I was 13 years old when this bridge fell. My parents had to go out of town for a few days and left my younger sister and I with some close friends who lived in the same neighborhood. The man of the house was a truck driver and a good man. He had a delivery that this bridge was on his route. He ask me if I wanted to ride along with him and I was excited to ride in his big truck. The lady called my mother long distance to ask permission, but due to scheduling of my parents' return home, my mom said no. The truck driver would not be back before my parents arrived home. His truck was on the bridge when it fell and he lost his life. I was still at the house when his wife got the phone call and clearly remember her face going stone cold as she dropped the phone and fainted to the floor. That was a seriously troubled time for his family, especially that close to Christmas!!!
@Buck ey Hope you can increase you patience levels Come the revolution after the bankers , politicians , car parking attendants you selfish thoughtless pricks are next up against the wall
Isn't it something how fate works?. You weren't meant to be included so your life was spared. Just like the lady that backed up on the bridge and stopped on what became the edge. It wasn't meant to be!.
I was a year and a half old. My grandfather responded to the area to help with recovery. I still live close to the area and have heard about the Silver Bridge my entire life. Sorry for your loss.
Aaah, what a pleasure - to watch a video without any stupid unnecessary background music trying to make it appear cool and modern but really only competing with the speaker. And the speaker in this one is so good as well, so easy to understand. Thank you very much film editor
It's the open university They have university degrees for people to do at home And they used to have lectures on maths on at 12 to 5am every day in the uk. Just one man talking and writing equations on a black board. Good stuff to watch !
MUSIC FOR NOISE SAKE ruins many if not all docs. In a movie(Hollywood) the music is composed FOR the scene. In most docs, it's just music that someone liked or had some kind of unknown reason for being used. Lousy reason for it. Even in movies the music doesn't always add to the experience, but at least there was an attempt to make it add. Remember "Silence is golden".
As a child I remember crossing the Silver Bridge several times to visit relatives in Ohio. My Dad would always say" ok everyone hold your breath and pray in silence that we make it this time". My Dad never did trust the bridge.
Wow, I learned it had movement. That just doesn't sound good at all, plus no way to fix, I believe, the eye bars. I don't blame your Daddy. He sounds like a smart fellow.
I actually live in Pittsburgh and regularly cross a suspension bridge quite regularly. (Pittsburgh being divided by three rivers we have TONS of bridges.) They really are made to move though since your in motion you usually can't feel it much unless your stopped on an end or a heavy tractor trailer is passing near you. (It really bounces then!) It doesn't make me nervous generally unless I'm stopped at an end when you can really feel the movement. I say a lot of prayers then and so far so good. Unfortunately not really any other options in Pittsburgh, your going to need to cross at least one bridge pretty much anywhere you go.
@Andrew Langton You'll do more than believe that Jesus is Lord, you confess it with your own tongue. Repent and believe the Gospel. Flee from the coming wrath.
I recommend the show engineering catastrophes on Science Channel. The Science Channel is the last glimmer of hope we have for educational television. Practically every single series on that channel is super informative! Weakest efforts being What on Earth? and Strange Evidence which are both highly speculative until the closing minutes when they finally give you the actually answers lol
Most people only want to watch a history show once or twice. Eventually, they have shown every possible show they can. After 20 years of programming, they have to go after viewership. I too miss the old History Channel and Discovery Channel. Plus the Biography Channel from 20 years ago.
My grandfather was the first person to call the police about the bridge falling. As he lived right beside the bridge and watched it fall. The police didn't believe him until others called in. His name is Roy Sayre.
The Silver Bridge was destroyed by the military industrial complex. Electrical mechanical energy. Next target San Francisco California 8.0 earthquake NOAA’s 20 and 21 U.S Space Force’s Directed Energy satellites. 2024
I am a Mechanical Engineer (BSME, MSME) with 40 years of experience and this is an excellent and interesting documentary! It's very sad to hear of this collapse and condolences to the families losing loved ones. At the same time, it is good that standards were established and implemented for inspection of bridges.
I'm curious about what seems to me to be a very low safety standard for live load. 1.5X seems really sketchy to me. I'm not an engineer but I did take three years of classes in structural and mechanical engineering in high school, and I remember my professors saying that bridges here in Canada were usually designed with 3.0X due to snow and ice buildup and just wear and tear over time. I'd love to know what the modern standards actually are for modern bridge designs.
@@jfever78 - I was watching a documentary on the Mackinac Bridge connecting the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. The designer was Dr. David B. Steinman and I believe he employed a safety factor of 2x. With modern computer simulations and advancements in design engineering, a safety factor of 1.5 is probably suffice. Simulations, for example, can help identify high stress areas due to weight of vehicles, stress from ice, potential earth quakes, wind buffeting etc. Kind Regards.
@@jivepatrol6833 Yeah I'm actually very familiar with that bridge, having driven it many times in the passenger seat in my dad's cab over Freightliner in the 80s and then myself in the driver seat for the one year I had a learners permit myself. I still have a hard time believing that a 1.5X live load factor is sufficient. And while the chances of the bridge to ever be stacked from end to end with rigs that are all at max weight are extraordinarily slim, I can't help but very clearly remember my engineering professor drilling into us the fact that bridges now were all designed to 3.0X potential live load. Memory is a fickle and notoriously unreliable bitch though, so I'll have to do some of my own digging and see what I can find. If I do find anything of interest I'll post a link here for our mutual benefit. Thanks for your input and interest, regardless.
Joseph T. Not with open university. This is actual studying material. Watch enough of this, do the required cause work and you’ll end up with a qualification.
LOVED LOVED LOVED this production. the script and all the speaking roles were so novel. it avoided the "slick" quality that so many docs have today. it had a simplicity that modern docs eschew. the amateur, or should i say non professional speakers gave a wonderful feeling of unpretentious reality. the professional narrator spoke with clarity and authority and never upstaged the subject. she was great. very impressive. thank you.
You should realize this video would have been produced as part of an engineering degree programme at the Open University in the UK. There was thus no need for any commercial or marketing angle.
"the silver bridge disaster's has a lasting legacy in Bridge safety" Which is why in 2019, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association found more than 47,000 bridges in the U.S. are in poor condition and in need of urgent repairs, but as of 2020 the US Congress has giving zero dollars to repair any of them....
The government collects taxes from sale of gasoline but puts the money in a general fund to distribute at their discretion. If the money collected from gasoline sales went entirely to our roads and bridges we would have the best in the world.
I remember when that happened. Dad was sent down there to help recover those poor souls that died. He was a volunteer fire fighter on Mt. Carmel's North Union Twnph Fire Dept (lifesquadman)
My name is Beverly Lynn Proctor. I was staying with my sister and brother in law at that time. Ann and Jim Hensley they lived right outside of Pomeroy. I was listening to the CB in their kitchen. When they got home I told them what I heard. They lost so many love ones. A very sad day.
I'm not a naturally mechanically inclined person, but I found this documentary and its explanations and graphics easy to understand and interesting. Thanks for the upload.
Walter Carpenter was my high school Biology teacher. Later, I considered him a good friend. Whenever anyone greeted him and asked how he was doing, his reply was always: "Better Than I Deserve". As a resident of St. Marys for much of my life, I will always remember the original Hi Carpenter Bridge. And the new bridge which replaced the one which was closed, was opened to traffic the same week as I reported for active duty in the US Marine Corps, 1977. Mr. Walter Carpenter was an authority on local history and a good man. He is missed by family and friends.
This is a really great documentary. I like the no nonsense approach and the fact it isn't dumbed down but is still presented in a way that you don't have to be a structural engineer to understand what's going on. No propaganda, no bells and whistles, no unnecessary "pop art" graphics, just the story. This is a lost art.
This is one of the reasons that certain load-bearing elements of railroad locomotives are never painted. That paint will hide otherwise visible cracks in the metal.
Correct. A former employer went really big suddenly in the trucking industry and got the container contract from Vancouver to Tacoma. I visited his year and couldn't understand why his crew were painting the well used container trailers with such thick, blue paint. Now I know. He was covering up the cracks.
My parents crossed the Silver Bridge just 1 day before it collapsed. I remember them saying that the swaying of the bridge just didn’t seem right and it really scared them. My dad stated that he would never cross that bridge again. Well, he was right on that one. I wonder if the ramps are still standing on either sides. I guess I need to make a trip to find out. Great video.
@@kam2894 🇺🇸 I agree. Sometimes it’s good to back in history and just get a feel for what my dad was thinking. We know that the story had a good ending though. I’m a history nut anyway.
To save you a trip the ramps have long been removed, a new bridge called the Silver Memorial Bridge was constructed down river a little. The highway on the west side actually dead ends where the ramp would have been. On the east side there's a parking lot and a plaque marking the spot but that's all that's left of silver
Im not so sure about the St Marys talk. St Marys WV is 80 miles from Point Pleasant WV and on the same side of the river. No St Marys OH near there either. Maybe theres a Catholic School around there or something. Idk
did anyone catch this event in a movie called, "Moth Man"...? My grandmother lived on the Ohio side, in a house located on the hill facing the bridge at the time it fell. She told me her experience of the bridge falling. She was a house wife at the time, my grand father drove a greyhound bus to Chicago, and back everyday. She told me that she didn't see it break apart, but had a birds eye view of the horrific aftermath. She said she could not hold back tears then, and when she had told me about it in 1975. She had explained to me what is said here, that the people, the area, was so proud to have such a grad size bridge. How important it made them feel to what was happening in the US back then.
I also thought so (from the Moth Man movie)! How interesting to hear that you have such first hand connections to the incident! Although, I am so sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing it.
Three years before the collapse of that bridge I drove a truck across it pulling a ten foot wide house trailer. I was alarmed by the noise and shaking. I never crossed it again.
Wow that woman who had the wherewithal to back up on the bridge came so close. I couldn’t imagine seeing a bridge fall out of the sky inches from me and where I had just been. Crazy.
That bridge is an example of why I was a big believer in the “Dead Ship” maneuver back in my seafaring days. When dead ship maneuvering, you rely 100% on the tug boats to provide ALL of your movements with your power plant, rudder, and bow thruster at the ready as an emergency backup to the tug boats. This way, the tug boats are constantly in position to start, stop, and change your motion with you not being reliant on your own equipment. That way when your own equipment fails it’s inconsequential because the tugs are already doing all of the work.
My Uncle was the head engineer in charge of putting the wreckage back together to find the cause of the bridge failure. I crossed that bridge many times and only a few days before it went down. It never crossed my mind that the bridge was dangerous.
I’m sure that thought never crossed through the mind of the people on the titanic and the world trade centers. Never crossed their mind. So every time I cross a bridge I wonder how much longer they will stand and who inspected it last.
I remember reading an analysis of the Silver Bridge collapse shortly after it happened and a significant factor was mentioned that was not included in this documentary. This was the use of "rocker towers". When a suspension bridge is at rest all of the tension and compression forces are in equilibrium. When acted upon by outside forces (wind, deck load, etc.) this equilibrium is disturbed and various parts of the bridge move until a new equilibrium is established. This documentary made a point about how much movement there was in the bridge and this was an intended part of the design. In order for there to be movement without excessive stress in the bridge components there has to be a mechanism to allow for this moment. Some suspension bridges have rigid towers and the cables or chains can move a bit lengthwise through the top of the tower as required. The Silver bridge was different. The chains were attached in a fixed position at the top of the towers and the bottoms of the towers were on "rockers" so that they could tilt along the the length of the bridge to redistribute the stresses. This worked OK under normal conditions, but when eyebar 330 failed there was a very large asymmetrical force on the tower and, being pretty much unrestrained at the bottom, it simply fell over and collapse of the entire bridge ensued. If the towers had been rigidly attached to the piers (and other means of redistributing stresses used) it is possible that the collapse would have only been partial rather than complete - and probably many fewer people would have died.
