The View from a Drawbridge

Back in 2022, I wrote a blog post entitled, How Bridgetending Turns into Manslaughter, about Artissua Paulk, a negligent, lying, sorry excuse for a human being who was, unfortunately, allowed to operate (if you could call it that) a drawbridge in West Palm Beach, Florida, and in so doing, managed to kill Carol Wright, a 79-year-old woman. Normally, I wouldn’t be so quick to tar and feather a bridgetender, but Ms. Paulk’s subsequent actions made it impossible to defend her. She is an embarrassment to every conscientious bridgetender, and there really are a lot of us out here.

That tragedy could have been so easily avoided that it breaks my heart every time I think about it. I had managed to put the incident in the furthest reaches of my mind, where all the most upsetting things dwell. It has rarely come to the surface since then. So, imagine my shock when, the other night, at around 2am, I was surfing YouTube, and I stumbled upon this video.

I have to admit, sick puppy that I am, that I love true crime, and I have recently been fascinated by the EWU Bodycam Youtube Channel. They get actual police bodycam and interrogation footage, and each episode reveals some of the very worst of humanity, doing things far beyond anything that even my nightmares could conceive. (We human beings are deluded if we think we’re superior to any other primate, in my opinion.)

Anyway, seeing one of their videos that was about a story that is already burned into my brain rattled me to my core. It also made me realize that I got a few key facts wrong in my first post. I won’t fix them there, because they were “true” based on the available information at the time, but the actual truth makes the situation much, much worse. So I’ll clear some of those inconsistencies up, and then I’ll give you an update as to what became of this despicable bridgetender since this video was produced, along with some insight into the travesty of the State of Florida subcontracting their bridgetenders, as someone who worked 13 years as a bridgetender in Florida.

I urge you to click the link above to go back and read that first post of mine if you’d like full context. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Tap… tap… tap…

Okay, so first, here’s what I got wrong on the original post:

• Yes, the opening procedure on that bridge was to walk out on the balcony and look around three separate times before raising the bridge. I said that she didn’t do that all day long based on a video camera that was on the shoreline. Not true. That footage showed that she did it three times that day. But she had 6 openings that day, so she should have been out there 18 times total. And those three balcony appearances were way earlier in the day, many bridge openings before the fatal one. It’s a miracle that this was the only person who got killed on her watch.
• I said there were no blind spots on that bridge. Well, it seems that there is one. It’s on the sidewalk right below the tower, where Ms. Wright happened to be. But that’s why those operators are required to walk out on the balcony and look around. (Believe me, though, most drawbridges have a lot more blind spots than that, so take those warning signals and gongs and flashing lights seriously and stop outside the gates. Never assume that an operator can see you, for your own safety.)
• I said that the operator tested negative for drugs. I should have known better. It was her supervisor/mother-in-law who took her for the drug test, and she claims that once she saw that Paulk had passed the test, she had discarded the sample and the results. But the supervisor/mother-in-law was the very same woman who had texted Paulk, advising her to lie about going out on the balcony, so she’s not exactly trustworthy. So Paulk may or may not have tested negative for drugs. We’ll never know, now.

I did learn quite a bit more from the video, though.

• Not only did Ms. Wright fall 40-60 feet into the pit below, but she fell headfirst, and died from blunt force trauma to the head, despite the fact that she had been wearing a bicycle helmet. That’s a hard fall.
• In the video, there appears to be a camera on the tower, pointing straight down at that sidewalk, so there shouldn’t be a blind spot. But I see no monitors in the tenderhouse, so, as is typical with Florida bridges, if there really was one (it sure looks like one to me), it must have been out of order and never repaired or replaced.
• I was outraged to discover that Paulk was hired by Florida Drawbridges, Inc one year before the tragedy, but she had a criminal record. She had been on felony charges for possession of Cocaine and Marijuana 8 years prior, but for some reason the charges were dropped. 4 years later, she got a citation for failing to seek medical care for her own dog, despite its leg injury. And she had multiple traffic violations. Stellar individual. She demonstrates the kind of compassion and concern for the safety of others, and the ability to operate machinery safely and responsibly, that every bridgetender should possess. Let’s hire her to ensure the safety of the traveling public!
• The nepotism in this situation is also disgusting, but not unusual with drawbridge subcontractors. Her supervisor was her mother-in-law, and her supervisor’s husband was Paulk’s coworker. So it wouldn’t be surprising if they were adept at looking the other way at her indifference to the rules. 
• Even though the accident happened on January 6, 2022, Paulk and her supervisor were not fired from Florida Drawbridges, Inc until March 22^nd, one week after Paulk was officially arrested and placed on a $20,000 bond. (In fairness, I have no idea if they were suspended with or without pay, or if they were left to continue working, but still, how much more evidence do you need that it was time for this woman to be shown the door? Florida is a right to work state. I’ve witnessed fellow bridgetenders get fired on the spot for simply looking at a supervisor funny.)
• At first, Paulk pleaded not guilty. Then she struck a  deal, pleading guilty to second degree felony manslaughter. On 1/10/23, she was placed on 8 years of probation, ordered to do 200 hours of community service, was banned for life from operating any heavy equipment or machinery, and ordered to write a letter of apology to Carol Wright’s family.
• On April, 2023, she tested positive for drugs, a violation of her probation. Her response? “I’m sorry. I smoke to sleep.”
• She never did any of the community service.
• In the interrogation, she was in tears, and one of the things she said was, “I would trade my life for this lady. I would.” And yet she never wrote the letter of apology to the family. She couldn’t be bothered. Her excuse? Wright wasn’t there. She looked, and she wasn’t there. What kind of magical thinking is that? Did she think Ms. Wright had been conjured out of thin air at the last possible second? 

