Odd this day
As it’s 1 July, it’s the 84th anniversary of the opening of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which famously only stayed open for four months, becoming not terribly easy to cross on 7 November the same year.
Still, in the words of former Director of State Highways Lacey Murrow (according to the Washington State Department of Transportation):
Every major bridge project is an adventure
That web page also informs us that the last person to drive across the bridge, journalist Leonard Coatsworth, did not drive all the way, but abandoned his car with a dog (called Tubby) in it. He got $450 compensation for the car, and $364.40 for the loss of its contents.
Apparently, engineers had noticed some ‘vertical oscillation’ in May 1940, so they contacted the man responsible for the bridge’s design, Leon Moisseiff, who
admitted that two of his latest bridges … were experiencing similar movements, though on a much smaller scale.
Professor Bert Farquharson at the University of Washington spent $14,500 building a 54-foot scale model of the bridge and testing it in a wind tunnel, and in the meantime, engineers put temporary ‘tie-down’ cables on the bridge, one of which broke on 1 November.
The following day, Farquharson finished his tests. By 7 November, the State had started drawing up contracts to add new safety measures.
In 10 days the bridge would have enough wind deflectors to achieve significant stability, if wind came from the south. In two weeks the south side of the center span would be fully covered with the protective deflectors. In 45 days the entire bridge on both sides would be covered. Eldridge and Farquharson felt optimistic.
That day, though, the wind got up… Remarkably, a student called Winfield Brown, who walked onto the moving toll bridge to get “a thrill for a dime” survived. The dog it was that died (and Farquharson, who tried to save it, got bitten for his pains)
There’s more about Winfield and other eyewitnesses here:
The remains of the bridge are still at the bottom of Puget Sound, the body of water which the bridge crossed, and now form
one of the largest man-made reefs in the world
…and are included in the National Register of Historic Places.