Vincent I would have to agree with your reply in partial. The excessive movement also did something else that was detrimental, it set up vibrations. These constant vibrations not only promoted the failure, but also acted as a cutting movement on connection points. This promoted stress points. When you look at 330, from my machinist background. I see a total failure of the steel and its designed connection. What I think that was done? Nobody tested the steel for strength, or if they did, they fudged the numbers of total failure point. Who ever did the quality assurance/ quality control did not do there job from an engineering standpoint! The bridge lasted under 50 years, that is a total failure.
There is no way, you could build a rigid tower, capable of supporting a 700 ft span, without anchorage on the back side. Either the tower will fail, or the cable will fall from the tower - leaving the tower standing, but the roadway will collapse either way. No matter the towers, if you lose one of the two main suspension elements on a suspension bridge, the bridge is gone.
December 15th, 1967 was a Friday. I had been in Charlotte, WV at the DuPont Plant in Nitro and was returning to Athens, Ohio where I was a Professor of Chemical Engineering. I had left the meeting mid-afternoon after I used the company phone to tell my wife I was on my way home. and approached the bridge from the south. I recall that traffic was quite heavy with a combination of semis, dump trucks, pickups and many sedans. Traffic was pretty much stop and go. I think I got to the stop light at the foot of the bridge some a couple of minutes before 5. I turned right at the light and headed toward Athens, arriving home a little after 6. My wife came rushing ou the door. "Did you cross the river?" she asked."Of course I said. "The bridge collapsed an hour ago!" I may have been one of the lucky few who had crossed the bridge just moments before it collapsed.
I drove my mama across that bridge one day and remarked, "Mom, some day this old bridge will fall" as we experienced a trembling and scary swinging of it from side to side as we crossed. Mama replied, "No. They built this bridge too well." I crossed that bridge hundreds of times and was terrified each time. There was a traffic light on the WV side which caused the bridge to be loaded with cars and trucks for extended periods. I remember seeing the newspaper accounts after the fall with pictures of Christmas packages floating in the water. How haunting and sad that was.
themirrorsofmymind yes she speaks correct understandable English. Not like the many clowns who make up their own pronunciation or even individual words.
The McClean truck at 12:05 was driven by a friend of my fathers. He was about 15 minutes behind him. Dad had to stop and was delayed and was trying to catch back up to his buddy when he drove up on this disaster. If he had not had the minor issue he had there would have been 2 McClean trucks in that mess!
thx for sharing that!. was rtng from leave in Navy headed bk to Dallas Tx.. i had alredi eaten, but in my head, i kept hearing STOP, so i gave in, stopped n had apple pie at a shoneys, get back in head out, as i crest the hill to cross abridge to get into Dallas, a THICK GREY FOG had enveloped that bridge on a CLEAR SUNNY DAY, a bunch of people died in a fiery pileup on I-20....one of the worst in texas history, i cal that the GRACE OF ALMIGHTY GOD!.. Would marry a year later n have a son! Could write a short book on this kinda stuff!
This was so informative, I learned a lot. I always wondered how they built these suspension bridges without pulling one of the main supports down horizontally before they could couple it with the other side.
The American Bridge Company built the Hercilio Luz Bridge in Florianópolis, Brazil in 1926. It has a similar design of the Silver Bridge and was reopened last year after it was revitalized. I monitored some part of the progress as Civil Engineering student and it was fantastic.
Man.. when I first saw the design of this bridge I thought, this is a terrible design.. But after learning more about the bridge, I started to think that this was a terrific design, just had a couple fatal flaws that went unnoticed.. It really makes you have immense respect for the designs that do work and do last.
My friend drove semis. His employer insisted he drive over this bridge with loads 28000 pounds heavier than permitted. The bridge sagged and swayed. He finally refused a to cross that bridge overweight, and was fired. A couple weeks later.....
Deckard Cain The trucking companies which force employees to violate weight limits endanger everyone because they damage the bridges and the damaged bridge s might not fall then but will in the future. That company needs to be put out of business and fined heavily! Innocent people died for someone else’s mistake
That could’ve been a contributing factor that caused the initial stress crack/fracture that ended in failure. Corrupt employers are disgusting. I hope his company has gone under and is no longer around. If it is you should report them.
Thanks for sharing this. It is amazing how we are interdependent on each other, sometimes in surprising ways. Consider people who make parts or assemble products that effect security and safety. What if they cut corners or allowed themselves to compromise their values. Values are important. As far as the engineers and builders and examiners and all the people working to build a better bridge, seems they are doing the best that you can. It is heartbreaking when we do our very best and then something happens. I guess that is where forgiveness comes in.
@@LaDivinaLover whos job was it to protect the bridge load weight ? You guessed it the local municipal safety office . So the blame rested on the elements rather than on the human failure . Dont think it didnt get brought up .
I remember this as a child, as we were traveling from California to Texas to be with our grandparents on Christmas. We heard it on the car radio. What a sad day.
Factor of safety of 1.5? In a corosive environment, without regular lubrication, under fatigue loading, and using medium tensile steel ? 1 The steel should have had enough nickel in it to prevent brittleness in sub zero temperatures. 2 There perhaps should have been a zinc plating on the steel to protect it from corrosion. 3 The links should have been bead blasted so that the surfaces were under compression. 3 The joints should have been regularly lubricated with something to keep water out. 4 There should have been at least 3 if not 4 links in each chain, so that loss of a link would not overload those remaining. 5 I think a softer steel would be preferable, that way if anything breaks the overloaded parts will bend and/or stretch instead of snapping. 6 The factor of safety should have been much higher. 1.5 is for millitary aircraft, 3 is for bridges. I wouldnt mind betting a substantial sum that there were a few cracks developing on the Hi Carpenter bridge when it was disassembled.
The older sister of this bridge, and one of these three already built in the world, (Hercílio Luz) in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, which is still standing, was recently restored. Cars went back on December 30, 2019, after 28 years banned due to cracking in one of the four eyebars support. Hercilio Luz may not have collapsed because it had four supporting eyebars, unlike Silver Brigde which had only two.
I never thought about that,not having background music, probably why I enjoyed it so much and left with more understanding of this disaster. Glad they didn't mention moth man either. I'm a fan of moth man but I think not having him or theme music added so much!!
There's no such thing as an accent free voice, everyone has an accent. I suspect what you mean is you want an American accent because that sounds generic to you. As an English person this narrator sounds generic to me. An American accent might sound normal to you but it's still a different accent to everyone else.
@@rubicon3atoz922 by saying generic you probably mean the accent of your native village. better thank your god that they had not used what is "generic" for myself.
I was 9 years old when this collapse happened..My Mother cried and my Dad shook his head.. They knew several people that died on that bridge.. I'll never forget that day..
THAT IS SO SAD, I know it says Danny Jones, but we have yahoo internet or youtubeinternet and it only shows his name. Mine is Shelley and I am so sorry for their loss.
always find it amazing how, in any engineering disaster, the experts reconstruct as much as possible to find the fault. Very similar to plane crashes, no matter how large or small the component, every piece is used to tell the tale of disaster.
I was 11yrs old in July 1967. I rode across the bridge twice the same day. I still remember the way it shook. When I heard about it falling later that year I got a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I remember when I was a lot younger my grandfather talking about the Silver Bridge. He hauled cars a crossed it 100+ times from Michigan to Charleston And I remember him talking about him crossing the bridge the day before it collapsed. He said he heard a very loud pop and the bridge shook in a way it never did before.
Don't cross the Ambassador bridge in Windsor,Onatario.I was stuck on it with 68,000lbs gross going in to Canada.Traffic was stopped and you can feel the bridge move up and down like it was breathing.Totally weird feeling
I remember one man said it hit home to him when he realized the girl who normally sat next to him in class wasn't there. She and her mother had died in the Silver Bridge disaster.
I crossed that bridge so many times from 1961 to 1966 that it's impossible to remember how many. I was in Vietnam when it collapsed and I could hardly believe it.
That must have been completely surreal, off fighting a war where people were dying and to find out about mass casualties at home. Thanks for your service sir!
@@michaelhendrickson5287 I can appreciate your situation as best anyone not in your shoes might. What a horrible situation to deal with what with everything else going on in your immediate situation. The country owes you and others who were put that needless, crazy situation a deep and sincere apology. My own Uncle, from Petersburg, received two purple hearts. Hardly a deposit of payment for the years of nightmares, anxiety and what is now called PTSD. To this day it is known in our family to never awaken him suddenly. It breaks my heart that a happy fun loving young country boy was forced to fight under the circumstances that you, he and others were dropped into. To this day a war fought in jungle terrain has never been won. They had to have known that back then. Because of this and more, I offer you my sincerest gratitude for your service to our country.
A very interesting documentary. I'm a mechanical engineer, and it surprises me that bridges are only designed to a 2.0 safety factor. I've always assumed that civil engineering structures were designed to at least a 4.0 safety factor to account for corrosion degradation. Lubrication of the joints would have greatly increased the likelihood of that bridge surviving the elements. Greasing the pins would have eliminated corrosion, and increased the freedom with which the links could move around the pins. Much has been learned in material science since the Silver Bridge was built, and modern materials can be made with no residual tensile stresses, or even residual compressive stress. And the cause of low-temperature brittle fracture has also been solved with higher purity steels. (During WW2, Liberty ships operating in cold water were famous for breaking apart.) My mother's side of the family lived in Portsmouth, Ohio, so the Silver Bridge collapse was big news there when it happened in 1967.
yeah, grease - what a concept - how hard would it have been to add Zerks and Galleys to the pins? O, and maybe anneal the end of the pins to reduce internal stresses on the steel. Corrosion is relentless, our bridges are rusting away.
It's amazing how close to being safe this bridge was. The designer was right about the strength of the materials and the design. But because of the combination of water pooling, corrosion, and work hardened members the crack was created. If any of those three things had not been, it would have been fine. This goes to show that using a higher factor of safety may be overkill for the structure overall, but it comes in handy when you get these unlucky combinations of problems that are hard to predict and greatly weaken a single spot.
Weakening a single spot, so like how the heck did the entire bridge collapse so quickly? virtually vanishing in like one minute, more than a little weird, especially when factoring in mothman and how deep is that river anyways?
There is a big difference between lack of maintenance as is the current problem than with metallurgy in the late 19th and early 20th century. Metallurgy in the early 20th century was still a tough field and there was much that wasn't known about how steel acted. Remember during WWII the Liberty ships would in extreme cold crack in half and they were retrofitted to resolve the problem. There are dozens of examples of this learning curve relative to steel manufacturing and its properties.
Thanks for explaining the process of trial and error, a process that has applied to every invention since the beginning of time. "Did you know when people first start doing some thing their typically bad at it at first?"
Look up the USS "Schenectady" she broke in half in the shipyard wet dock on a very cold night ( - 20). The Ductile - Brittle transition temperature for mild steels at that time (1940's) was around - 10 Deg C.
@@snavisTM it's not that they were bad at it, they were actually pretty good at metallurgy at the time. it's that the technology for smelting very pure steel wasn't possible yet. the engineers here failed to consider the increasing load of the bridge, and the steel they used was susceptible to stress-corrosion cracking, which was likely not known at the time of construction as the conditions for it are surprisingly precise.
snavis Trial and error aren’t really the best way to build bridges and ocean going vessels. A competent grasp of engineering and metallurgy can be very helpful in reducing the error part.
With my experience working in very cold temperatures. I have seen High strength steel fail spectacularly. With no warning, breaking.The colder the temperature the more easily it breaks apart. The company that made the machines wound up designing a much heavier piece to replace it and the steel was a more ductile type which resulted in far fewer problems.
Just superb. I was in grade school in West Virginia when the Silver Bridge fell and subsequently became an engineer, but I never informed myself about the final causality. Well done.
As a 20 something adult I’m beyond glad we live in an age where building technique have had thousands of years of practice, and newer ones have had a few decades. It sucks those people passed but hopefully we learned and do better
Unfortunately we don’t even do as well. With the amount of government corruption attached to money , not only do we rarely build a new bridge but we don’t maintain the ones we have.
In Lake Charles, LA, the I10 Bridge is definitely on borrowed time. It's the scariest bridge I have ever been on. I always had to get a running start to make it to the top and over it. They are supposed to build another one, but they always put it on the back burner.