The video really didn’t make clear that the first guy you see had been in his car, and he was frantically honking his horn. The Hispanic guy was trying to rescue Carol Wright, and I believe there was a third guy (or somehow the Hispanic guy did double duty), who had been using the call box and pounding on the tenderhouse door. And no doubt Ms. Wright was screaming, and she must have risen into view as the bridge rose, so how did the Paulk not see or hear anything, and at the very least, stop and then begin lowering mid-opening?

Guess what. If you look closely at the documents, you see that she was texting with her mother-in-law/supervisor during the opening! You can’t do things like that during an opening. Both she and her mother-in-law were well aware of that, and yet they did it anyway. I have to admire Ms. Paulk’s ability to remain laser-focused on the task at hand. Unfortunately, she felt the task at hand was the text, not the job. And this particular job, if done wrong, can kill people.

So, what happened to Ms. Paulk after this video was produced? According to this article, on top of her other probation violations, she also never paid court fines. That’s a clear indication that she accepted no responsibility whatsoever for what she had done. In December, 2024, a judge sentenced her to 10 years in prison.

What became of Florida Drawbridges, Inc?

• In July, 2022, Carol Wright’s family received an 8.2 million dollar settlement from them.
• In addition, the company is now required to do criminal background checks. (Are you kidding me? They weren’t required to do them before? Coworkers could have been doing one-on-one shift changes on isolated bridges at 11 pm with violent felons without knowing it? Lovely.)
• They also have to give bridgetenders new training, and their bridgetenders are required to watch a 23 minute video on Carol Wright’s life. You can see that video here. In order to honor Ms. Wright’s life, I watched the whole thing, even though I had tears in my eyes the entire time. My heart breaks for her family, and also breaks because some of them are now afraid of drawbridges, and have a low opinion of bridgetenders. But who could blame them?

If you go to the Florida Drawbridges, Inc. website, the first thing you see is the statement, “Ensuring safe passage by land and sea”. Tell that to Carol Wright. I’m sorry to say that they still have drawbridge contracts with the state of Florida.

From what I can tell from the website, that 8.2 million dollar settlement probably felt like a mosquito bite to them. They are deep into Florida Department of Transportation’s pockets. So deep that they’re probably covered with lint. They currently hold the contracts to operate, I believe, about 116 of the approximately 140 drawbridges in Florida. (They also operate 8 in South Carolina, 4 in New Jersey, and 1 in Maine.)

And FDOT? Did they immediately rush out the day after Carol Wright’s death in January, 2022, and do something about that blind spot? There are plenty of things they could have done, anywhere from convex mirrors to periscopes to motion sensors to a camera system. Did they do that? No.

According to this image from Google Maps’ street view in March of 2023, nothing had changed. 14 months after that woman died, they still hadn’t bothered to do a thing to prevent it from happening again. The good news is, as you can see from the Google Maps’ street view image from March of 2024, finally, cameras were installed. Let’s all pray that they keep them operational. Speaking from the experience of having worked for a subcontractor on one of their bridges for 13 years, I can tell you that there’s definitely no guarantee of that.

Yes, Artissua Paulk killed Carol Wright. There’s no getting around that. But there’s a wider issue here. This whole situation springs from a much bigger, systemic rot that can be traced directly to the State of Florida as a political and administrative entity.

Florida should be the flagship that all of us look to for sound management of drawbridges. Florida and Louisiana run neck and neck in terms of the states with the most movable bridges, each with approximately 140. (I can’t say who wins for certain, because while there is an inventory, it’s incomplete. The Federal Highway Administration movable-bridge inventory has to rely on accurate reporting from each state, and each state could have bridges controlled by different entities: Federal, State, County, City, Railroad, or Private. Some are more reliable than others.)

