted to give up the wheel, but Porter and his cousin, Harold, who was driving, told them they couldn’t park the boat.

Nearly everyone in the troop had a Key Bridge story to tell. Their parents felt the bridge collapse, even though most of the Scouts slept through it. Wade had scheduled a Girl Scout meeting the night of the disaster and decided not to cancel it.

Some of the parents said they’d changed employers after the collapse because they couldn’t easily reach jobs in places such as Linthicum and Glen Burnie.

“The noise is different now,” said Wade, who lives about a mile from Turner Station. First, she said, the highway was quiet. Now she can hear the construction work, which is different from the daily hum of past bridge traffic.

For Wade, Porter and their fellow volunteers, the trip to the bridge was the culmination of weeks of logistics: procuring life jackets, recruiting captains and making sure someone brought the water and snacks.

As the sun warmed the Porter House, Lafon Porter showed the twins how a crabber baits and sets trotlines. They passed osprey nests. The girls adjusted their sunglasses, and Lafon Porter high-fived Wade. “Arkia, you did it!”

As for memories, consider them made.

“I never saw a broken bridge in real life before,” Kira Brooks said.

She won’t soon forget it.