We actually lost the museum last year to fire. They were able to get the fire out and save a lot of the contents. The historical society is fighting them to save the building and not just rebuild and get the museum back open. Hopefully a decision can be made soon and we'll have the river museum back.
This is my hometown. Excellent review here. I did my a report on this in my engineering senior paper many years ago, and micro fish and newspaper searches were all I had . The only thing I will add is that the Christmas shopping was heading to Gallipolis Ohio side and had the bridge loaded on one side significantly more than the other side (coming in to point pleasant, WV) and that contributed to exposing the flaw on the suspension pin. I absolutely love the information here, well done, Thank you!
Louis Blazejewski Thank you. I'm sure I did, but to be honest I don't remember, but it's one of the very few times I learned something doing a research paper.
@@louisblazejewski7884 they did not receive an 'A' in spelling though good buddy! 'Microfiche' is the word. Micro fish are those little things in a foot bowl that chew the dead skin off one's feet! Hehehe...
@@GaryNumeroUno iam sorry i dont know what you are talking about i sometimes get confused and reply to the comments instead of the video but i dont remember commenting on this
Thanks for this well produced documentary! The lady saved her life by backing up! The tensile strength of the "shiny metal" was below standard and the rust accumulates and the failure occurs. Condolences to the families of those killed in that tragedy.
I live about 30 miles from the this bridge. I remember hearing stories from the dive teams that went down to recover bodies and such. Many were getting stuck in the muddy muck on the bottom. One particular diver described seeing a catfish big enough to swallow a grown man just swimming back and forth in front of him. He stayed he poked at it with a hooked pole he was using and it just swam off.
I was surprised at how thin I bars that were supporting the tremendous load on the silver bridge. Even my basic common sense would have questioned the wisdom of an entire bridge relying on that thin piece of steel. The lady that backed up was one quick thinking lucky lady.
It was some VERY quick thinking on her behalf. However, I found it strangely interesting that her car stalled as she was backing off of the bridge.. I can't even begin to imagine the odds that, of all the times that this COULD happen, it was at this very moment in time that it did.. Things like this really lead one to question if life truly is as random as most of us believe it to be..
@Giacomo Esposito - You must not have lived a lot of things in your live to have not yet realized how "coincidences" are common during big events. And almost all accidents are just "many unprobable things which happens at the same times", which is MANY coincidences, and fact is: it happens MANY time EVERY day... Stop being mystic, read science books, LIVE do things with PEOPLE, and you'll realized that coincidences are severely commons.
Giacomo Esposito Her car was possibly a manual transmission. Reversing in a panic while the bridge in front of her is collapsing, I’d be surprised if she didn’t pop the clutch and stall out.
The open university is just that, a university. It specialises in "home learning" and these programs were commissioned to support the coursework at a time when the internet did not exist. They used to be broadcast off-peak; usually early morning or late evening, back in the days before TV became a 24 hour service.
My grandmother (Grace B. Kerwood VanMatre (Vanmeter))had crossed the bridge earlier that day. She had been Christmas shopping. Great video documentation.
I have looked at that spot hundreds of times in my life and thought about it extensively since I lived in the area. Also, my grandfather was one of the divers who tried to retrieve the bodies from the Ohio river. Bad deal.
Why is this channel not monotized?? It's fantastic! This narrator is the best female narrator I've even had the pleasure to enjoy! (Covering such educational, dark subjects)
It wasn't until I read this complimentary comment about the narrator, that I even thought about her. Which says everything, a narrator shouldn't impose themselves on the narrative. Excellent little programme. They also say you never notice a good football (soccer for some) referee. Though these days probably impossible with VAR and all the technology. How on earth did I drift into that.
Excellent narration, great presentation. Thank you. The suspension towers of the Silver Bridge seem remarkably fragile compared to the lengths of the spans they're supporting.
I remember driving from Columbus, Ohio to Huntington AV a week or so after the Silver Bridge fell, and finding a tow or three mile backup at the Huntington Bridge, about forty miles from the Silver Bridge. Turned out everyone was waiting until the car ahead had gotten more than halfway over before accelerating so that there were only two or three cars on the bridge at a time. we were terrified.
My father crossed the bridge several times the day it fell. As a very young child I cried every time we crossed the bridge because I just felt it was going to fall, it swayed.
Redundancy is definitely important, one of the reasons for having trained engineers designing things is to ensure that you have just enough redundancy to cover the possible stresses with a reasonable margin for error. Sometimes that's just about budget, but often times, like with cutting edge projects, it may be the only way to actually build the design. This remains a problem to the current day, as evidenced by the latest problems at Boeing.
There might be multiple reasons as mentioned by Chris L.. Money can be and often times is a huge deal breaker. I think location played a huge role here as well with Pittsburgh being an industrial town and Point Pleasant being a more rural area where heavy traffic is not expected. Unfortunately for the bridge traffic load increased exponentially in the thirty years before the collapse. Add to that new materials being used and a lack of understanding of how those materials would behave over time and you have a disaster on your hands.
Sadly much the same issues have caused the Boeing 737 MAX tragedies - a failure-prone sensor and no redundancy. That said, you can do away with redundancy if you have enough design margin and sufficient inspections to catch degradation before it becomes a critical failure. We regularly trust our lives to systems with no redundancy like car steering struts and aircraft trim jackscrews.
@li d The town is pronounced Gallis-police. My late friend from college was from there an had crossed the same bridge an hour before and had been Christmas shopping and she said that they really don't know as to how many actually died because many cars were swept down the river. I am from the north on Lake Erie and we have many more bridges, some bigger, that are in bad condition and the state of Ohio just passed yet another gas tax to supposedly repair the bridges and roads. There is one road now in it's 15th year of reconstruction. But our officials always have money for pay raises and pensions.
What an absolute joy to see a documentary of such high calibre! Facts, expert analysis and participants recalling their personal experiences of the actual incident all make this a delight to watch. The viewer learns rather than be entertained by the unfolding examination of relevant information.
This is what happens when you make a suspension structure too rigid. The eyebar system enforced a side to side rigidity that concentrated stresses. The failure could have just as easily come from the small bolts that held the eyebar pin endcaps on. There were multiple design flaws in such a system, and why cable bridges are generally superior.
And if those eyelets cracked at the holes, they would start to crack from the inside outward where they wouldnt be visible. The only way to inspect them is by diassembling them and inspecting them. It wouldnt matter what kind of material nor layers. If they crack, you wouldnt know it until it reached the outside of the eyelet, which would be too late. Am I right on that?
Did the aluminum paint also play a role? I would imagine that would increase the corrosion, especially from one part to the other as an electrode would be formed? I assumed that was the cause of the increased pitting where the parts came in contact with each other.
@@DD-lv3zs Basically, this. Cable bridges have a lot more flexibility and elasticity in their design. This design concentrated stress on the eyebar eyelets and the endcaps for the pins. Even if the eyebars didn't crack, sooner or later they would ream out and start allowing more angular displacement than intended, and this would lead to the eventual failure of the eyebar pin endcaps. This bridge was doomed to fail due to concentrated stresses and no way to inspect or repair it once assembled. There were multiple ways this could have and _would have_ eventually failed.
I was living in Ucon, ID. when the Teton dam gave way..June 5th, 1976. I've researched this thing. Experts such as yourself told the people in charge that it was a bad place for a dam. They built it anyway..
Das Piper that bridge was creepy. I cried every single time our family crossed it. I hid in the back floor boards of the car until we were safe on land. My father crossed that bridge several times that very day. Thank God he wasn’t on day shift because he would have been on the bridge at that time most likely. It felt like it moved or something creepy is the only word I can think of. The mothman didn’t give me any premonitions, in fact I had never heard that story until the movie. I was probably 3 the first time we crossed and I cried and cried. No other bridges ever gave me that feeling.
Why no lube in the joints? No bushings? No accounting for water freezing and thawing in the joints? Clearly the job went to the lowest bidder, highest kickbacks. It did though last 39 of it's expected 40 year life. Glad we have learned from our mistakes. Thanks for this doc.
The way this town has always been, Id say it did go to the lowest bidder. They probably worked for cash and didn't pay their taxes on it. I live here, it's always been this way!
Seems like it should have had tubes for frequent rapid application of corrosion ihibitor, just like old cars typically had zerk fittings for greasing their bearings. New designs lack these, and rely on a "use it 'til it fails, then replace it" plan.
My father, a deputy Assessor now long deceased, from Wheeling had attended a Conference in Huntington by bus and crossed the Silver Bridge on the way home the day before the collapse!
i learn so much through the internet . no matter ones age, education is important, as i tell my sons all the time. thanks for upload. Learning how bridges are designed is fascinating. I had developed a bridge phobia years ago traveling over the Chesapeake bridge in Maryland. My solution was prayer and imagining trees and grass surrounding and beneath me!!
Greetings fellow Marylander!, Im well aware of the Chesapeake, but my worse crossing is the Nice bridge going into Va.! That might as well be for horse and carriage crossing only!
Will wunners never cease! And Ceaser's never won... That very bridge started giving me a pretty serious, oodle-boodlish dose of the willies. I didn't used to have that, I think it's because I so infrequently need to go now, as opposed to a couple of decades back. I had heard, at one point, that you could call ahead and a policeman would meet you and drive your car across, better than freezing up in the middle! But, then, some people need to get back, too... (snif). I do doubt it's easy to drive right straight OFF the darn thing, which is kinda really the point after all. However, I achieved THE great & transcendent breakthrough when I realized that, if I can't get... _WHATEVER_ on Ebay or right here on the Eastern Shore, I probably didn't really need it after all! This _may_ work better for, a book or something than it does for a replacement hip joint or the likes. Although, I DO have a Dremel moto-tool and some X-acto knives, betcha can save a bundle that way too.
For a long time I drove over that bridge really not happy about doing it but did it. Then came a period where I would just freak out on it and there is nothing you can do. You can't stop on the middle of it. I don't know how or why the phobia about that bridge began but to this day I can't even stand riding as a passenger on it.
i believe it's closer to 10 for human safe ropes and cables, isn't it? however, rope is inherently safer than chain, for having multiple redundancies built in.
I went with a similar theory forming concrete structures. Engineers would give me calculated tie bolt spacing that l never used once. I always overbuilt. It's served me well over the years never having a blowout. I have witnessed calculated blow outs. I used to say to the engineers it looks good on paper.
@@daveberswick5372 It sort of spooks me to find out that they "only" used a factor of safety of 2 on these bridges, and the one that failed supposedly had a F.O.S. of 1.5. Steel is cheap, lives dont have a price, why shouldnt the factor of safety be more like 5 or 6. I like your "overkill" methods!!
More importantly, as this disaster revealed, bridges need to be inspected. And I'm thinking that here in the UK we have bridges still in use that are older than the US !
@@Eansarii actually, there's thousands of bridges in the U.S. right now that were built in the 50's and 60's using these lower factor of safety's, and we are paying for it now... one of these bridges failed catastrophically near where I lived. All it took was one support to break and down it went! fortunately, no one was killed but it was a darned scarey experience for the few that went down with the bridge. Steel is relatively cheap and so is concrete, and if it takes twice as much material to get a factor of safety into the 4 or 5 range vs 2, it is far cheaper over the long run to build the sucker the right way, than it is to cheap out and have to replace it twice, even if nobody gets killed!
What a great team! From the fella that was there back when the bridge opened to the contemporary engineer of today with the head of the museum to tie the report together and, of course, not forgetting our brave survivor lady (I liked her) to the narrator who was clear and concise. I think those "sister bridges" are outstanding and I'm very interested to see them today. Thank you very much for a fine show. \m/
I think the 0th Century inherited some right to left language🌈 not a left to right🌈 which means we need more left handed people🌈 or at least some left handed tooling🍪
I remember watching this tragedy on the Today Show, they showed them bringing up cars that were crushed and twisted and I will never forget seeing a hand with fingers splayed out sticking out of one the twisted crushed cars. That image haunted me for years. I’ve never forgotten it.
