Narrow Bridge Case Study

In the month of July in 1940, The Tacoma Narrows Bridge construction was completed and open to the public. Although built upon request of the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce after arguing that building of the bridge would be more suitable to replace the ferry system that as the only way to get to the Gig harbour from Tacoma's Narrow Bridge. One of the downsides was that it had been constructed with a much lesser budget than the committee had expected even upon the request of various engineers to draw out different plans with different requirements for the construction of the bridge. Despite an increase in traffic by about forty-five percent after its construction, very few predicted it would go downhill and pose a much bigger economic and technological …show more content…
Some minutes later the bridge started cracking then finally went down collapsing. This was due to the uneven tilting of the bridge's font that would tilt for as much as twenty-eight feet. Though the incident was catastrophic, it was fortunate enough to have had only one casualty in the form of a car that belonged to a newspaper reporter. Although the reporter reached to safety after the incident with what doctors may call ‘minor injuries' the only life lost was a pet dog who belonged to the reporter who went down crashing together with the car (Hobbs, 2006) …show more content…
A good number of trials had been carried to test the chains of the suspension bridge while noting down all the yield and possible failure loads by Thomas Telford. Too much time was taken on testing of the chains that little attention was paid to how the light and flexible roadway might react during strong and fats winds. A large number of remedial measures were to be applied which included tying down cables that snapped soon after installation, bumpers and inclined stay cables that all seemed to bare no fruits. The oscillations it received in relatively light winds was attributed as one of the major causes of its collapse. The oscillations were due to the wind vortex shedding in the bridge deck. The great failure then gave birth to the development of the engineering discipline of aerodynamics whose sole purpose was to investigate the effects of vortex shedding and gutter in greater depths. Poor calculations by Leon Moisseiff who was a well-regarded researcher and designer said that a considerably lighter deck-stiffened by solely a thin plate girder and not a deep truss would work perfectly. This was among some of the issues during its design that had been greatly