The deadliest bridge disaster in US history was caused by a tiny crack just three millimeters deep
In 1967, 64 people went into the frigid Ohio River
Charlene Wood was driving home at 5 p.m. on December 15, 1967, when she felt Silver Bridge shake. The bridge, built in 1928, spanned the Ohio River between Ohio and West Virginia, and served 4,000 vehicles every day. On this cold Friday, a single eyebar — a 55-foot-long section of steel, two inches thick and 12 inches wide — had suddenly fractured. Then the pin holding it in place fell loose, sending the bridge’s components into catastrophic failure. “It was like someone had lined up dominoes,” Wood recalled. “I could see car lights flashing as they were tumbling into the water. The car in front of me went in. Then there was silence.”
Silver Bridge inherited its name from its metallic aluminum paint, but it was notable as well for its distinct design. The American Bridge Company, which won the bid for the project, settled on the cheaper method of using eyebars instead of cables of steel wire, the sort used in famous suspension bridges like the Brooklyn and Golden Gate.
The eyebars used were long steel plates, 2 inches thick with a 12-inch face, and ranged from 55 to 44 feet in length. The ends of the eyebars terminated in loops, allowing 11-inch pins to join them to the next eyebar section—like a bicycle chain. They also bore the hanging weight of vertical supports that held up the bridge deck below. While other successful bridges had used eyebar-chain suspension and incorporated many redundancies, at the time the nearest model to the Silver was a single (and now decommissioned) bridge in Florianopolis, Brazil. Other eyebar models, like the Three Sisters in Pittsburgh, constructed at the same time, were shorter and used as many as eight eyebars in a section. The Silver Bridge only used two.
Silver Bridge was dubbed the “Gateway to the South” upon its opening, and residents on both sides appreciated its promise of better commutes and easier traveling. But it also came to be known for its tendency to rock and shake. Salesman Ben Cedar crossed Silver Bridge around 15 minutes before it collapsed, but only reluctantly. “I was worried about that bridge every time I crossed over,” he said. “If you got stuck in the middle of that bridge, it would wave back and forth, back and forth.”
Charlene Wood was pregnant at the time she drove home from her job at a hair salon. She was moving at 15 miles per hour as she approached the bridge, which was filled with truckers, commuters, and Christmas shoppers. As she drove over it, she felt it begin to shake. Wood put her car in reverse, and was able to move back a short distance before the rocking of the bridge stalled her car. She was four feet away from the precipice when, within 60 seconds, Silver Bridge rocked and collapsed into the river.
Bill Needham was less lucky. He was driving a truck across the bridge when it collapsed and threw him into the river. He was able to escape from his partially opened window. “I didn’t know how far I had to go up,” he recalled, “But I could tell the water kept getting lighter.” He used a nearby box as a flotation device and was rescued 15 minutes later. His partner, Robert Towe, didn’t make it.
Howard Boggs was a passenger in a car with his 17-month-old child and his 18-year-old wife, Marjorie, who was driving. Their car was heaved into the river by the collapsing bridge. When Howard was pulled to safety by a rescue boat, he told the crew on board, “I just hope to God Marjorie and the kid got out okay.” Their bodies were found in the car six weeks later.
State trooper Rudy Odell, 31, may have been the first officer to respond to the disaster. Before the bridge collapsed, it shook violently, turning the deck over and sending dozens of cars and their passengers into the water.
“I could hear them hollering for help. I didn’t know how many there were at that time,” Odell recalled. “There was absolutely nothing I could do. It was a long way out into the water.” Another rescuer, Bill McCormick, observed “people hanging on to flotsam from the tractor-trailers that had been on the bridge.”
In all, 31 vehicles went into the Ohio River that day, sending 64 people into its 44-degree waters. Those like Howard Boggs defied the odds: Of the 64 who went in, 46 died. The collapse remains the deadliest bridge disaster in United States history.
President Lyndon Johnson released a statement saying all Americans were “shocked by the cruel tragedy and loss of life,” and assembled the Task Force on Bridge Safety to mount an investigation. Forensic analysis was able to trace the problem to a small stress crack, around three millimeters deep, inside the bearing loop of eyebar 330. The crack had grown around an impurity in the steel, and had been aggravated by the the elements and the natural movements of the eyebar along the pin over the 39 years of the bridge’s use.
The most alarming part of the conclusion was that there was no way for engineers or maintenance crews to have found the ruinous defect, save by taking apart the entire joint, which—since it was integral to the bridge’s structural integrity—would have been merely restating the problem. “If ever a design was to blame for a failure,” writes engineering historian Henry Petroski, “this was it.”
Silver Bridge’s legacy is especially pronounced in being the impetus for National Bridge Inspection Standards. These guidelines, still in use today, require all public bridges containing a 20-foot-plus span to be examined every two years. If they are determined a higher-risk bridge, they must continue to be examined more frequently, as often as monthly or more, until they can be repaired. Other bridges, in the wake of the collapse, were examined and retrofitted with better parts, and Silver Bridge’s sister bridge in nearby St. Mary, West Virginia, was decommissioned shortly after, in 1971.
Yet for all the heavy documentation, one colorful theory suggests as the cause of the bridge collapse a bit of West Virginia folklore. In 1970, the author John Keel popularized the legend that the Mothman, sightings of whom began in 1966, was seen on the bridge near the time of accident, though whether as a warning or the cause is uncertain. Indeed today, in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where Silver Bridge was anchored, there is an annual, tongue-in-cheek Mothman festival, and even a large statue of the monster.
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