I saw a picture of something similar from the Cypress Structure that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake. A hand, in one of the crushed cars. It looked like the person had put their hand up to the ceiling of the car as if to protect themselves. I know what you mean about the image never leaving you...
My great-g'father was a builder and my g'father was a cabinet maker by trade but also a builder. Together they built 5 houses on Champaign Street in Champaign, IL. The home built by and for my grandparents in 1899 is still occupied; 3 of the other 4 have been demolished and the 5th (the home I grew up in) was destroyed by fire 30 years ago. But the demolitions occurred after 2010, so they did a pretty good job of building.
The reason the older houses that we see were 'made to last' is because the ones that weren't - no longer exist. This is an example of 'survivor bias' - where the only examples are the ones that survived and people assume that everything was made like them. The house I grew up in was custom built for my parents. A couple of years ago it was torn down because it no longer met structural codes and any renovation would have hit the dollar limit that requires the entire structure be brought up to current building codes. And there were structural elements that met code in the early 1960's - but are forbidden today. There was simply no realistic way to replace the structural elements in question without essentially tearing down the parts of the house above them.
@@colincampbell767 not really, if you look at historical Ariel imagery almost all of the old buildings are still Standing, and the ones that weren’t were almost always torn down to make way for a development or just not maintained or burned down, hell, look at any small town, there are always houses of the same era bunched together, and where there is a new house usually the old one burned down or was torn down to build a new one. the survivors biased theory doesn’t make sense with buildings. And if there were a lot of poorly built houses, don’t you think some of them would have survived? But you never see poorly built old houses, because they were just built better back than.
@@youngillinoisan4270 So if I look at the imagery - I would see places where newer houses were torn down and replaced? Or are those houses still standing also? BTW - exactly how do you define 'better built?' Better weather protection? Better mechanical systems? Better roofing systems? Better structural systems? Better plumbing or electrical wiring? Better foundations? Better insulation? Better fire resistance?
@@youngillinoisan4270 No, he's right, it's survivorship bias. You only see now the old buildings that lasted, and don't see now that some modern buildings will last for decades, if not centuries. If you haven't seen poorly built old houses, you haven't been looking. I suggest you pick over ruins and comb through records for houses that were condemned. Oh, and for buildings that just plain collapsed. That happened a lot more in the past than it does now.
My grandmother went over this bridge 30 minutes before it collapsed. She had a hair appt her friend took her to and sadly her friend was coming back over the bridge when it collapsed.
This is not a documentary per se. It is more a tutorial and very well done. I was a student in the early days of this Open University, studying the Humanities and I can vouch for the quality in the 70s at least, from which this is taken,. No bells and whistles, no dramatics, no fuss, just good old-fashioned teaching and learning.
A Mothman sighting at the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant was well-documented. The movie was based on this disaster killing 46 Xmas shoppers in freezing waters on December 15, 1967. 2 bodies were never recovered.
@@jfrtbikgkdhjbeep9974 Mothman doesn't cause disasters, it foreshadows them. The bridge collapsed due to: 1. poor structural design using inferior redundancy tensile material that chemically eroded over time 2. human error in not inspecting & maintaining over years of oxidation.
There are actually a number of these same amazing i-beam supported suspension bridges in Pittsburgh. Another one which similar in design to the Three Sisters (albeit with a much narrower pedestrian walkway) is the 10th Street Bridge spanning the Monongahela river on the southern side of downtown. Beautiful bridge.
Sad, but interesting. When looking at the corrosion between the components, note that as steel oxidises, the rust expands with enormous force as well as abrading surfaces. Add movement & friction = wear, plus expansions / contractions with changes in temperature, = a recipe for failure. However, note how Brunel's Clifton suspension Bridge, opened 1864, is still standing, and taking light car traffic to this day. Remarkable.
Theo N de Bray The thing is Brunel was a one of a kind engineer. He taught us to allow plenty of room for "movement". That is the crucial difference. Ultimately the Silver Bridge self destructed because the tolerances were too tight. Things out in the real world don't always work out like in the lab or on paper. Brunel had the practical experience and wisdom of foresight of the unforeseen and that is what made him uniquely superb, the signs of which are all around us still today.
Theo N de Bray I think the Brunell bridge was made from wrought iron, which is very ductile so much so the hooks employed on cranes are still made from this material.
Lol, the 1970's boats are today's SUV,don't miscalculate that today's average family may have less members but the increased average weight per member offsets the quantity.
@@DG-sf9ei I drove a 1968 Cadillac in the early eighties, and the title listed five thousand pounds for its weight. So not sure about your point. Cars were much larger back then.
It’s so nice to see and hear my Uncle Walters voice again.
He’s passed on now and was a wealth of historical and natural information he’s much missed.
My condolences
Sorry for your loss :( But so glad to hear it along with you :)
I'm sorry.
RIP uncle Walter
He seemed like a chill, knowledgeable guy. My condolences but glad you had and appreciated him as your uncle.
I was 13 years old when this bridge fell. My parents had to go out of town for a few days and left my younger sister and I with some close friends who lived in the same neighborhood. The man of the house was a truck driver and a good man. He had a delivery that this bridge was on his route. He ask me if I wanted to ride along with him and I was excited to ride in his big truck. The lady called my mother long distance to ask permission, but due to scheduling of my parents' return home, my mom said no. The truck driver would not be back before my parents arrived home. His truck was on the bridge when it fell and he lost his life. I was still at the house when his wife got the phone call and clearly remember her face going stone cold as she dropped the phone and fainted to the floor. That was a seriously troubled time for his family, especially that close to Christmas!!!
@@PurpleObscuration wow what a jerk
@Buck ey Hope you can increase you patience levels Come the revolution after the bankers , politicians , car parking attendants you selfish thoughtless pricks are next up against the wall
Isn't it something how fate works?. You weren't meant to be included so your life was spared. Just like the lady that backed up on the bridge and stopped on what became the edge. It wasn't meant to be!.
Life is fragile
I was a year and a half old. My grandfather responded to the area to help with recovery. I still live close to the area and have heard about the Silver Bridge my entire life. Sorry for your loss.
Aaah, what a pleasure - to watch a video without any stupid unnecessary background music trying to make it appear cool and modern but really only competing with the speaker. And the speaker in this one is so good as well, so easy to understand. Thank you very much film editor
That is because this is a professionally produced piece of film.
I appreciate the professional quiet production. On some shows, the music is so loud you can't hear the narrator.
🙏🙏🙏
It's the open university
They have university degrees for people to do at home
And they used to have lectures on maths on at 12 to 5am every day in the uk. Just one man talking and writing equations on a black board. Good stuff to watch !
MUSIC FOR NOISE SAKE ruins many if not all docs. In a movie(Hollywood) the music is composed FOR the scene. In most docs, it's just music that someone liked or had some kind of unknown reason for being used. Lousy reason for it. Even in movies the music doesn't always add to the experience, but at least there was an attempt to make it add. Remember "Silence is golden".
As a child I remember crossing the Silver Bridge several times to visit relatives in Ohio. My Dad would always say" ok everyone hold your breath and pray in silence that we make it this time". My Dad never did trust the bridge.
Wow, I learned it had movement. That just doesn't sound good at all, plus no way to fix, I believe, the eye bars. I don't blame your Daddy. He sounds like a smart fellow.
I actually live in Pittsburgh and regularly cross a suspension bridge quite regularly. (Pittsburgh being divided by three rivers we have TONS of bridges.)
They really are made to move though since your in motion you usually can't feel it much unless your stopped on an end or a heavy tractor trailer is passing near you. (It really bounces then!) It doesn't make me nervous generally unless I'm stopped at an end when you can really feel the movement. I say a lot of prayers then and so far so good. Unfortunately not really any other options in Pittsburgh, your going to need to cross at least one bridge pretty much anywhere you go.
@Repent and believe in Jesus Christ Go away.
@@danistaab7152 - Hi neighbor!
@Andrew Langton You'll do more than believe that Jesus is Lord, you confess it with your own tongue. Repent and believe the Gospel. Flee from the coming wrath.
I need more content like this. This reminds me so much of old Discovery Channel and History Channel before it became all reality shows.
I recommend the show engineering catastrophes on Science Channel. The Science Channel is the last glimmer of hope we have for educational television. Practically every single series on that channel is super informative! Weakest efforts being What on Earth? and Strange Evidence which are both highly speculative until the closing minutes when they finally give you the actually answers lol
Maybe the US channels need to buy more UK content. This programme was made for the Open University in the UK!
just the facts THANK YOU GOOD DOC
Most people only want to watch a history show once or twice. Eventually, they have shown every possible show they can. After 20 years of programming, they have to go after viewership. I too miss the old History Channel and Discovery Channel. Plus the Biography Channel from 20 years ago.
@Coy Leigh that's soooo true!
My grandfather was the first person to call the police about the bridge falling. As he lived right beside the bridge and watched it fall. The police didn't believe him until others called in. His name is Roy Sayre.
apologies for the notification, but did you mean your grandfather?
@@slickcorrosion yes, autocorrect or whatever you call it on these phones nowadays.
Nowadays it would be live streamed by a falling millennial/gen-Y for some extra clicks and fame. lol
The Silver Bridge was destroyed by the military industrial complex. Electrical mechanical energy.
Next target
San Francisco California
8.0 earthquake
NOAA’s 20 and 21 U.S Space Force’s Directed Energy satellites.
2024
This is the way to do a documentary: leave the viewer smarter after watching. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
This is Open University foundation course material for civil engineering degrees, so is primarily intended to educate.
@Kevin Prima my dad made steel for 45 yre. He could tell what it needed by the color of the heat liquid state!
@Cicliste- Not only "smarter" but definitely more actually ...concerned.
I’m not
AGREE
I am a Mechanical Engineer (BSME, MSME) with 40 years of experience and this is an excellent and interesting documentary! It's very sad to hear of this collapse and condolences to the families losing loved ones. At the same time, it is good that standards were established and implemented for inspection of bridges.
I'm curious about what seems to me to be a very low safety standard for live load. 1.5X seems really sketchy to me. I'm not an engineer but I did take three years of classes in structural and mechanical engineering in high school, and I remember my professors saying that bridges here in Canada were usually designed with 3.0X due to snow and ice buildup and just wear and tear over time. I'd love to know what the modern standards actually are for modern bridge designs.
@@jfever78 - I was watching a documentary on the Mackinac Bridge connecting the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. The designer was Dr. David B. Steinman and I believe he employed a safety factor of 2x. With modern computer simulations and advancements in design engineering, a safety factor of 1.5 is probably suffice. Simulations, for example, can help identify high stress areas due to weight of vehicles, stress from ice, potential earth quakes, wind buffeting etc. Kind Regards.
@@jivepatrol6833 Yeah I'm actually very familiar with that bridge, having driven it many times in the passenger seat in my dad's cab over Freightliner in the 80s and then myself in the driver seat for the one year I had a learners permit myself. I still have a hard time believing that a 1.5X live load factor is sufficient. And while the chances of the bridge to ever be stacked from end to end with rigs that are all at max weight are extraordinarily slim, I can't help but very clearly remember my engineering professor drilling into us the fact that bridges now were all designed to 3.0X potential live load. Memory is a fickle and notoriously unreliable bitch though, so I'll have to do some of my own digging and see what I can find. If I do find anything of interest I'll post a link here for our mutual benefit. Thanks for your input and interest, regardless.
This was the day that Bridge Inspections commenced.
The Big Mac is the benchmark to this day. She will never go down.
It is wonderful NOT to have irritating music and hysterical narration !
I love disaster documentaries, but I hate when they are overdramatized. This one is perfect.
And the opinionated comments annoy me alot
High five for this comment.
And the constant of repeating of details all the way through badly made modern doc's is terrible. This is spot on.
Couldn't agree more buddy/buddette
This, my friends, is a real documentary..... no guesses, suppositions, or ancient aliens...... a forgotten art of fact based storytelling!
No fake news here. CNN was just a twinkle in Ted Turner's eye then...
No music either
Keep watching videos, you'll end up in the alien and robot voice section.
