Dock tragedy is latest chapter in Gullah Geechee community’s long struggle

For the young daughters of Michael and Kimberly Wood, it was their first time at the annual festival celebrating the culture of the Gullah Geechee community on Georgia’s remote Sapelo Island, the birthplace of their maternal grandmother and other descendants of enslaved Africans.

After a day of storytelling, poetry, religious dance and hope-filled spirituals a week ago Saturday, the Woods, other family members and dozens of festival goers waited on a floating dock and adjoining gangway for the scenic ferry ride to the mainland across marshy Doboy Sound.

A loud cracking sound and a sudden shifting of the gangway were the only warning before the relatively new dockside aluminum walkway plunged into the water about 60 miles south of Savannah. The collapse killed seven people, injured several others and gave his two girls what Michael Wood said was their first glimpse of the Gullah Geechee community’s longtime heartache and resilience.

“It’s that fight to survive,” said Wood, a quality assurance engineer who slid down the collapsed gangway, snatched his 74-year-old mother out of the water and handed her to a stranger on the dock.

Wood said he unsuccessfully attempted to reach his 8-year-old daughter Hailey, who was eventually rescued by the boyfriend of a relative as she clung to part of the dock. His wife Kimberly, clinging to their 2-year-old daughter Riley and using a book bag as a flotation device, drifted away in the strong current before another stranger pulled them safely to shore.

The October 19 tragedy is the latest chapter in the struggles of one of the last surviving Gullah Geechee communities in the Georgia Sea Islands. These descendants of Africans who were enslaved on coastal plantations in the Southeast have fought to preserve their ways of life amid what they describe as a long-standing policy of neglect by state and county officials.

“The call that the community has to its preservation is strong and runs deep, even risking their lives to save a life,” said Joyce White, a professor and interim director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Center at Georgia Southern University. “The risk of life, or death in this instance, is for future survival.”

Four women and three men, all of them older than 70, were killed in the collapse, which the head of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources said appears to have been caused by a “catastrophic failure of the gangway.” An engineering and design firm will conduct an independent investigation in the cause, the DNR said Friday.

The victims were identified as Jacqueline Crews Carter, 75; Cynthia Gibbs, 74; William Johnson Jr., 73; Carlotta McIntosh, 93; Isaiah Thomas, 79; Queen Welch, 76; and Charles L. Houston, 77. They had traveled to the festival from Jacksonville, Florida, Atlanta and Darien, Georgia.

Gangway inspected in 2022 after a ‘loud noise’

Those who died were among 700 visitors to the island for the annual Cultural Day celebration, which residents said used to attract as many as 2,000 people. Only 29 original descendants remain in the small hamlet known as Hogg Hummock or Hog Hammock, where their enslaved ancestors settled after being forcibly brought there in 1802. The state now owns most of the island.

As festival goers waited to board a ferry returning to the mainland, the gangway came down. At least 20 people plunged into the Duplin River, officials said. There were as many as 40 people on the walkway at the time.

The ferry dock was rebuilt in 2021 after a group of Gullah Geechee residents reached multimillion-dollar settlement with the state over what they claimed in a 2019 lawsuit were soaring property taxes and inferior treatment compared to the residents on the mainland. In 2015 federal civil rights claims, residents said they were paying high property taxes and receiving inadequate services including “water, emergency medical, fire, road maintenance, trash, and accessible ferry services to members of the community.”

The lawsuit against the state was settled in 2020 and the case against the county was settled two years later. The state settlement included the construction of the dock and “new aluminum gangways” as well as improved ferry service.

“There should be very, very little maintenance to an aluminum gangway like that,” DNR Commissioner Walter Rabon told reporters last Sunday, adding there were “almost daily” visual inspections of the structure.

The gangway passed four safety inspections since 2022, DNR said in a statement on Thursday. A subcontractor inspected the structure in May 2022, one day after the agency was “made aware of a loud noise that had been heard by a group on the gangway,” according to the statement.

The May 2022 inspection and a follow-up later that year in December both found “no structural concerns with the gangway,” said the agency, which owns and runs the docks and ferries. Two additional inspections were conducted after recent hurricanes Helene and Milton and “no concerns” were identified, the statement said.

The cause of the collapse is also being looked at by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump – who is representing relatives of some victims – as well as a number of island residents have called for a federal probe.

‘See where their grandmother grew up’

A week ago Saturday, Michael and Kimberly Wood, their two daughters, his mother Susie, and several other family members arrived on Sapelo from their homes throughout the state. The barrier island, about 7 miles off the coast of Georgia, is accessible only by boat or ferry.

