Beware of falling bridges

No trucks were involved in last month’s collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Trucks didn’t cause the catastrophe, and no trucks fell into the bay as a result.

When it comes to bridges, that hasn’t always been the case.

Big trucks have fallen in other bridge disasters and even caused a few. Back in 1964, for example, a gas tanker reportedly weighing four times the posted limit brought down a bridge over the Cuyahoga River in Kent, Ohio. Just three years later, in 1967, another heavy truck destroyed a bridge in Kingsport, Tenn., after someone removed a weight-limit warning sign. More recently, tanker fires brought down two spans: one over Interstate 580 in Oakland, Calif., in 2007 and an elevated chunk of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia last year.

On May 23, 2013, an oversize load being hauled by Canadian carrier Mullen Trucking hit the overhead structural framework of the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River in Burlington, Wash. The truck driver was in the right lane instead of the left, where the clearance is higher. His pilot car driver was reportedly on her phone at the time. The cascading effect of the strike brought down a 160-foot span of the 1,100-foot-long bridge. The truck cleared the collapsing section, and only two cars went into the river. Both drivers were rescued.

The archives of The New York Times reported more than 54 bridge failures in the U.S. in the past 100 years, beginning with a bridge in Sterling, Conn., in 1924. That failure dumped two trucks into the Moosup River. Both drivers survived.

More spectacular failures have happened since then, some involving trucks and some not.

One of the most famous was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse in November of 1940, which was filmed by the owner of a Tacoma camera shop with his 16 mm movie camera.

The film shows the 1.8-mile-long suspension bridge twisting wildly in a 42-mph wind until the central span comes apart and falls into Puget Sound below. The bridge, which had opened to traffic just four months earlier, was the world’s third-largest suspension bridge after the Golden Gate and the George Washington. One car had been abandoned on the bridge, but no one was hurt and no trucks were involved.

But there were two trucks on the 160-foot section of a two-lane bridge in Muscatine, Iowa, when it collapsed into the Mississippi River in June of 1956. News photos show one truck amidst the wreckage in the water and the other with its cab still on a remaining section of the bridge, while its trailer dangled over the river. Both drivers survived.

Truckers were victims of two interstate highway collapses in the 1980s. The first happened just after 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 1983, when a section of the Mianus River Bridge between Portchester, N.Y., and Greenwich, Conn., collapsed – taking two semis 70 feet down to the river shore. Two cars also fell, and three fatalities were reported. But news stories did not say which vehicles they had been driving.

Just four years later, on April 5, 1987, a tractor-trailer and a car were on the New York State Thruway in Central Bridge, N.Y., when a section of the roadway beneath them fell 110 feet into Schoharie Creek, then at flood stage.

Three more cars followed, and 10 people died in the incident. Again, news stories did not differentiate between car and truck drivers.

The surging Schoharie Creek had weakened the piers of the Thruway bridge, while a design flaw caused the Mianus River Bridge collapse. Other bridges have failed after being hit by vessels, usually barges – sometimes under tow and other times loose in a river.

Barges did serious damage in 2001, when four of them being pushed by a tugboat struck the Queen Isabella Memorial Causeway. A section of the bridge fell 80 feet into the Intercoastal Waterway near South Padre Island, Texas. Eight people in cars died.

Barges also brought down the Seeber Bridge in New Orleans in 1993, the Interstate 40 bridge over the Arkansas River in 2002 and the Popp’s Ferry Bridge over Biloxi Bay in 2009.

And earlier this month, 26 barges loaded with coal and fertilizer broke free on the Ohio River. One of them hit Sewickley Bridge near the town of the same name. The bridge was closed as a precaution. So was the McKees Rock Bridge downriver in Pittsburgh. No injuries were reported, and the only damage was to a local marina.

But as happened in Baltimore last month, sometimes larger vessels are involved, and at least one such collision in 1980 was just as spectacular and far more deadly.

At 7:30 a.m. on May 9, a bulk carrier ship rammed a support column under the Sunshine Skyway bridge on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The strike caused a 1,200-foot span of the cantilever bridge to fall 150 feet into Tampa Bay, bringing six cars, a pickup truck and a Greyhound bus with it. While the recent Baltimore collapse killed six construction workers, the Sunshine Skyway disaster cost 35 lives.

Arguably the eeriest bridge collapse was that of the Silver Bridge, which occurred on the Ohio River between Point Pleasant, W.Va., and Kanauga, Ohio, 10 days before Christmas in 1967.

The 1,750-foot-long suspension bridge was heavy with stalled, rush-hour traffic in the gathering darkness. At 4:58 p.m., people heard what sounded to some like a sonic boom; then the bridge began to fall. As little as 20 seconds later, 31 vehicles – cars and trucks – were in the river or on the shore. The Ohio River at that point was more than 50 feet deep.

Prominent in some photographs of the disaster is a trailer with the colors of McLean Trucking of Winston-Salem, N.C., then one of the nation’s largest LTL carriers (company owner Malcolm McLean had pioneered the use of shipping containers in 1956).

According to stories that became local folklore, the Silver Bridge collapse was presaged by the appearance of Mothman, described as a part-man, part-bird creature and depicted in the 2002 film “The Mothman Prophecies” starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. According to legend, Mothman began appearing in the area for a year leading up to the disaster. That collapse cost 46 lives. There is no record of who among them might have been truckers.

And finally, there was the Tallahatchie Bridge, made famous by country songwriter and singer Bobbie Gentry in her 1967 No. 1 hit song, “Ode to Billie Joe.” While a few bridges cross the Tallahatchie River, the one Billie Joe jumped from in the song was presumed to be near Money, Miss. On the night of June 20, 1972, that Tallahatchie Bridge fell into the river. Authorities believed no one was on it at the time, and no one saw it happen.

There were no trucks involved. LL