Joseph T. Not with open university. This is actual studying material. Watch enough of this, do the required cause work and you’ll end up with a qualification.
Psibug I just drove over the Sagamore bridge shaking like a dog shitting razor blades
LOVED LOVED LOVED this production. the script and all the speaking roles were so novel. it avoided the "slick" quality that so many docs have today. it had a simplicity that modern docs eschew. the amateur, or should i say non professional speakers gave a wonderful feeling of unpretentious reality.
the professional narrator spoke with clarity and authority and never upstaged the subject. she was great.
very impressive.
thank you.
You should realize this video would have been produced as part of an engineering degree programme at the Open University in the UK. There was thus no need for any commercial or marketing angle.
"the silver bridge disaster's has a lasting legacy in Bridge safety" Which is why in 2019, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association found more than 47,000 bridges in the U.S. are in poor condition and in need of urgent repairs, but as of 2020 the US Congress has giving zero dollars to repair any of them....
Welp, fingers crossed for the next four years I guess
Meanwhile sending millions if not billions of tax payers money to foreign aid
Wow, this turned sour a LOT faster than most comments like this
The government collects taxes from sale of gasoline but puts the money in a general fund to distribute at their discretion. If the money collected from gasoline sales went entirely to our roads and bridges we would have the best in the world.
Which bridges?
I remember when that happened. Dad was sent down there to help recover those poor souls that died. He was a volunteer fire fighter on Mt. Carmel's North Union Twnph Fire Dept (lifesquadman)
Thank you for his service, he found my great great uncle who died
My Family had crossed that Bridge the night before it collasped
My name is Beverly Lynn Proctor. I was staying with my sister and brother in law at that time. Ann and Jim Hensley they lived right outside of Pomeroy. I was listening to the CB in their kitchen. When they got home I told them what I heard. They lost so many love ones. A very sad day.
I'm not a naturally mechanically inclined person, but I found this documentary and its explanations and graphics easy to understand and interesting. Thanks for the upload.
... times 2!
@@tracer740 Times 3! ..No complex Physics or equations...just easy to understand info.
Times 4, although I am a mechanically interested person. Still it's an art to explain it with straightforward wording. Great!
Hello Daisy how are you doing today.
Walter Carpenter was my high school Biology teacher. Later, I considered him a good friend. Whenever anyone greeted him and asked how he was doing, his reply was always: "Better Than I Deserve". As a resident of St. Marys for much of my life, I will always remember the original Hi Carpenter Bridge. And the new bridge which replaced the one which was closed, was opened to traffic the same week as I reported for active duty in the US Marine Corps, 1977. Mr. Walter Carpenter was an authority on local history and a good man. He is missed by family and friends.
I was also serving in the
Marine Corps in 1977. 🙏✌️ SEMPER FI 🇺🇲
@@augustinecerronejr7968I'm gay too
@kylekorona that's cool Bro, but I'm not Gay. No offense meant✌🏻
@@augustinecerronejr7968 don't be gay big daddy
@@IamNiggler Right On✊️ Not my Cup of Tea🇺🇸🫡🖖
This is a really great documentary. I like the no nonsense approach and the fact it isn't dumbed down but is still presented in a way that you don't have to be a structural engineer to understand what's going on. No propaganda, no bells and whistles, no unnecessary "pop art" graphics, just the story. This is a lost art.
you can thank the Open University, a British institution for remote learning. This video was part of a degree course in engineering.
Excellent comment. I agree with every point, particularly about the pop art graphics.
This is one of the reasons that certain load-bearing elements of railroad locomotives are never painted. That paint will hide otherwise visible cracks in the metal.
The bridges? In Pittsburgh they're not painted because they're made from cor-ten steel
Correct. A former employer went really big suddenly in the trucking industry and got the container contract from Vancouver to Tacoma. I visited his year and couldn't understand why his crew were painting the well used container trailers with such thick, blue paint. Now I know. He was covering up the cracks.
Grease those pins!
Good point
@@dwightstjohn6927 structural paint? lol
I like the no nonsense style. No bombastic music, no replace of information with drama...
You will really enjoy most BBC doca then. Go and have a look at BBC Horizon docs, there are some brilliant ones.
My grandfather died on the bridge. Thank you for this great documentary.
during construction or the collapse?
RADIUM CLOCK He died when it collapsed.
One of my fears is dying on a collapsing bridge
Why lie about such a random thing? 🤦♂️😆
@@snavisTM hey shut up fucker you dont know this guys life so shut your mouth
That female narrator was brilliant - she sounded cool, authoritative and attractive to listen to. Well done, Open University.
My parents crossed the Silver Bridge just 1 day before it collapsed. I remember them saying that the swaying of the bridge just didn’t seem right and it really scared them. My dad stated that he would never cross that bridge again. Well, he was right on that one. I wonder if the ramps are still standing on either sides. I guess I need to make a trip to find out. Great video.
Forget it, put it out of your head your family made it and that is all that matters.
Your dad is/was very smart.
@@kam2894 🇺🇸 I agree. Sometimes it’s good to back in history and just get a feel for what my dad was thinking. We know that the story had a good ending though. I’m a history nut anyway.
To save you a trip the ramps have long been removed, a new bridge called the Silver Memorial Bridge was constructed down river a little. The highway on the west side actually dead ends where the ramp would have been. On the east side there's a parking lot and a plaque marking the spot but that's all that's left of silver
Did you catch a glimpse of the Moth man?
This how you make a documentary! Whoever enjoys this will like The History Guy! Thanks for no stupid music!
I agree about the music thing. In my opinion, the music can totally ruin the whole thing. It’s usually so loud that I can barely hear the commentator!
History guy is bad ass!!
@@whitemage024 --- Agreed. The History Guy, and this channel are two of the best.
An amen for that!
Excellent Comment
Great documentary! This is the gold standard for how to make a proper documentary. And thanks for no dramatic music! 👍🏻💕
Real tragedies do not have a soundtrack in background; you Just die and that Is all 😮😢
What a pleasure to hear a narrator who has knowledge on public speaking..slow and mellodonical..ALSO VERY WELL PRESENTED kept my interest
Im not so sure about the St Marys talk. St Marys WV is 80 miles from Point Pleasant WV and on the same side of the river. No St Marys OH near there either. Maybe theres a Catholic School around there or something. Idk
And NOT an AI.
did anyone catch this event in a movie called, "Moth Man"...? My grandmother lived on the Ohio side, in a house located on the hill facing the bridge at the time it fell. She told me her experience of the bridge falling. She was a house wife at the time, my grand father drove a greyhound bus to Chicago, and back everyday. She told me that she didn't see it break apart, but had a birds eye view of the horrific aftermath. She said she could not hold back tears then, and when she had told me about it in 1975. She had explained to me what is said here, that the people, the area, was so proud to have such a grad size bridge. How important it made them feel to what was happening in the US back then.
I also thought so (from the Moth Man movie)! How interesting to hear that you have such first hand connections to the incident! Although, I am so sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing it.
My Grandmother lived about 7 miles up river in Cheshire Oh. They knew many of the victims.
"The Mothman Prophecies" , starring Richard Gere.
@@Thoralmir the reason I watched it was I knew a guy that supplied some of his Buicks for the movie.
I was born in Gallipolis in 93. I moved away when I was 4 but it always fascinated me the events that took place in this area.
Three years before the collapse of that bridge I drove a truck across it pulling a ten foot wide house trailer. I was alarmed by the noise and shaking. I never crossed it again.
Haha i was thinking the same thing
The old Pomeroy bridge shook also.
And he is on TH-cam 😁 knowing how to make a comment.
@@Billy_Darley The bridge collapsed 52 years ago.
But how did you get the next house trailer across the river!? Did you float it across?
Wow that woman who had the wherewithal to back up on the bridge came so close. I couldn’t imagine seeing a bridge fall out of the sky inches from me and where I had just been. Crazy.
Here after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse
Also I'm a Baltimorian as well.. this video popped up in my feeds
You should look up the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse of you aren't already familiar. Just like the F.S.K. Bridge collapse.
That bridge is an example of why I was a big believer in the “Dead Ship” maneuver back in my seafaring days. When dead ship maneuvering, you rely 100% on the tug boats to provide ALL of your movements with your power plant, rudder, and bow thruster at the ready as an emergency backup to the tug boats. This way, the tug boats are constantly in position to start, stop, and change your motion with you not being reliant on your own equipment. That way when your own equipment fails it’s inconsequential because the tugs are already doing all of the work.
My Uncle was the head engineer in charge of putting the wreckage back together to find the cause of the bridge failure. I crossed that bridge many times and only a few days before it went down. It never crossed my mind that the bridge was dangerous.
I’m sure that thought never crossed through the mind of the people on the titanic and the world trade centers. Never crossed their mind. So every time I cross a bridge I wonder how much longer they will stand and who inspected it last.
My grandparents drove over that.bridge two hours before it
collapsed. They lived down river
from Point Plesant. I was 22.
I remember reading an analysis of the Silver Bridge collapse shortly after it happened and a significant factor was mentioned that was not included in this documentary. This was the use of "rocker towers". When a suspension bridge is at rest all of the tension and compression forces are in equilibrium. When acted upon by outside forces (wind, deck load, etc.) this equilibrium is disturbed and various parts of the bridge move until a new equilibrium is established. This documentary made a point about how much movement there was in the bridge and this was an intended part of the design. In order for there to be movement without excessive stress in the bridge components there has to be a mechanism to allow for this moment. Some suspension bridges have rigid towers and the cables or chains can move a bit lengthwise through the top of the tower as required. The Silver bridge was different. The chains were attached in a fixed position at the top of the towers and the bottoms of the towers were on "rockers" so that they could tilt along the the length of the bridge to redistribute the stresses. This worked OK under normal conditions, but when eyebar 330 failed there was a very large asymmetrical force on the tower and, being pretty much unrestrained at the bottom, it simply fell over and collapse of the entire bridge ensued. If the towers had been rigidly attached to the piers (and other means of redistributing stresses used) it is possible that the collapse would have only been partial rather than complete - and probably many fewer people would have died.
Vincent I would have to agree with your reply in partial. The excessive movement also did something else that was detrimental, it set up vibrations. These constant vibrations not only promoted the failure, but also acted as a cutting movement on connection points. This promoted stress points. When you look at 330, from my machinist background. I see a total failure of the steel and its designed connection. What I think that was done? Nobody tested the steel for strength, or if they did, they fudged the numbers of total failure point. Who ever did the quality assurance/ quality control did not do there job from an engineering standpoint! The bridge lasted under 50 years, that is a total failure.
Thank you for this engineering lesson. I wondered why it fell the way it did. That completely explains it.
There is no way, you could build a rigid tower, capable of supporting a 700 ft span, without anchorage on the back side. Either the tower will fail, or the cable will fall from the tower - leaving the tower standing, but the roadway will collapse either way.
No matter the towers, if you lose one of the two main suspension elements on a suspension bridge, the bridge is gone.
@@MissionaryForMexico You sounded credible until "there job"
The Bridge's Major Design Flaw: SPOF - Single Point of Failure
December 15th, 1967 was a Friday. I had been in Charlotte, WV at the DuPont Plant in Nitro and was returning to Athens, Ohio where I was a Professor of Chemical Engineering. I had left the meeting mid-afternoon after I used the company phone to tell my wife I was on my way home. and approached the bridge from the south. I recall that traffic was quite heavy with a combination of semis, dump trucks, pickups and many sedans. Traffic was pretty much stop and go. I think I got to the stop light at the foot of the bridge some a couple of minutes before 5. I turned right at the light and headed toward Athens, arriving home a little after 6. My wife came rushing ou the door. "Did you cross the river?" she asked."Of course I said. "The bridge collapsed an hour ago!" I may have been one of the lucky few who had crossed the bridge just moments before it collapsed.
