The fog was thick, the rain was icy and as Officers Shawn Carson and Robert Nguyen headed back to Jersey City, they had no idea that the road underneath them was about to run out.
It was around 8 Sunday night. The two officers were delivering emergency flares to colleagues directing traffic on the Lincoln Highway Bridge, an old-fashioned steel elevator bridge over the Hackensack River that lifts a piece of the roadway straight up when it opens. The bridge's crash gates, which prevent vehicles from dropping into a void when the span is raised, had recently been damaged by a wayward truck, which is why officers were needed that night.
As Officers Carson and Nguyen finished passing out the flares, a tugboat slipped into the channel. The bridge operator raised the bridge. Apparently, no one told the two officers.
Officer Carson, a part-time track coach known for his charm, and Officer Nguyen, a son of Vietnamese immigrants known for his Police Department test scores, climbed back into the front seat of their Ford F-550 utility truck and headed into the fog. In front of them was the open span. Forty-five feet beneath them was the river. Their truck flew off the roadway and plunged into the water. Officer Carson's body was found Sunday night, Officer Nguyen was still missing yesterday, and presumed dead.
If it had been a different type of bridge, if the warning gates had been working, if it hadn't been so foggy or if a tugboat hadn't happened to pass by, these two officers would probably still be alive.
But it seems that a set of unusual factors conspired to take their lives that night, leaving Jersey City officials distraught and confused.
"There's no doubt in my mind those officers didn't know the bridge was up," said Jersey City's police chief, Robert A. Troy.
Asked why they had not been told, Chief Troy said: "I don't know. I don't know why this happened."
"The weather was definitely a factor. The rain. The fog," he said. "You couldn't see your hand in front of your face."
As of Monday evening, police boats were still searching the brown-gray 40-degree water of the Hackensack River for Officer Nguyen's body. Divers pulled Officer Carson from the river bottom two hours after the accident and took him to University Hospital in Newark, where he was pronounced dead. More than 300 police officers from across New Jersey have joined the search, including a Jersey City contingent who showed up in their pajamas, leaving their families on Christmas night and vowing not to go home until their comrades were found.
The officers have been working in shifts, some combing the weed-strewn riverbanks, others standing in the rain, riveted to the decks of their search boats, their orange slickers the only spot of color on a drab landscape of chain-link fences and long-cool smokestacks.
The Lincoln Highway is a key piece of this post-industrial landscape, a bumpy, narrow four-lane strip of asphalt, with no shoulder, that connects Jersey City to Newark by way of Kearny. Most people refer to it as the 1/9 truck route, to distinguish it from the parallel passenger car route, the Pulaski Skyway. Both routes run east-west, spanned by iron bridges like the vertical-lift Lincoln Highway Bridge. The roads are considered among New Jersey's most dangerous, because they are full of potholes, unforgiving and heavily traveled.
On Friday morning, a postal truck ran off the road on the eastbound portion of the 1/9 truck route in Kearny, damaging the concrete gate that closes the roadway when the Lincoln Highway Bridge is raised.
The truck also sideswiped the railroad-crossing-style wooden arm that swings across the road, warning drivers to halt.
Erin Phalon, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Transportation, said fixing the gate was a major job, requiring one to two weeks. "This isn't just a pothole," she said.
Complicating matters, the bridge is near a vital point at the Port of Newark and needs to be raised about once a day for ships and boats serving the port.
The transportation agency faced a tough choice: close the entire road on a busy holiday weekend; keep the bridge down and bar ships from passing; or improvise a solution until the bridge's gate could be fixed. The agency decided to keep using the bridge and worked out an agreement with local police departments to be on call if it needed to be raised.
Three times over the holiday weekend, the call came and police officers were dispatched to shut down traffic and clear the bridge deck so it could be safely raised.
But on Sunday night something went wrong.
A tugboat captain radioed the bridge operator sometime before 8 p.m. to lift the bridge, Ms. Phalon said. The Kearny police were called to stop traffic, but there were not enough officers available, said Police Lt. Thomas Osborne of Kearny.
So several Jersey City officers were sent to the bridge. Officer Carson, 40, and Officer Nguyen, 30, were part of the second wave, equipped with a couple of cases of flares, so drivers would be able to see the temporary roadblock, which was set up about 200 feet from the gap.
The weather was horrible. A thick fog curled across the water. Visibility was down to inches. A cold rain coated the roadway, making it more dangerous than it normally is.
"I was out there, after the accident, standing right under the top of the bridge and I couldn't even see it," said Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy of Jersey City.
Ms. Phalon said the bridge operator was "in direct communication" with the Jersey City police. But she did not know if the operator was talking to officers on the bridge or a dispatcher. "I'm not sure who he talked to," she said.
The Jersey City police chief said that was the critical issue: Who was talking with whom, and when?
"There are a lot of things I want to know that I'm not going to comment on right now," Chief Troy said.
About 8:15 p.m., Officers Carson and Nguyen crossed the bridge heading west. Once in Kearny, they essentially made a U-turn to get to the checkpoint on the eastbound side of the road. They gave the flares to the other officers, police officials said. They wished them a merry Christmas. Then they headed back east, to their station in Jersey City. Police officials said they were not sure who had been driving.
The bridge takes less than 10 minutes to raise and lower back into place. In those few minutes while Officers Carson and Nguyen were passing out flares, the bridge was raised behind them.
They would have had little warning before they plunged into the river, because, unlike a drawbridge, where the roadway folds up, the roadway of a vertical-lift bridge, from the perspective of a driver, simply disappears.
And on that night there was no margin for error.
"There were a lot of things wrong with that bridge," Chief Troy said.