Case History: Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Collapse, Washington State (1940)

Rita Robison
The failure that brought an abrupt end to the search for “a slender ribbon bridge
deck” also introduced the importance of wind dynamics to bridge design.

Background
Although the newspapers were filled with important stories from
throughout the world on Saturday, November 8, 1940—stories such as the
RAF bombing Berlin, the Luftwaffe bombing London, and Franklin D.
Roosevelt returning to Washington D.C. for an unprecedented third presidential
term—there was still room on the front page of the New York
Times for a single-column story, “Big Tacoma Bridge Crashes 190 Feet
into Puget Sound.”
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third largest suspension span
bridge in the world and only five months old. The center span, measuring
853 m (2800 ft), stretched between two 130 m (425 ft) high towers, while
the side spans were each 335 m (1100 ft) long. The suspension cables
hung from the towers and were anchored 305 m (1000 ft) back towards
the river banks. The designer, Leon Moisseiff, was one of the world’s
foremost bridge engineers. He and his partner Fred Lienhard had earlier
developed the calculations for determining load and wind forces used by
bridge designers everywhere.
Following the widespread design effort of the 1930s toward “streamlining”
every product from teakettles to locomotives to airplanes, Moisseiff’s
intent was to produce a very slender deck span arching gently
between the tall towers. His design combined the principles of cable suspension
with a girder design of steel plate stiffeners—running along the
side of the roadway—that had been streamlined to only 2.4 m (8 ft) deep.
The $6.4 million bridge had opened with much fanfare on July 1, celebrated
as a defense measure to connect Seattle and Tacoma with the Puget
Sound Navy Yard at Bremerton, Washington. Owned by the Washington
State Toll Bridge Authority, the bridge had been financed by a Public
Works Administration grant and a loan from the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation, and had been constructed in only 19 months.
The bridge gained notoriety even before it opened, and was nicknamed
“Galloping Gertie” by people who experienced its strange behavior.
Forced to endure undulations that pitched and rolled the deck, workmen
complained of seasickness. After the opening, it became a challenging
54 / How to Organize and Run a Failure Investigation
sporting event for motorists to cross even during light winds, and complaints
about seasickness became common.
Despite Moisseiff’s reputation as a top-ranked engineering consultant,
State and Toll Bridge Authority engineers were more than a little nervous
about the behavior of the slender two-lane span, which was only 12 m
(39 ft) wide. Its shallow depth in relation to the length of the span (0.9–
853 m, or 3–2800 ft) resulted in a ratio of 1:350, nearly three times more
flexible than the Golden Gate or George Washington bridges. Engineers
tried several methods to stabilize, or dampen, the oscillations—the upand-
down waves of the deck.
The first method involved attaching heavy cables—called tie-down cables—
from the girders and anchoring them with 45,900 kg (50 ton) concrete
blocks on shore. The cables soon snapped, and another set installed
in a second try lasted only until the early morning hours of November 7.
A more successful method, a pair of inclined stay cables connecting the
main suspension cables to the deck at mid-span, remained in place but
proved ineffectual. Engineers also installed a dynamic damper, a mechanism
consisting of a piston in a cylinder, that also proved futile as its seals
were broken when the bridge was sandblasted prior to being painted.
Measurements and movie camera films taken over several months gave
the engineers a good idea of how the bridge was moving in the wind.
They charted the oscillations and vibrations, and discovered the movements
were peculiar. Rather than damping off (dying out) very quickly as
they did in the Golden Gate and George Washington bridges, Galloping
Gertie’s vibrations seemed almost continuous. The puzzle, however, was
that only certain wind speeds would set off the vibration; yet there was
no correlation between the vibration and the wind speeds.
Led by Frederick B. Farquharson, professor at the University of Washington’s
engineering school, the study team applied actual measurements
of the bridge movements to a scale model, hoping to find ways to stabilize
it. They suggested installing additional stabilizing cables, attaching curved
wind deflectors, and drilling holes in the girders to permit wind to pass
through. Unfortunately, the report was issued only a week before the
bridge collapsed.
Interest in the phenomenon rose with the onset of the brisk fall winds
pushing through the valleylike narrows that lie between the cities of Tacoma
and Bremerton. The public as well as the engineers kept watch, and
when the bridge finally snapped, it became one of history’s most documented
disasters. Cameras—still and movie—recorded the collapse on
film. A newspaper man was a mid-span survivor, supplying a firsthand
account of the disaster.