Instead, the State of Florida views their drawbridges as an expensive inconvenience that they’d rather not deal with themselves. They also think bridgetending is a job a trained monkey could do. As long as they think of bridgetenders as glorified security guards who push one button and sleep the rest of the time, rather than as professionals who have to ensure the safety of the traveling public, think independently in thousands of different unexpected situations, act quickly in emergencies, diagnose bridge malfunctions, maintain accurate records and write coherent reports, they’ll never take them seriously. If state drawbridges were run by state employees, the state would have to hire them full time, and give them benefits and retirement and paid vacations and raises on an occasional basis. They also wouldn’t have some other company to blame if something goes terribly wrong.

Florida is a red state. It doesn’t care about the working man or public safety. It’s all about the $$. So they subcontract their bridges, and these contracts usually go to the lowest bidders. Those lowest bidders are usually the largest companies, who gain a bigger and bigger monopoly, and as they spread themselves more thinly, they have less oversight, more delegation, and a whole lot more corners get cut.

And, of course, the contractors want as much of the contract money to go into their pockets in the form of profit as humanly possible, so they trim costs wherever they can. Supplies and equipment are as substandard as they can possibly get away with. And employees bear the brunt of this. That gets worse every year.

I worked for a different subcontractor, and when I started, they were hiring people full time, and we got a tiny bit of sick leave and they offered health insurance with something like a $20,000 deductible if I remember correctly. (Which amounts to no insurance at all, really, unless you”re riddled with cancer, but the contract only required they provide “adequate insurance” but did not define what that meant.) When I started, we were getting about $3 above minimum wage. It wasn’t much, but we were at least able to retain good, reliable people.

But we only got raises when their contracts renewed, and they only renewed every 6 years, so the raises definitely did not keep up with inflation. Then, around 2010, in the midst of red state panic about Obamacare, they thought that they’d have to start providing us with actual, decent healthcare since they had more than 50 full-time employees, so they decided that from then on, they’d only hire part time employees, and wouldn’t give them paid sick leave or any health insurance at all.

As more and more of us full-timers left, employee turnover increased, because who can afford to live on increasingly crappy pay, no benefits, and part time status? I can’t speak for Florida Drawbridges Inc., but I can tell you that as my employers got increasingly desperate for warm bodies, they started hiring whatever drunks they found at the VFW bar.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that there are still good bridgetenders in Florida. People who take their jobs seriously, show up for it, and love what they do. But the way they are treated makes those “keepers” have an increasingly hard time staying, and do you think the perks of the position help attract topnotch professionals who will keep you safe?

Want to hear something disgusting? Based on the few positions Florida Drawbridges, Inc currently has advertised, they are paying their Drawbridge Operators $14.50 an hour, or 50 cents above Florida minimum wage! And not only that, they are only hiring part time, so they can get away with not giving them any benefits.

Contrast that with the City of Seattle, for whom I work now. We are paid as professionals should be paid (about three times as much as Florida bridgetenders are). It’s a union job, so we have security. We get raises regularly. The benefits are phenomenal. Most of us have made it a career, and many have a decade or more of experience.

Here’s a chart that I created so you can see exactly the difference between a state that subcontracts its drawbridges out, and a state that doesn’t. And just so you know, no one has ever been killed by bridgetender negligence in Seattle.

Florida drawbridges open up much more frequently than Seattle drawbridges do, so if anything, those operators should be paid even more and be even more highly trained. They should be given even more job satisfaction so that taxpayers get the benefit of long-term employee experience. But in fact, the very opposite happens. This is shameful.

Bridgetenders should be made to be State Employees, but barring that, FDOT should at least require that all contracts include annual raises, full time employment with healthcare on par with state employees, and contractors should be informed that there will be a certain wage floor that they cannot drop below, and it should be  much, much higher than it is at present.

Why is this so important? Why is it in your best interest that every moveable bridge you cross be manned by a well paid, experienced, vetted professional? A few days ago I wrote a blog post entitled How Dangerous Are Drawbridges, Anyway? in which I discussed the many ways people have died or been seriously harmed on movable bridges. I was able to find stories of 28 deaths without a particularly intensive search. Sometimes the bridgetender was at fault, but just as often it was due to reckless behavior on the part of the victim, and in a few cases it was due to a freak accident.

No matter what the cause, people do die on movable bridges, and therefore it is really important that you heed all rules and warnings when you are on or around them. And having well trained, experienced professionals in highly competitive positions that offer a living wage and decent benefits would go a long way toward making those bridge operators the most safety oriented people you could possibly be entrusting your life to. They’d also be experienced enough to handle emergencies, even ones brought on by recklessness. Anything less than that in a bridgetender is unacceptable.

I know it would be cold comfort to Carol Wright’s family that there’s a bridgetender on the other side of the country who takes great pride in doing her job and making sure no one is harmed in any way, who fervently wishes she had been working on that drawbridge on that fateful day, so that they could still have their loved one with them. I’m a total stranger who never met her. But whenever I think of Carol Wright, I feel a profound sense of grief, and an extreme sense of bitterness that the State of Florida is allowed to perpetuate a system that is definitely not in the best interests of anyone who comes near their bridges. And those are feelings I’ll always carry with me.