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‘It’s terrifying’: Will Key Bridge collapse increase fear of crossing spans?

Molly Agundez’s fear of bridges was sparked early in life, when she had to hold hands and sing songs in the car to ease her mother’s trepidation.

Later, as a mother herself, Agundez’s thoughts turned to her own three boys. Would she be able to rescue her kids in time if her car launched into the abyss?

Now 57 and living in Chesapeake Beach, Agundez watched a video of the Francis Scott Key Bridge crumbling in Baltimore early last Tuesday morning after being struck by a cargo ship — a bridge she had driven across before — and felt her heart race as she began to cry.

“It’s going to be burned into my brain for a while. It’s terrifying,” said Agundez, who retired as a chief petty officer after 24 years in the Navy and now works as a government contractor.

Some mental health experts say that the collapse of the Key Bridge could exacerbate the uneasiness that many people already feel when crossing bridges.

“Everybody is going to have some little anxiety while driving over bridges,” said Dr. Jyoti Kanwar, a University of Maryland Medical Center psychiatrist and assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “But how does it really amount to phobia? And how do you determine that?”

Avoidance is one telltale sign that a fear may be developing into a more serious phobia that significantly impacts a person’s life, Kanwar said, noting that fears of heights, water and enclosed spaces all can play into gephyrophobia, an intense fear of crossing bridges.

Specific phobias are common and treatable, Kanwar said. A little over 12% of adults in the U.S. are estimated to experience a specific phobia, a kind of anxiety disorder, during any point in their lives, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Kanwar said phobias are most likely to develop if someone has already had anxiety linked with a certain experience, seen a parent deal with anxiety or has had a panic attack associated with a specific place or thing, even if the place or thing didn’t specifically trigger it.

“The closer you are to trauma, the more it impacts you,” she said.

Of the Key Bridge collapse, Kanwar noted that “it will heighten the anxiety. And definitely if somebody has a preexisting panic disorder or a phobia of driving, or a phobia of driving on a bridge, they are going to have a hard time.”

Bonnie Downing, who lives in Pikesville, has been afraid of bridges since she started driving, often feeling like she was holding her breath while crossing a span. When she and a friend drove to Ocean City years ago, they took a route that avoided the Bay Bridge.

Working out of an office in Canton as a manager at a health insurance company, she could see the Key Bridge in the distance. When wind warnings were issued, she was frightened at the thought of the bridge moving.

Downing said “time will tell” if her bridge anxiety worsens.

“My feet are planted firmly on the ground,” she said. “I honestly didn’t know that something like what happened could actually happen.”

There were 35 major bridge collapses worldwide caused by ship or barge collisions from 1960 to 2015, according to a report by the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 610,000 highway bridges, though not all of them pass over waterways.

The catastrophic fall of the Key Bridge isn’t something Nicholas Johnson Sr. could have imagined happening. Johnson, who works in loss prevention for stores across multiple counties, said he took the bridge to work, enjoying the scenic view and marveling at the bridge’s structure.

“The Key Bridge kind of brought a sense of calm,” said Johnson, 33, who lives in Middle River.

His mother has a fear of bridges, but Johnson said he never felt anxiety driving over them — until after the collapse. While traveling across the Governor Thomas Johnson Memorial Bridge spanning the Patuxent River, Johnson said he felt “uneasy” for the first time.

Last week, he bought tools — one to keep in his car and one for his wife’s — to break car windows and cut seat belts.

“It lives in the back of your mind now,” he said about the Key Bridge collapse.

When a major bridge crossing is a must, some apprehensive travelers put the task in professional hands.

Kent Island Express, a company that transports people across the Bay Bridge in their own vehicles, has been fielding more calls for information in the wake of the Key Bridge collapse, said owner Steven Eskew, adding that he thinks the event has made people more nervous.

“There’s always a conversation about the bridge and about the collapse,” said Eskew, 53, who doesn’t get anxious crossing bridges and took over operation of Kent Island Express more than 10 years ago. The majority of his business is Bay Bridge crossings.

For $40 cash or $50 credit, Kent Island Express drivers get behind the wheel of their customers’ cars to drop them off on the other side of the bridge. The company typically makes more than a dozen drives across the Bay Bridge each day; the number can be closer to 35 during the summer, when more people head to the beach.

“It only takes one major event like this for that to be a possibility in people’s minds,” said Tiara Fennell, clinic director of the Center for Healthy Families at the University of Maryland.

Fennell suggested that anyone experiencing day-to-day difficulty with a fear causing severe anxiety should talk to their doctor. She also recommended meditation, taking deep breaths, and various forms of therapy as options to manage or address phobias.

Acknowledging fear is the first step, Fennell said.

Parents should consider monitoring how and what information about the Key Bridge is consumed by their children, said Matt Edelstein, a licensed psychologist and behavior analyst who serves as the director of Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Brief Treatment Clinic.

“Having the wrong information can be as scary as having the right information,” he said, referencing early questions about whether the Key Bridge incident could have been an act of terrorism.

Most children will have questions about what happened, Edelstein said. Parents don’t need to know the answers, he added, but can search for information together with their children. He also suggested that parents and caregivers be mindful of their emotional displays when talking about the Key Bridge with kids.

“We want to show kids that they can be both afraid and safe at the same time,” Edelstein said. “They can be sad and safe at the same time.”

While a fear of bridges has followed Agundez around for much of her life, sometimes inching her close to hyperventilating, it hasn’t always stopped her from crossing them.

In the past, when driving over the Key Bridge, a pep talk did the trick: “It’s like two minutes out of your life, you’ll be fine.”