the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

IGNORE THE PAST AT YOUR PERIL 57
to the problem. As a stopgap mea sure, they installed shock-absorbing
jacks at the towers and tie-down cables on the sides. Those mea sures
helped a little in controlling the movement, but not enough.
Ominous warnings began to accumulate. About a week before the
collapse, one of the tie-down cables snapped, requiring repairs. And in
his lab, Farquharson sometimes noticed an unexpected “twisting motion”
when wind passed through his scale model of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
According to Hobbs, the engineer predicted “if that sort of motion ever
occurred on the real bridge, it would be the end of the bridge.”
Farquharson finished his study of the bridge on November 2. Along
with Eldridge and others, the engineers immediately began developing
specific plans and shopping for wind deflectors and other materials they
needed to streamline the structure. But the improvements were expected
to take about forty-five days, and early on the morning of November 7, the
winds from the southwest began to pick up.
It was hardly a hurricane-force assault, with measure ments topping
out at around 42 miles per hour. According to Hobbs, Eldridge
stopped by about 8:30 a.m., but saw no reason to be any more concerned
than usual. A thrill-seeking local college student paid the 10¢ pedestrian
fee just so he could walk across the undulating bridge for kicks. Not long
after Eldridge left, though, the toll collector on the bridge’s west side was
concerned enough that he was reluctant to let Leonard Coatsworth, a copy
editor for the News Tribune in Tacoma, drive across the bridge. He told
Coatsworth that he’d be one of the last motorists allowed to pass until
things settled down.
They didn’t.
“Just as I drove past the towers, the bridge began to sway violently
from side to side,” Coatsworth recalled. “Before I realized it, the tilt became
so violent that I lost control of the car.” He stepped out and was
thrown to the concrete, which he could hear cracking all around him.
When he tried to coax his daughter’s black cocker spaniel, Tubby, from
the car, the panicked dog bit his hand. It was all he could do to crawl off