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Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster (GT Mini)

Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

Jason Horton & Rebecca Leib

True Crime, Unknown, Paranormal, Weird History, Social Sciences, History, Science

3.7928 Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2022

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A Washington state bridge has a historical collapse in 1940. More Ghost Town: https://www.ghosttownpod.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/ghosttownpod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ghosttownpod Sources: https://bit.ly/3yljreb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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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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