the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

IGNORE THE PAST AT YOUR PERIL 59
professor probably was the last person off the collapsing bridge.) At 11:02,
a six-hundred-foot-long section of the center-span roadway broke free,
flipped over, and fell, taking Coatsworth’s car and Tubby, the day’s only
casualty, down with it. The splash reached one hundred feet high. By
11:10, Puget Sound had a new thirty-fathom-deep reef that eventually
proved so suitable for underwater life that, even after extensive salvage
operations, it was named in 1992 to the National Register of Historic
Places.
An after-the-fact reference to the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge
collapse in the collection of the University of Washington Libraries refers
to the event as “the Pearl Harbor of engineering,” and in some ways it
was. But in other ways, the catastrophe may have been one of the most
constructive events in modern engineering. Petroski, a Duke University
civil engineering professor, wrote in 2001 that “unfortunately, it often
takes a catastrophic failure to provide clear and unambiguous evidence
that the design assumptions were faulty. It provided the counterexample
to the implicit engineering hypothesis under which all such bridges were
designed, namely, that wind did not produce aerodynamic effects in heavy
bridge decks sufficient to bring them down. Thus, the failure of the Tacoma
Narrows Bridge proved more instructive than the success of all the
bridges that had performed satisfactorily—or nearly so—over the preceding
decades.”
Even now, the far sturdier and more conventional $14 million replacement
bridge that began carrying traffi c across the Tacoma Narrows
in 1950 is “one of the most studied in the United States,” engineering
manager Joe Collins told the News Tribune in Tacoma in 2002. Its builder,
Tacoma Narrows Constructors, began precautionary tests that year to
make sure its fi ve-year, $615 million plan to resurface the bridge roadway
wouldn’t end up changing the behavior of the bridge in the wind or under
stress. “The world as a whole got much smarter about suspension bridges
as a result of Galloping Gertie’s failure,” Collins said.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse is still mentioned alongside