0:00.0	A narrow escape. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.
0:20.4	On November 7th, 1940, copy editor Leonard Cotesworth was running some errands with his daughters,
0:25.6	three-legged spaniel, Tubby, when he began to cross the Tacoma Narrows Bridge from Puget Sound
0:30.6	to his office in Tacoma, Washington. What he experienced crossing the bridge,
0:34.8	now called Galloping Girty, was truly wild. Almost more than the bridge itself,
0:39.8	the insane and iconic footage online has taken on a life of its own. And in these times,
0:45.3	feels more like CGI than the real and epic failure of engineering. Today we're talking about the
0:50.6	strange story of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. Since 1889, there was a need for a
0:55.5	bridge to connect Puget Sound to the Washington mainland. In 1937, Washington State Legislature
1:00.6	allocated a whopping $5,000 to study the request by Tacoma and Pierce County for a bridge over the
1:06.8	Narrows. The bridge itself costs $6.4 million to build, and at the time was the third longest
1:12.8	suspension bridge in the world. As a note, today it is the 33rd longest. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge
1:18.0	was open to traffic on July 1st, 1940 and worked, as usual, until almost exactly four months and a
1:24.0	week later. On November 7th, 1940, at 11am, at that point, harsh 42-mile per hour winds hit the
1:30.8	bridge, causing aero-lastic flutter. Aero-lastic flutter is defined as, quote, an unstable,
1:36.0	self-excited structural oscillation at a definite frequency, where energy is extracted from
1:41.2	air stream by the motion of the structure. In layman's terms, it means when a rigid object gets
1:45.8	hit with a blast of air, it moves quickly, often taking energy from the air to create even more
1:51.2	and erratic motion. With the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the bridge needed to be flexible to move
1:55.7	comfortably on a windy day, but it was not. When the bridge was hit with the wind, it fluttered,
2:00.4	not like a cute butterfly flutter. A flutter that became more and more dangerous, waving the
2:05.2	bridge's structure so comically even that it, today, it looks fake. If you haven't seen it,
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