That video looks well before the 60s
I drove my mama across that bridge one day and remarked, "Mom, some day this old bridge will fall" as we experienced a trembling and scary swinging of it from side to side as we crossed. Mama replied, "No. They built this bridge too well." I crossed that bridge hundreds of times and was terrified each time. There was a traffic light on the WV side which caused the bridge to be loaded with cars and trucks for extended periods. I remember seeing the newspaper accounts after the fall with pictures of Christmas packages floating in the water. How haunting and sad that was.
So cool to have someone write first hand accounts of history.
@ probably because she said they experienced a trembling and scary swinging of it from side to side.
Thank you for sharing this tragic personal experience. God bless you.
Sounds like bad design , survivor's are so lucky .
Pat Melton how horrible 😢
The narrator, Francesca Hunt, is brilliant. *I wish she could narrate EVERYTHING!*
"Thank you for the compliment, agent 47."
i like her voice too. clear and soothing.
Voice i could listen to all day, so pleasant.
Francesca 's sister India Fisher is equally as captivating
themirrorsofmymind yes she speaks correct understandable English. Not like the many clowns who make up their own pronunciation or even individual words.
The McClean truck at 12:05 was driven by a friend of my fathers. He was about 15 minutes behind him. Dad had to stop and was delayed and was trying to catch back up to his buddy when he drove up on this disaster. If he had not had the minor issue he had there would have been 2 McClean trucks in that mess!
ram2791 that be a scary thought you can’t get out of your head.
That I could have been on it thought
Timing is an amazing thing.
thx for sharing that!. was rtng from leave in Navy headed bk to Dallas Tx.. i had alredi eaten, but in my head, i kept hearing STOP, so i gave in, stopped n had apple pie at a shoneys, get back in head out, as i crest the hill to cross abridge to get into Dallas, a THICK GREY FOG had enveloped that bridge on a CLEAR SUNNY DAY, a bunch of people died in a fiery pileup on I-20....one of the worst in texas history, i cal that the GRACE OF ALMIGHTY GOD!.. Would marry a year later n have a son! Could write a short book on this kinda stuff!
:'(
Hi! Hi! (It's The Mothman. Say "Hi") Drove my Chevy, to Point Pleasant 'cuz Point Pleasant is nice etc.
This was so informative, I learned a lot. I always wondered how they built these suspension bridges without pulling one of the main supports down horizontally before they could couple it with the other side.
The American Bridge Company built the Hercilio Luz Bridge in Florianópolis, Brazil in 1926. It has a similar design of the Silver Bridge and was reopened last year after it was revitalized. I monitored some part of the progress as Civil Engineering student and it was fantastic.
Man.. when I first saw the design of this bridge I thought, this is a terrible design..
But after learning more about the bridge, I started to think that this was a terrific design, just had a couple fatal flaws that went unnoticed..
It really makes you have immense respect for the designs that do work and do last.
My friend drove semis. His employer insisted he drive over this bridge with loads 28000 pounds heavier than permitted. The bridge sagged and swayed. He finally refused a to cross that bridge overweight, and was fired. A couple weeks later.....
Deckard Cain The trucking companies which force employees to violate weight limits endanger everyone because they damage the bridges and the damaged bridge s might not fall then but will in the future. That company needs to be put out of business and fined heavily! Innocent people died for someone else’s mistake
That could’ve been a contributing factor that caused the initial stress crack/fracture that ended in failure. Corrupt employers are disgusting. I hope his company has gone under and is no longer around. If it is you should report them.
Thanks for sharing this. It is amazing how we are interdependent on each other, sometimes in surprising ways. Consider people who make parts or assemble products that effect security and safety. What if they cut corners or allowed themselves to compromise their values. Values are important.
As far as the engineers and builders and examiners and all the people working to build a better bridge, seems they are doing the best that you can. It is heartbreaking when we do our very best and then something happens. I guess that is where forgiveness comes in.
...and people wonder why there's so much red tape. Scumbags like that employer are the reason.
@@LaDivinaLover whos job was it to protect the bridge load weight ? You guessed it the local municipal safety office . So the blame rested on the elements rather than on the human failure . Dont think it didnt get brought up .
I remember this as a child, as we were traveling from California to Texas to be with our grandparents on Christmas. We heard it on the car radio. What a sad day.
Factor of safety of 1.5? In a corosive environment, without regular lubrication, under fatigue loading, and using medium tensile steel ?
1 The steel should have had enough nickel in it to prevent brittleness in sub zero temperatures.
2 There perhaps should have been a zinc plating on the steel to protect it from corrosion.
3 The links should have been bead blasted so that the surfaces were under compression.
3 The joints should have been regularly lubricated with something to keep water out.
4 There should have been at least 3 if not 4 links in each chain, so that loss of a link would not overload those remaining.
5 I think a softer steel would be preferable, that way if anything breaks the overloaded parts will bend and/or stretch instead of snapping.
6 The factor of safety should have been much higher. 1.5 is for millitary aircraft, 3 is for bridges.
I wouldnt mind betting a substantial sum that there were a few cracks developing on the Hi Carpenter bridge when it was disassembled.
Well summarised
A single point of failure is inexcusable. The Pittsburgh bridges were designed and built right.
The older sister of this bridge, and one of these three already built in the world, (Hercílio Luz) in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, which is still standing, was recently restored. Cars went back on December 30, 2019, after 28 years banned due to cracking in one of the four eyebars support. Hercilio Luz may not have collapsed because it had four supporting eyebars, unlike Silver Brigde which had only two.
Thank you for posting this
So happy they didn't use music.
Wish they had used a more "generic", or accent free narrator though!
Yea, what a relief.
I never thought about that,not having background music, probably why I enjoyed it so much and left with more understanding of this disaster. Glad they didn't mention moth man either. I'm a fan of moth man but I think not having him or theme music added so much!!
There's no such thing as an accent free voice, everyone has an accent. I suspect what you mean is you want an American accent because that sounds generic to you. As an English person this narrator sounds generic to me. An American accent might sound normal to you but it's still a different accent to everyone else.
@@rubicon3atoz922
by saying generic you probably mean the accent of your native village. better thank your god that they had not used what is "generic" for myself.
I was 9 years old when this collapse happened..My Mother cried and my Dad shook his head.. They knew several people that died on that bridge.. I'll never forget that day..
In those days people knew each other.
I see the mothman?
I was 8 and I remember the news and my parents reaction. Very sad time close to Christmas.
THAT IS SO SAD, I know it says Danny Jones, but we have yahoo internet or youtubeinternet and it only shows his name. Mine is Shelley and I am so sorry for their loss.
always find it amazing how, in any engineering disaster, the experts reconstruct as much as possible to find the fault. Very similar to plane crashes, no matter how large or small the component, every piece is used to tell the tale of disaster.
I was 11yrs old in July 1967. I rode across the bridge twice the same day. I still remember the way it shook. When I heard about it falling later that year I got a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Bill Brown I was 10, we'd come back to Ohio from a rafting trip in W.Virginia a couple months before the collapse.
Because you knew you were right all along. And innocent lives were lost.
I remember when I was a lot younger my grandfather talking about the Silver Bridge. He hauled cars a crossed it 100+ times from Michigan to Charleston And I remember him talking about him crossing the bridge the day before it collapsed. He said he heard a very loud pop and the bridge shook in a way it never did before.
Omg thats horrible!
GrandPOP
This caused my lifelong fear of bridges. Hard thing to overcome when you’re an over the road truck driver.
Tunnels and bridges scare me too
Don't cross the Ambassador bridge in Windsor,Onatario.I was stuck on it with 68,000lbs gross going in to Canada.Traffic was stopped and you can feel the bridge move up and down like it was breathing.Totally weird feeling
I'm terrified of bridges especially ones like this. My heart skips beats everytime I have to cross one.
I remember one man said it hit home to him when he realized the girl who normally sat next to him in class wasn't there. She and her mother had died in the Silver Bridge disaster.
So sad and I guess I missed that in the program.
I crossed that bridge so many times from 1961 to 1966 that it's impossible to remember how many. I was in Vietnam when it collapsed and I could hardly believe it.
That must have been completely surreal, off fighting a war where people were dying and to find out about mass casualties at home. Thanks for your service sir!
@@nathanbbyrum And I thank you, sir. I appreciate your reply.
@@GoteeDevotee I think about them more than you can ever know.
@@michaelhendrickson5287 I can appreciate your situation as best anyone not in your shoes might. What a horrible situation to deal with what with everything else going on in your immediate situation. The country owes you and others who were put that needless, crazy situation a deep and sincere apology. My own Uncle, from Petersburg, received two purple hearts. Hardly a deposit of payment for the years of nightmares, anxiety and what is now called PTSD. To this day it is known in our family to never awaken him suddenly. It breaks my heart that a happy fun loving young country boy was forced to fight under the circumstances that you, he and others were dropped into. To this day a war fought in jungle terrain has never been won. They had to have known that back then. Because of this and more, I offer you my sincerest gratitude for your service to our country.
GoteeDevotee The government drafted them. They are forced to go.
A very interesting documentary. I'm a mechanical engineer, and it surprises me that bridges are only designed to a 2.0 safety factor. I've always assumed that civil engineering structures were designed to at least a 4.0 safety factor to account for corrosion degradation. Lubrication of the joints would have greatly increased the likelihood of that bridge surviving the elements. Greasing the pins would have eliminated corrosion, and increased the freedom with which the links could move around the pins. Much has been learned in material science since the Silver Bridge was built, and modern materials can be made with no residual tensile stresses, or even residual compressive stress. And the cause of low-temperature brittle fracture has also been solved with higher purity steels. (During WW2, Liberty ships operating in cold water were famous for breaking apart.) My mother's side of the family lived in Portsmouth, Ohio, so the Silver Bridge collapse was big news there when it happened in 1967.
Shut up. how would you know. TH-cam is not smell-o-vision.
Andy has a valid point. Bridges should be built with a safety factor of 4.
yeah, grease - what a concept - how hard would it have been to add Zerks and Galleys to the pins? O, and maybe anneal the end of the pins to reduce internal stresses on the steel. Corrosion is relentless, our bridges are rusting away.
It's amazing how close to being safe this bridge was. The designer was right about the strength of the materials and the design. But because of the combination of water pooling, corrosion, and work hardened members the crack was created. If any of those three things had not been, it would have been fine. This goes to show that using a higher factor of safety may be overkill for the structure overall, but it comes in handy when you get these unlucky combinations of problems that are hard to predict and greatly weaken a single spot.
Weakening a single spot, so like how the heck did the entire bridge collapse so quickly? virtually vanishing in like one minute, more than a little weird, especially when factoring in mothman and how deep is that river anyways?
There is a big difference between lack of maintenance as is the current problem than with metallurgy in the late 19th and early 20th century. Metallurgy in the early 20th century was still a tough field and there was much that wasn't known about how steel acted. Remember during WWII the Liberty ships would in extreme cold crack in half and they were retrofitted to resolve the problem. There are dozens of examples of this learning curve relative to steel manufacturing and its properties.
Thanks for explaining the process of trial and error, a process that has applied to every invention since the beginning of time.
"Did you know when people first start doing some thing their typically bad at it at first?"
Ductile-brittle transition temperature for the average mild steel in the 30's/40's -10 deg C.
Look up the USS "Schenectady" she broke in half in the shipyard wet dock on a very cold night ( - 20). The Ductile - Brittle transition temperature for mild steels at that time (1940's) was around - 10 Deg C.
@@snavisTM it's not that they were bad at it, they were actually pretty good at metallurgy at the time. it's that the technology for smelting very pure steel wasn't possible yet.
the engineers here failed to consider the increasing load of the bridge, and the steel they used was susceptible to stress-corrosion cracking, which was likely not known at the time of construction as the conditions for it are surprisingly precise.
snavis Trial and error aren’t really the best way to build bridges and ocean going vessels. A competent grasp of engineering and metallurgy can be very helpful in reducing the error part.
With my experience working in very cold temperatures. I have seen High strength steel fail spectacularly. With no warning, breaking.The colder the temperature the more easily it breaks apart. The company that made the machines wound up designing a much heavier piece to replace it and the steel was a more ductile type which resulted in far fewer problems.
I was just thinking of how many leaf springs I've shattered while working in the cold. We even managed to crack a truck's frame.
