the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 58
the bridge to save himself. He called the newspaper office to say he was
coming in to write about the experience, and urged the city desk send a
reporter and photographer to the scene.
Reporter Howard Clifford grabbed his camera, and he and fellow
reporter Bert Brintnall drove to the bridge to look for a story, ultimately
deciding that, if nothing else, they could rescue Tubby from Coatsworth’s
abandoned car and write about that. They arrived about the same time as
Farquharson, who had driven an hour from Seattle to take film and photos
of the bridge’s behavior in the wind. Barney Elliott and Harbine Monroe,
co-owners of the Camera Shop in Tacoma, had grabbed their Bell & Howell
16mm camera with the same idea in mind.
A few minutes after 10 a.m., reporters Clifford and Brintnall started
walking out to Coatsworth’s car. They didn’t get far, maybe twenty yards,
when the bridge’s swaying motion first mutated into the violent twist that
Farquharson had observed during his wind-tunnel tests. By 10:07, the
roadway was tilting up to a 45-degree angle, with one side twenty-eight
feet above the other. The question of why that twisting began under those
conditions has been the subject of intense aerodynamic study in the decades
since, but as Farquharson had predicted, it was the moment when
the bridge was clearly doomed.
“I’d gone just a short distance when I heard a popping sound, like
rifl e fire,” Clifford recalled to the Seattle Times in 1990. “It was the cables
that supported the bridge deck. They were breaking and flying around in
the air.”
The next forty-five minutes were painfully well chronicled. The
wind ebbed and flowed, but around 10:30 a large chunk of the center span
broke loose and dropped 195 feet into the water below. Thirty minutes
later, the twisting motion resumed, and the end began. “Massive steel
girders twisted like rubber,” Hobbs wrote. “Bolts sheered and fl ew into
the wind. Six light poles on the east end broke off like matchsticks. Steel
suspender cables snapped, flying into the air ‘like fishing lines,’ as Farquharson
said.” (Accounts differ, but Hobbs concludes that the engineering