On October 20, 1976, the worst ferry disaster in United States history occurred on the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish, where seventy-seven people died when the fifty-year-old George Prince Ferry, carrying ninety-five people from Destrehan to Luling in dark, forty-degree weather at dawn, collided with the twenty-two-thousand-ton Norwegian tanker Frosta after the tanker sighted the ferry dangerously close to its bow and pilot Nicholas Colombo signaled several times, but too late. Most aboard were young men who worked at plants on the riverbank, and in the days after the collision, relatives and friends kept vigil on the Mississippi River levee as rescue efforts continued, while hard hats and lunch pails washed ashore and Governor Edwin Edwards and President Gerald Ford's personal emissary, Ed Foreman, came to the site. The tragedy led to changes in maritime law, giving ships on the river the legal right of way over smaller vessels and bringing random drug and alcohol testing by the Coast Guard for pilots and other vessel employees. The Hale Boggs Memorial Bridge, under construction at the time of the accident, opened in 1983 and ended the Destrehan-Luling ferry run.