the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 60
other spectacular and embarrassingly public engineering failures that
were far more recent, including the 1979 sinking of the west half of Wash-
ington’s $26.6 million Hood Canal Floating Bridge, and the tragic 1981
collapse of two suspended walkways at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas
City. That may be because nothing compounds a failure or tragedy
like the inconvenient presence of someone with a camera, and that aspect
of the bridge failure pushed it into another realm entirely. As one of the
earliest and most spectacular caught-on- tape American touchstones, its
visceral impact is much the same as Abraham Zapruder’s 1963 film of the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, or the televised 1986
and 2003 explosions of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.
Fortunately, a cocker spaniel was the only casualty that day in 1940,
but only if you don’t count the careers and reputations that were ruined in
the aftermath of the collapse. Moisseiff wasn’t the only victim. Two days
after the bridge went down, Eldridge publicly blamed the moneylenders
who insisted on hiring “an eastern fi rm of engineers” for the project. By
the following spring, he’d decided he needed a change of scenery. He took
a job with the U.S. Navy and moved to Guam in the South Pacifi c.
On January 11, 1941, about two months after the collapse, the Tacoma
Times broke the news that the federal Public Works Administration’s
own field engineer in Tacoma, David L. Glenn, had warned of faults with
the bridge design and recommended that the agency refuse to accept the
structure. The PWA ignored that recommendation, and fired Glenn two
weeks after his dissent was made public.
The fallout included inquiry hearings, insurance scandals, and
generalized acrimony that lasted the better part of a decade. The salvage
operation was a disaster, too, with the Toll Bridge Authority paying nearly
$650,000 to recover seven thousand tons of scrap steel that later was sold
for less than $300,000. Another insult came many years later, when leading
bridge engineers studied Eldridge’s original design for the Tacoma
Narrows Bridge and declared that, had it been built, it would “without a
doubt” still be standing.