3.7 • 928 Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
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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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