Journalists can be insensitive at times — “gallows humor,” they call it. It comes from covering too many wrecks, witnessing too many natural disasters and writing too many stores about relatives who shoot each other at backyard barbecues during football season.

So yes, within a day or two of a terrible 1995 chain-reaction wreck on Interstate 10 in Mobile, Ala., some reporters were already making cracks about the catastrophe. Nothing ghastly; just eye rolls and “Yeah, right” remarks.

For example: One of the stories in the Mobile Press-Register (where I was an editorial writer) used statistics and quotes from civic leaders, area commuters, truckers and tourists to build the case for a high-rise bridge over the Mobile River, plus a wider Bayway.

We on the paper’s editorial board agreed it was needed — and not merely in the spirit of regional boosterism. When a thick fog envelops a seven-mile raised span, causing more than 100 cars and trucks to crash into one another, injuring dozens of people, killing one woman, and shutting down a cross-country interstate for much of the day, that’s a king-size traffic problem.

On its west end, the Bayway feeds vehicles into and out of the Wallace Tunnel, which carries traffic under the Mobile River. Stories and editorials showed that despite the presence of the Causeway, a smaller tunnel and the Africatown bridge further upriver, the roadways were overloaded.

Officials predicted that the congestion would only get worse — and oh, how right they were. During morning rush hour, afternoon rush hour, Mardi Gras, the summer tourist season and random other days and hours, the Bayway and tunnel are packed, meaning traffic sometimes moves at a brisk 25 mph.

That’s assuming there are no wrecks. If there are, then traffic stops — except for those fortunate drivers who are near the mid-Bayway exit. They generally will scramble off the Bayway on to the nearby Mobile Causeway, sometimes in numbers so great that the Causeway also slows to a crawl.

All it then takes to create a complete cluster is one bad wreck or a couple of minor wrecks on the Causeway.

In the spirit of the late comedian Rodney “I don’t get no respect” Dangerfield, I was among those who, a couple of days after the 1995 pileup, were rolling their eyes at the thought of the state and federal highway departments building a high-rise, high-dollar bridge in Mobile. Always a bridesmaid but never a bride, Mobile was rarely at the top of anybody’s political to-do list in Montgomery or Washington.

“(Expletive),” I said to a colleague, laughing. “By the time that bridge happens, you and I will be on Social Security.”

Little did we know that nearly 30 years later, he’d be dead, I’d be 70 and there would be no sign of the bridge. There would be proposals, drawings, impact statements, cost estimates, right-of-way acquisitions, design changes and political battles out the wazoo, but no visible construction, no ribbon-cuttings and certainly no vehicles sailing more than 200 feet above the Mobile River.

Meanwhile, an inconvenient truth about construction projects began to play itself out: Big projects like bridges don’t get cheaper as time goes by; they get more expensive. Thus, the longer local, state and federal officials wrung their hands over what the bridge should look like, where it would go and, especially, where the money would come from (Tolls? Grants? Budget allocations? Special appropriations?), the price tag kept rising.

A news story in 2001 said officials estimated that a new bridge would cost about $200 million and Bayway improvements would run another $150 million — a total of $350 million and change. Gulp.

Just four years later, in 2005, they were talking about $600 million. Double gulp.

Nine years later, in 2014, news reports put the tab at $700 million to $800 million; and in 2019, state and federal officials said the project — which had grown more complex and now included a brand new Bayway — could cost $2.1 billion. Say what?!

Just the other day, the state announced a 60-day pause in the project as estimates soared to as much as $3.5 billion. Sweet Jesus.

As discouraging as it has been to wait for so many years, political and civic leaders in and around Mobile still believe that construction will start within the next few years. They are convinced that because I-10 carries people and goods from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Fla., the bridge is nationally important and should be funded as such.

Indeed, when the English poet, Alexander Pope, wrote nearly three centuries ago that “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” he could have been describing Mobile’s dogged optimism that this project is going to work.

Maybe I’ve drunk a little of the Kool-Aid myself, because I still am inclined to believe that it’ll all come together one day and we’ll get ourselves a shiny new bridge and Bayway.

I just wish I knew when and how it’ll happen.

Having already started drawing Social Security, my options are — to put it delicately — narrowing. Which means that if one day I’m going to drive across that thing, I may have to request a time extension from the Grim Reaper.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.