“I wanted my daughters to experience Cultural Day and see where their grandmother grew up,” Michael Wood said.

On the way back after the event, however, the gangway collapsed and Wood, 43, said his family got a firsthand look at the resilience and strength of an imperiled community that refuses to go away.

“A lot of people that attended the festival jumped into action,” he said. “People were falling into the water and screaming everywhere. And others rushed over from the festival to save anyone that they could.”

Video footage from the scene showed people desperately clinging to a section of the walkway, which hung at a steep angle in the water. Others in the water were dragged away by the current. Still, people dove in to help. Some hurled life jackets into the water as survivors drifted away.

Wood said he learned from his sister on the shore that his 8-year-old daughter had been rescued. He ran up and down the rugged shoreline, desperately looking for Kimberly and Riley, shouting out their names and fearing the worst. “My heart was just dropping,” he said. His sister, a nurse, performed CPR on a number of people along the way.

Eventually, the couple, their daughters and other family members were reunited and tightly held one another with tears in their eyes.

“The visitors and everybody at the event jumped in quickly,” said Kimberly Wood, 42, her voice still shaky days after the tragedy.

“They basically took over. They were throwing life vests. We drifted very far away and I had to wait for a life vest to float over to me. I’m thankful for all the visitors and the descendants for their quick action. I do not know their names, maybe their faces, but thank you.”

‘We would want the same type of response’

J.R. Grovner, 44, who runs an island tour company and had his boat at the dock, said the initial rescue efforts in the first 30 to 45 minutes after the gangway collapse involved mostly locals and festival goers. Vessels and a helicopter from the Coast Guard and DNR appeared later, he said. Others who were there gave similar accounts.

“For almost an hour we had hell on Sapelo … and it was being tended to by civilians,” he said.

The DNR said other emergency agencies assisted with the deployment of boats equipped with side-scan sonar and helicopters for search and rescue missions. But officials have not released a specific timeline of the those efforts.

“This is part of our ongoing investigation. We will provide additional updates as they are made available,” DNR Deputy Commissioner Trevor Santos said in an email Friday.

At a news conference after the collapse, Rabon, the DNR commissioner, thanked civilians who took time to help. “Their quick response and action saved additional lives,” he said.

Grovner said when he arrived at the dock shortly after the collapse, he noticed someone had loosened his boat, which had drifted away because they had been unable to start its engine. “It was like a horror scene in a movie,” he said, noting that he momentarily attempted to revive a person on the shore.

He jumped in the water. Another boater picked him up and delivered Grovner to his own vessel, where he said he found a cousin performing CPR on two people who were already dead. They returned to the dock area and left the two bodies on the shore. Grovner said he then heard his goddaughter yell at him: Her 2-month-old daughter was unconscious after falling in the water.

Grovner took the baby into his speed boat. A woman at the scene left her child with one of his relatives and volunteered to give the girl CPR as he raced to the mainland. His goddaughter suffered a fractured knee in the collapse. He left her baby girl in the hands of paramedics on the mainland, he said. She survived.

The other day, Grovner recalled, his granddaughter told him she doubts she’ll return to Sapelo. “You don’t want to hear somebody say that when their roots are from the island,” he said.

The day of the collapse Grovner eventually returned to the dock area, where he and others covered some bodies with blankets. They also used blankets to carry the injured to boats waiting to transport them to the mainland for emergency care, he said.

Reginald Hall, 59, an island native who helped chronicle the claims and organize the residents involved in the lawsuits, joined Grovner at a news conference last weekend. They demanded answers from state and county officials.

“What I saw that day was the human fabric pull together and have an opportunity to make every effort they could – we could – to place ourselves not only in the shoes of the people who were suffering, but to place ourselves inside the rescue effort and say, if that were us, we would want the same type of response,” Hall told CNN.

White, the Georgia Southern University professor, added: “The Gullah Geechee community has always had to fight for their survival. And the assaults on the culture are unceasing.”

CNN’s Dalia Faheid, Ashley R. Williams, Michelle Watson, Melissa Alonso, Sharif Paget, Sarah Dewberry, Zoe Sottile, Philip Wang, Chandelis Duster, Adeline Chen, Teo Kermeliotis, Emma Tucker, Nicole Chavez, Devon Sayers, Kia Fatahi, Nick Valencia and Zenebou Sylla contributed to this report.