Details of the Collapse
Witnesses included Kenneth Arkin, chairman of the Toll Bridge Authority,
and Professor Farquharson. As Arkin later recalled, that morning
Chapter 2: Failures Come in All Shapes and Sizes / 55
Fig. 4 The center span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge writhes under a galeforce
wind. Moments later the bridge collapsed.
he had driven to the bridge at 7:30 to check the wind velocity, and by
10:00 saw that it had risen from thirty-eight to forty-two miles per hour
while the deck rose and fell 0.9 m (3 ft) 38 times in one minute. He and
Farquharson halted traffic, watching while the bridge, in addition to waving
up and down, began to sway from side to side. Then it started twisting
(Fig. 4).
Meanwhile, Leonard Coatsworth, the newspaperman, had abandoned
his car in the middle of the bridge when he could drive no further because
of the undulations. He turned back briefly, remembering that his daughter’s
pet dog was in the car, but was thrown to his hands and knees. Other
reporters described him, “hands and knees bloody and bruised,” as he
crawled five hundred yards while the bridge pitched at forty-five degree
angles and concrete chunks fell “like popcorn.” The driver and passenger
of a logging truck told a similar tale of having jumped to the deck and
crawled to one of the towers, where they were helped by workmen.
By 10:30 the amplitude (distance from crest to valley) of the undulations
was 7.6 m (25 ft) deep and suspender ropes began to tear, breaking
the deck and hurling Coatsworth’s car and the truck into the water. When
the stiffening girder fell 58 m (190 ft) into Puget Sound, it splashed a
plume of water 30 m (100 ft) into the air. Within a half hour, the rest of
the deck fell section by section, until only the towers remained, leaning
about 3.7 m (12 ft) toward each shore. Overlooking the bridge was an
insurance company billboard that bragged, “As safe as the Narrows
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Bridge.” The slogan was covered up before the end of the day. The only
casualty of the collapse was the dog.
Moisseiff’s first public comment was, “I’m completely at a loss to explain
the collapse.”
Charles E. Andrew, chief engineer in charge of construction, said that
the collapse was “probably due to the fact that flat, solid girders were used
along the sides of the span.” He wanted to make clear that his original
plans called for open girders, but “another engineer changed them.” He
compared Galloping Gertie with the New York’s Whitestone Bridge,
which had been completed a year earlier. It was the only other large bridge
designed with web-girder stiffening trusses, “and these caused the bridge
to flutter, more or less as a leaf does, in the wind. That set up a vibration
that built up until failure occurred.”
The Whitestone, now known as the Bronx-Whitestone, was indeed very
similar to the Tacoma Narrows. However, the stiffening trusses were twice
as heavy and the deck twice as wide. Its designer, Othmar Ammann, had
consulted Moisseiff, as had the designers of such structures as the Golden
Gate and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridges. The Whitestone is 1220
m (4000 ft) long, with a 701 m (2300 ft) main span and 358 m (1175 ft)
high towers. It, too, had early oscillation problems, but they had been
successfully damped with a device similar to the one tried on Galloping
Gertie.
After the Tacoma failure, Ammann realized the danger of the too-slender
deck, and insisted that a new steel truss be superimposed onto the
deck. His redesign, which also added cable stays between the towers and
deck to prevent twisting, stabilized the bridge. In 1990, a tuned mass
damper (a fairly recent invention) was added to the deck during a rehabilitation.
The first investigations into the collapse of Tacoma Narrows detailed
how the bridge had come apart. For months the motions, while disturbing,
had been symmetrical and the roadway had remained flat (Fig. 5). The
lampposts on the sidewalks remained in the vertical plane of the suspension
cables even as they rose, fell, and twisted. But on November 7, a
cable band slipped out of place at midspan, and the motions became asymmetrical,
like an airplane banking in different directions. The twisting
caused metal fatigue, and the hangers broke like paper clips that have
been bent too often.
Impact
But what caused Galloping Gertie to twist so violently when other
bridges had survived gale-force winds? Engineers looking into the problem
of the twisting bridges were able to explain that winds do not hit the
bridge at the same angle, with the same intensity, all the time. For instance,
Chapter 2: Failures Come in All Shapes and Sizes / 57
wind coming from below lifts one edge, pushing down the opposite. The
deck, trying to straighten itself, twists back. Repeated twists grow in amplitude,
causing the bridge to oscillate in different directions.
The study of wind behavior grew into an entire engineering discipline
called aerodynamics, parallel to that of the airplane industry. Vortex shedding
and flutter were added to the vocabulary. A vortex is a spiral that
can be seen in the wake of a ship or, in a wind tunnel, by wisps of smoke
added for the purpose. Some vortices do not affect oscillation, but others
form a flutterlike pattern that has the same frequency as the oscillating
bridge. Eventually no bridge, building, or other exposed structure was
designed without testing a model in a wind tunnel. With the development
of graphic capabilities, some of this testing is now done on computers.