@@841k9 .
@Dennis Wilson thanks google.
How extreme is the cold on the West Virginia-Ohio border?
@@tomservo56954 On a frigid winters night not counting wind chill -6 F to -9 F, on a scorching summer day +95 to +100 F.
Just superb. I was in grade school in West Virginia when the Silver Bridge fell and subsequently became an engineer, but I never informed myself about the final causality. Well done.
As a 20 something adult I’m beyond glad we live in an age where building technique have had thousands of years of practice, and newer ones have had a few decades. It sucks those people passed but hopefully we learned and do better
Unfortunately we don’t even do as well. With the amount of government corruption attached to money , not only do we rarely build a new bridge but we don’t maintain the ones we have.
@@williammorris3303 THANK YOU 🙏 hit the nail man
In Lake Charles, LA, the I10 Bridge is definitely on borrowed time. It's the scariest bridge I have ever been on. I always had to get a running start to make it to the top and over it. They are supposed to build another one, but they always put it on the back burner.
Excellent documentary. And thanks to those who work at the museum for keeping history alive.
We actually lost the museum last year to fire. They were able to get the fire out and save a lot of the contents. The historical society is fighting them to save the building and not just rebuild and get the museum back open. Hopefully a decision can be made soon and we'll have the river museum back.
@@towboatjeff I'm so sorry to hear that. If there is anyone I can write to I will.
Write to them, so as they can use your Letter to start another Fire, with. Good one, David Gray. Your Pyromania precedes you.
This is my hometown. Excellent review here. I did my a report on this in my engineering senior paper many years ago, and micro fish and newspaper searches were all I had . The only thing I will add is that the Christmas shopping was heading to Gallipolis Ohio side and had the bridge loaded on one side significantly more than the other side (coming in to point pleasant, WV) and that contributed to exposing the flaw on the suspension pin. I absolutely love the information here, well done, Thank you!
Hope you got an "a"
Louis Blazejewski Thank you. I'm sure I did, but to be honest I don't remember, but it's one of the very few times I learned something doing a research paper.
@@louisblazejewski7884 they did not receive an 'A' in spelling though good buddy! 'Microfiche' is the word. Micro fish are those little things in a foot bowl that chew the dead skin off one's feet! Hehehe...
@@GaryNumeroUno iam sorry i dont know what you are talking about i sometimes get confused and reply to the comments instead of the video but i dont remember commenting on this
No worries Louis. Just trying to lighten the mood. Stay safe and happy. Cheers
Thanks for this well produced documentary! The lady saved her life by backing up! The tensile strength of the "shiny metal" was below standard and the rust accumulates and the failure occurs. Condolences to the families of those killed in that tragedy.
I live about 30 miles from the this bridge. I remember hearing stories from the dive teams that went down to recover bodies and such. Many were getting stuck in the muddy muck on the bottom. One particular diver described seeing a catfish big enough to swallow a grown man just swimming back and forth in front of him. He stayed he poked at it with a hooked pole he was using and it just swam off.
Hi 🙋♂️
Extremely well done the narrator's tone and vocalization is excellent.
Pretty sure she is of foreign descent. Foreign dialect naturally is more interesting when it comes to narration.
@Nicky L no American is going to understand your brilliant joke!
I was surprised at how thin I bars that were supporting the tremendous load on the silver bridge. Even my basic common sense would have questioned the wisdom of an entire bridge relying on that thin piece of steel. The lady that backed up was one quick thinking lucky lady.
I too noticed that and the size of the bolt seem inadequate.
It was some VERY quick thinking on her behalf. However, I found it strangely interesting that her car stalled as she was backing off of the bridge.. I can't even begin to imagine the odds that, of all the times that this COULD happen, it was at this very moment in time that it did.. Things like this really lead one to question if life truly is as random as most of us believe it to be..
@Giacomo Esposito - You must not have lived a lot of things in your live to have not yet realized how "coincidences" are common during big events.
And almost all accidents are just "many unprobable things which happens at the same times", which is MANY coincidences, and fact is: it happens MANY time EVERY day...
Stop being mystic, read science books, LIVE do things with PEOPLE, and you'll realized that coincidences are severely commons.
Giacomo Esposito Her car was possibly a manual transmission. Reversing in a panic while the bridge in front of her is collapsing, I’d be surprised if she didn’t pop the clutch and stall out.
@@garryiglesias4074 - Wow, listen to you - acting as if you have even the slightest idea who I am, or what I know...
This small documentary was extremely well done. Thank you.
This documentary is a BBC programme it was not made by the person who has put it up. Andy England
I am just acknowledging the quality and thanking them for the upload.
I like the female narrator's style.
Agreed. Good clear statement of pertinent factual information from a variety of viewpoints, without a bunch of whipped up hype or useless drama.
The open university is just that, a university.
It specialises in "home learning" and these programs were commissioned to support the coursework at a time when the internet did not exist.
They used to be broadcast off-peak; usually early morning or late evening, back in the days before TV became a 24 hour service.
My grandmother (Grace B. Kerwood VanMatre (Vanmeter))had crossed the bridge earlier that day. She had been Christmas shopping. Great video documentation.
I have looked at that spot hundreds of times in my life and thought about it extensively since I lived in the area. Also, my grandfather was one of the divers who tried to retrieve the bodies from the Ohio river. Bad deal.
Why is this channel not monotized?? It's fantastic! This narrator is the best female narrator I've even had the pleasure to enjoy! (Covering such educational, dark subjects)
Yep
I live 30 minutes away from point pleasant wv there is still cars in the river I think
This is terrific. The narrator is outstanding.
One terrific channel complimenting another one.
Nice to see.
No drama. No superbole. No exaggeration. And a lovely English accent. Excellent
It wasn't until I read this complimentary comment about the narrator, that I even thought about her. Which says everything, a narrator shouldn't impose themselves on the narrative. Excellent little programme. They also say you never notice a good football (soccer for some) referee. Though these days probably impossible with VAR and all the technology. How on earth did I drift into that.
Is she Diana from the Hitman series ? It's like I hear her saying "Hello 47..."
The narrator's use of RP is quite good. The best clarity, meaning and context is given using such accents.
Excellent narration, great presentation. Thank you.
The suspension towers of the Silver Bridge seem remarkably fragile compared to the lengths of the spans they're supporting.
Wow.
THIS is a documentary! Simple. Educational. To the point.
Not screaming about/or even mentioning the Moth Man.
👍👌👏🤜(fist bump).
I remember driving from Columbus, Ohio to Huntington AV a week or so after the Silver Bridge fell, and finding a tow or three mile backup at the Huntington Bridge, about forty miles from the Silver Bridge. Turned out everyone was waiting until the car ahead had gotten more than halfway over before accelerating so that there were only two or three cars on the bridge at a time. we were terrified.
I definitely can understand their fear
Experience can be a cruel teacher.
Very well said
My father crossed the bridge several times the day it fell. As a very young child I cried every time we crossed the bridge because I just felt it was going to fall, it swayed.
Brilliant documentary. Perfect pacing and excellent information. How you could think that redundancy was NOT important is mystifying.
Redundancy is definitely important, one of the reasons for having trained engineers designing things is to ensure that you have just enough redundancy to cover the possible stresses with a reasonable margin for error. Sometimes that's just about budget, but often times, like with cutting edge projects, it may be the only way to actually build the design.
This remains a problem to the current day, as evidenced by the latest problems at Boeing.
There might be multiple reasons as mentioned by Chris L.. Money can be and often times is a huge deal breaker. I think location played a huge role here as well with Pittsburgh being an industrial town and Point Pleasant being a more rural area where heavy traffic is not expected. Unfortunately for the bridge traffic load increased exponentially in the thirty years before the collapse. Add to that new materials being used and a lack of understanding of how those materials would behave over time and you have a disaster on your hands.
Sadly much the same issues have caused the Boeing 737 MAX tragedies - a failure-prone sensor and no redundancy. That said, you can do away with redundancy if you have enough design margin and sufficient inspections to catch degradation before it becomes a critical failure. We regularly trust our lives to systems with no redundancy like car steering struts and aircraft trim jackscrews.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade "we got this awesome new steel what really works great. You just need two eyebars 'stead of eight!
Two is one and one is none.
This is a great documentary: very sober, very reasonable.
@christosvoskresye IKR? And btw, where's the loud, inappropriate "music" playing overtop of the narrator? Something's wrong with this picture.
This is an educational film for engineering students with the OU. It isn't chasing advertising money.
My mother crossed the Silver Bridge just 15 minutes before it fell. She was in the five and dime store in Gallipolis when it fell.
My late friend was in the same dime store went it collapsed. They had crossed the bridge an hour before. She was from Gallispolis.
@li d The town is pronounced Gallis-police. My late friend from college was from there an had crossed the same bridge an hour before and had been Christmas shopping and she said that they really don't know as to how many actually died because many cars were swept down the river. I am from the north on Lake Erie and we have many more bridges, some bigger, that are in bad condition and the state of Ohio just passed yet another gas tax to supposedly repair the bridges and roads. There is one road now in it's 15th year of reconstruction. But our officials always have money for pay raises and pensions.
@@carltonpoindexter2034 A lot of people call it Gali-polis
Ok to
It's pronounced Galli-Polis.
What an absolute joy to see a documentary of such high calibre!
Facts, expert analysis and participants recalling their personal experiences of the actual incident all make this a delight to watch.
The viewer learns rather than be entertained by the unfolding examination of relevant information.
This is what happens when you make a suspension structure too rigid. The eyebar system enforced a side to side rigidity that concentrated stresses. The failure could have just as easily come from the small bolts that held the eyebar pin endcaps on. There were multiple design flaws in such a system, and why cable bridges are generally superior.
And if those eyelets cracked at the holes, they would start to crack from the inside outward where they wouldnt be visible. The only way to inspect them is by diassembling them and inspecting them. It wouldnt matter what kind of material nor layers. If they crack, you wouldnt know it until it reached the outside of the eyelet, which would be too late.
Am I right on that?
From an engineering point, I think the bridge was not swinging enough to the stress of the elements. Nature can take down anything...
Did the aluminum paint also play a role? I would imagine that would increase the corrosion, especially from one part to the other as an electrode would be formed? I assumed that was the cause of the increased pitting where the parts came in contact with each other.
Is that why the model of the bridge in the museum shots is clearly of cable construction? 🙃
@@DD-lv3zs Basically, this. Cable bridges have a lot more flexibility and elasticity in their design. This design concentrated stress on the eyebar eyelets and the endcaps for the pins. Even if the eyebars didn't crack, sooner or later they would ream out and start allowing more angular displacement than intended, and this would lead to the eventual failure of the eyebar pin endcaps. This bridge was doomed to fail due to concentrated stresses and no way to inspect or repair it once assembled. There were multiple ways this could have and _would have_ eventually failed.
As a retired Civil Engineer, I am fascinated in Bridge and Dam failures and the forensic investigations that follow.
I was living in Ucon, ID. when the Teton dam gave way..June 5th, 1976. I've researched this thing. Experts such as yourself told the people in charge that it was a bad place for a dam. They built it anyway..
Das Piper that bridge was creepy. I cried every single time our family crossed it. I hid in the back floor boards of the car until we were safe on land. My father crossed that bridge several times that very day. Thank God he wasn’t on day shift because he would have been on the bridge at that time most likely. It felt like it moved or something creepy is the only word I can think of. The mothman didn’t give me any premonitions, in fact I had never heard that story until the movie. I was probably 3 the first time we crossed and I cried and cried. No other bridges ever gave me that feeling.
The bridge collapse that is most shocking to watch to me is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge "Galloping Gertie"
You mean 'fascinated by' I hope.
@@172-e5s I think you are correct.
Why no lube in the joints? No bushings? No accounting for water freezing and thawing in the joints? Clearly the job went to the lowest bidder, highest kickbacks. It did though last 39 of it's expected 40 year life. Glad we have learned from our mistakes. Thanks for this doc.
