Lanky Banker’s Human Bridge Saved 20 on Ferry

A bank official who stretched his 6-foot-3 frame into a human bridge and saved 20 people emerged Monday as one of the heroes of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster.

Andrew Parker, his family and others sitting in a corner of the vessel were cut off from the safety of a small island of metal by a 6-foot-wide cascade of water that rushed in after the ferry turned over on its side.

“It was . . . too big for people to jump across,” Parker told reporters. “I just made a sort of a bridge.”

“I was the first one to climb across and I stepped on his back and I was petrified,” his wife, Eleanor, said. “When you climbed on top of him, you had to jump and the floor was slippery with water.

“All the people in our corner there got over Andrew’s human bridge. Otherwise, we couldn’t have crossed that space,” she said.

Once across the gap, the 20 people reached the small “island” to which rescuers had thrown a rope. Parker said he stayed behind for about an hour and a half, helping people climb the rope.

“People were screaming and my daughter thought she was going to die,” Eleanor Parker said. “She said, ‘Mommy, if I did something wrong, I didn’t mean to do it.’ ”