Dozens of papers are published each year about these subjects; nevertheless,
misconceptions continue. In 1990, K. Yusuf Billah of Princeton
University noticed that currently popular physics textbooks were using an
incorrect version of the cause of the Tacoma Narrows collapse. He enlisted
Robert H. Scanlan of Johns Hopkins University, and they “set the record
straight” in the February 1991 issue of the American Journal of Physics.
The textbooks were claiming “forced resonance (periodic natural vortex
shedding)” as the cause. Instead, Billah and Scanlan pointed out, “the
aerodynamically induced condition of self-excitation [vibration] was an
interactive one, fundamentally different from forced resonance.”
Fig. 5 For months the motions, while disturbing, had been symmetrical and
the roadway had remained flat. Such twisting motions caused metal
fatigue, resulting in the collapse on November 7, 1942.
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Fig. 6 This new bridge was opened in 1950. Its four-lane deck and stiffening
trusses form a box design that resists torsional forces. Excitation is controlled
by hydraulic dampers at the towers and at midspan.
Two years after the collapse, the remains of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
were scrapped. In 1950, the state opened a new $18 million bridge designed
by Charles Andrew and tested in wind tunnels by Farquharson and
other engineers (Fig. 6). Its four-lane, 18 m (60 ft) wide deck and stiffening
trusses 7.6 m (25 ft) deep form a box design that resists torsional
forces. Excitation is controlled by hydraulic dampers at the towers and at
midspan.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse remains one of the most spectacular
failures in the history of engineering. It is certainly one of the best
known because of the movie film and widely reproduced still photos, but
as Billah and Scanlan demonstrated, the aerodynamic details tend to become
blurred. The new science of wind engineering, however, is now
routinely applied to every type of structure.
Chapter 2: Failures Come in All Shapes and Sizes / 59
SELECTED REFERENCES
• D. Alexander, “A Lesson Well Learnt,” Construction Today, Nov
1990, p 46
• C.H. Ammann, T. von Karman, and G.B. Woodruff, “The Failure of
the Tacoma Narrows Bridge,” Report to the Federal Works Agency,
March 28, 1941
• Billah, K. Yusuf, and R.H. Scanlan, “Resonance, Tacoma Narrows
Bridge Failure, and Undergraduate Physics Textbooks,” American
Journal of Physics, Feb 1991, p 118–124
• F.B. Farquharson, “Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge,” Scientific
Monthly, Dec 1940, p 574–578
• R.R. Goller, “Legacy of Galloping Gertie 25 Years After,” Civil Engineering,
Oct 1965, p 50–53
• D.C. Jackson, Great American Bridges and Dams, Preservation Press,
1988, p 327–378
• “Big Tacoma Bridge Crashes 190 Feet into Puget Sound,” New York
Times, Nov 8, 1940, p 1
• I. Peterson, “Rock and Roll Bridge,” Science News, 1990, p 244–246
• H. Petroski, “Still Twisting,” American Scientist, Sept–Oct 1991, p
398–401
Case History Discussion
As late as 1991 engineers were still debating the 1940 failure of the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Puget Sound. As technology advances, failure
causes are understood more completely through the use of better analytical
tools and better examination tools. Years later we realize that some conclusions
reached in the past were wrong. Sometimes the past teaches us
what we need to know. Sometimes the past wasn’t smart enough to know
what was going on. That’s what happened here.
This spectacular bridge failure resulted in far-reaching ramifications.
The introduction of the concept of self-harmonics was one ramification.
The concept of self-excitation came later. Another ramification was the
importance of aerodynamics on stationary objects like bridges, which had
not been considered before this bridge failure. Because of this failure,
wind-tunnel testing would be applied to all structures, not just bridges.
The bridge was seen to “gallop” many times before the failure, even
during construction. Everyone knew this was happening, but no one
thought it was important. The engineers certainly considered the bridge
safe enough to drive out and do measurements of the movement.
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The physical cause of the bridge failure was metal fatigue. The human
cause of the failure was the slender bridge design with the type of railing
used. The latent cause of the failure was the “streamlining” design movement
of the 1930s and its application to this bridge, which spanned a
windy gorge. The problem disappeared when design changes were made
including a nonsolid railing either slatted or gapped sides. The original
bridge design created lift, and the lift created a cable stretching problem,
which created a harmonic excitation—that old cascading failure concept
again.