The way this town has always been, Id say it did go to the lowest bidder. They probably worked for cash and didn't pay their taxes on it. I live here, it's always been this way!
Blame the engineers, not the contractor. The contactor is required to build according to the engineer's specifications.
@@mikeshanahan7933 we're all to blame.
@@beastlyendeavour9184 yeah that makes sense...
I was born 14 years after this happened; I accept full responsibility.
Seems like it should have had tubes for frequent rapid application of corrosion ihibitor, just like old cars typically had zerk fittings for greasing their bearings. New designs lack these, and rely on a "use it 'til it fails, then replace it" plan.
My father, a deputy Assessor now long deceased, from Wheeling had attended a Conference in Huntington by bus and crossed the Silver Bridge on the way home the day before the collapse!
i learn so much through the internet . no matter ones age, education is important, as i tell my sons all the time. thanks for upload. Learning how bridges are designed is fascinating. I had developed a bridge phobia years ago traveling over the Chesapeake bridge in Maryland. My solution was prayer and imagining trees and grass surrounding and beneath me!!
Greetings fellow Marylander!, Im well aware of the Chesapeake, but my worse crossing is the Nice bridge going into Va.! That might as well be for horse and carriage crossing only!
Will wunners never cease! And Ceaser's never won... That very bridge started giving me a pretty serious, oodle-boodlish dose of the willies. I didn't used to have that, I think it's because I so infrequently need to go now, as opposed to a couple of decades back. I had heard, at one point, that you could call ahead and a policeman would meet you and drive your car across, better than freezing up in the middle! But, then, some people need to get back, too... (snif). I do doubt it's easy to drive right straight OFF the darn thing, which is kinda really the point after all.
However, I achieved THE great & transcendent breakthrough when I realized that, if I can't get... _WHATEVER_ on Ebay or right here on the Eastern Shore, I probably didn't really need it after all! This _may_ work better for, a book or something than it does for a replacement hip joint or the likes. Although, I DO have a Dremel moto-tool and some X-acto knives, betcha can save a bundle that way too.
Prayer is for those who fail to understand things.
For a long time I drove over that bridge really not happy about doing it but did it. Then came a period where I would just freak out on it and there is nothing you can do. You can't stop on the middle of it. I don't know how or why the phobia about that bridge began but to this day I can't even stand riding as a passenger on it.
@@scottleft3672 and masturbation is for atheists.
BTW - we use a Factor of Safety of 8 for chain design for industrial use, and FoS of 14 for "people movers" ( e.g. amusement park chains )
i believe it's closer to 10 for human safe ropes and cables, isn't it? however, rope is inherently safer than chain, for having multiple redundancies built in.
Cripes that's scary. I never trust amusement parks. I'd never put my kid on a ride.
@@jaeljade3609 why not? You know that you'd have to overload it 10 to 14 times before it would fail.
@@wyattroncin941 I guess you haven't seen the news and how often rides fail and people go flying in the air.
@@jaeljade3609 in third world shitholes where safely factor is "good enough" and maintenance periods are "it isn't broke. Don't fix it"
The guy who made the Brooklyn Bridge
said “you need to make a bridge 10x
Stronger than you think you need.”
I went with a similar theory forming concrete structures. Engineers would give me calculated tie bolt spacing that l never used once. I always overbuilt. It's served me well over the years never having a blowout. I have witnessed calculated blow outs. I used to say to the engineers it looks good on paper.
@@daveberswick5372 It sort of spooks me to find out that they "only" used a factor of safety of 2 on these bridges, and the one that failed supposedly had a F.O.S. of 1.5. Steel is cheap, lives dont have a price, why shouldnt the factor of safety be more like 5 or 6. I like your "overkill" methods!!
More importantly, as this disaster revealed, bridges need to be inspected.
And I'm thinking that here in the UK we have bridges still in use that are older than the US !
63Turbo I thought that as well, however, I learned it’s impractical to have such a high safety factor because it would not be functional.
@@Eansarii actually, there's thousands of bridges in the U.S. right now that were built in the 50's and 60's using these lower factor of safety's, and we are paying for it now... one of these bridges failed catastrophically near where I lived. All it took was one support to break and down it went! fortunately, no one was killed but it was a darned scarey experience for the few that went down with the bridge. Steel is relatively cheap and so is concrete, and if it takes twice as much material to get a factor of safety into the 4 or 5 range vs 2, it is far cheaper over the long run to build the sucker the right way, than it is to cheap out and have to replace it twice, even if nobody gets killed!
What a great team! From the fella that was there back when the bridge opened to the contemporary engineer of today with the head of the museum to tie the report together and, of course, not forgetting our brave survivor lady (I liked her) to the narrator who was clear and concise. I think those "sister bridges" are outstanding and I'm very interested to see them today. Thank you very much for a fine show. \m/
I know a man whose parents were killed on that bridge. When they found them they were hugging each other. They were stuck on the bridge in traffic.
Thats really sad
Love in life Love in death - they truly lived each other and valued each other greatly- how beautiful and meaningful
I think the 0th Century inherited some right to left language🌈 not a left to right🌈 which means we need more left handed people🌈 or at least some left handed tooling🍪
Mare Austėja Sea what? Are you handicapped?
What does this have to do with the price of toilets in Indonesia?!? I mean, why is this comment here?
I remember watching this tragedy on the Today Show, they showed them bringing up cars that were crushed and twisted and I will never forget seeing a hand with fingers splayed out sticking out of one the twisted crushed cars. That image haunted me for years. I’ve never forgotten it.
I saw a picture of something similar from the Cypress Structure that collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake. A hand, in one of the crushed cars. It looked like the person had put their hand up to the ceiling of the car as if to protect themselves.
I know what you mean about the image never leaving you...
so sorry for such a horrible memory.
Hello Becky how are you doing today.
@@dannyjones4044 Hello Danny how are you doing today.
If it's ur time to go its ur time to go. 😢
6:14, just like houses built today, they’re built to code, not built to last like old houses.
My great-g'father was a builder and my g'father was a cabinet maker by trade but also a builder. Together they built 5 houses on Champaign Street in Champaign, IL. The home built by and for my grandparents in 1899 is still occupied; 3 of the other 4 have been demolished and the 5th (the home I grew up in) was destroyed by fire 30 years ago. But the demolitions occurred after 2010, so they did a pretty good job of building.
The reason the older houses that we see were 'made to last' is because the ones that weren't - no longer exist. This is an example of 'survivor bias' - where the only examples are the ones that survived and people assume that everything was made like them.
The house I grew up in was custom built for my parents. A couple of years ago it was torn down because it no longer met structural codes and any renovation would have hit the dollar limit that requires the entire structure be brought up to current building codes. And there were structural elements that met code in the early 1960's - but are forbidden today. There was simply no realistic way to replace the structural elements in question without essentially tearing down the parts of the house above them.
@@colincampbell767 not really, if you look at historical Ariel imagery almost all of the old buildings are still Standing, and the ones that weren’t were almost always torn down to make way for a development or just not maintained or burned down, hell, look at any small town, there are always houses of the same era bunched together, and where there is a new house usually the old one burned down or was torn down to build a new one. the survivors biased theory doesn’t make sense with buildings. And if there were a lot of poorly built houses, don’t you think some of them would have survived? But you never see poorly built old houses, because they were just built better back than.
@@youngillinoisan4270 So if I look at the imagery - I would see places where newer houses were torn down and replaced? Or are those houses still standing also?
BTW - exactly how do you define 'better built?' Better weather protection? Better mechanical systems? Better roofing systems? Better structural systems? Better plumbing or electrical wiring? Better foundations? Better insulation? Better fire resistance?
@@youngillinoisan4270 No, he's right, it's survivorship bias. You only see now the old buildings that lasted, and don't see now that some modern buildings will last for decades, if not centuries.
If you haven't seen poorly built old houses, you haven't been looking. I suggest you pick over ruins and comb through records for houses that were condemned. Oh, and for buildings that just plain collapsed. That happened a lot more in the past than it does now.
Great description of how a suspension bridge was supposed to work. This was a great documentary.
Amazing how many people showed up to open a bridge. Simpler times!
Nothing on TV in 1928!
@@markh9875 Yeah, people actually went out and watched REAL things!
The bridge saved them from inefficient and slow ferry boats. It was a big deal to them.
I wish we were more like that. Looking a something for the spectacular thing it IS.
Taking the ferry was very time consuming. They were so happy to have a bridge.
"How terrible and tragic !!!" R.I.P. To All Those Lives Lost 🙏
My grandmother went over this bridge 30 minutes before it collapsed. She had a hair appt her friend took her to and sadly her friend was coming back over the bridge when it collapsed.
This is not a documentary per se. It is more a tutorial and very well done. I was a student in the early days of this Open University, studying the Humanities and I can vouch for the quality in the 70s at least, from which this is taken,. No bells and whistles, no dramatics, no fuss, just good old-fashioned teaching and learning.
A Mothman sighting at the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant was well-documented. The movie was based on this disaster killing 46 Xmas shoppers in freezing waters on December 15, 1967. 2 bodies were never recovered.
Last sighting I've heard is Mothman hanging with NJDevil, having a lovely summer bromance :^)
@@heatherrobinson4942 - LOL! I needed some funny absurdity in this moment. Now I can get back to work!
damnnnn 😳 moth hoooo??
@@heatherrobinson4942 damnnn 😳
@@jfrtbikgkdhjbeep9974 Mothman doesn't cause disasters, it foreshadows them. The bridge collapsed due to: 1. poor structural design using inferior redundancy tensile material that chemically eroded over time 2. human error in not inspecting & maintaining over years of oxidation.
My mother crossed just 20 minutes before it fell.
So was it 15 or was it 20 minutes? lol
Your mother was a lucky lady Linda GOD BLESS.
Was moth man responsible for its collapse
Phil Meup stfu
karan chandra Not the least bit funny, unless you think 46 people dying horrible deaths is comical! 🤬
There are actually a number of these same amazing i-beam supported suspension bridges in Pittsburgh. Another one which similar in design to the Three Sisters (albeit with a much narrower pedestrian walkway) is the 10th Street Bridge spanning the Monongahela river on the southern side of downtown. Beautiful bridge.
People back then spoke eloquently unlike these modern times. Amazing articulation
Sad, but interesting. When looking at the corrosion between the components, note that as steel oxidises, the rust expands with enormous force as well as abrading surfaces. Add movement & friction = wear, plus expansions / contractions with changes in temperature, = a recipe for failure. However, note how Brunel's Clifton suspension Bridge, opened 1864, is still standing, and taking light car traffic to this day. Remarkable.
Theo N de Bray The thing is Brunel was a one of a kind engineer. He taught us to allow plenty of room for "movement". That is the crucial difference. Ultimately the Silver Bridge self destructed because the tolerances were too tight. Things out in the real world don't always work out like in the lab or on paper. Brunel had the practical experience and wisdom of foresight of the unforeseen and that is what made him uniquely superb, the signs of which are all around us still today.
The Brooklyn bridge is still standing
The Brunzells Cliffs bridge was made out fo carbon gibers and cements -- it is immune for rtstings or Rosty the scarecrows. Thanks Yous!
Theo N de Bray I think the Brunell bridge was made from wrought iron, which is very ductile so much so the hooks employed on cranes are still made from this material.
I could sit and listen to Francesca Hunt read the phone book. I feel so calm and safe.
Larry Green safe? Safe from what?
Don Nebes anxiety Don,anxiety.
@@johnadams3107 Keep calm & carry on.
Larry, it's just a very typical BBC/British voice from London. Boring.
@Larry Green. 100% agree - the voice of rational, careful thought.
should have put a grease fitting in. would push away the water, and flush out the corrosion over time.
“Cars and Lori’s weight have gotten heavier over time”
Leave my Aunt Lori outta this! Lolo
Lol, the 1970's boats are today's SUV,don't miscalculate that today's average family may have less members but the increased average weight per member offsets the quantity.
@@DG-sf9ei I drove a 1968 Cadillac in the early eighties, and the title listed five thousand pounds for its weight. So not sure about your point. Cars were much larger back then.