yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Collapse of West Virginia's Silver Bridge | Atlas of Cursed Places


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

SAM SHERIDAN: This is a place that has seen a lot of human tragedy. You can bundle it up under the blanket of a curse, but you can't deny that there is something at work here, some relationship between West Virginian industry and a seemingly endless cycle of calamity. And since Austin Caperton won't be providing any answers, I'm turning to a trusted old buddy—science. So what we do in this lab is we build stuff. And we break it to figure out how to make it stronger. What a cool job, man.

SAM SHERIDAN: No disaster is woven into the local folklore of West Virginia quite like the collapse of the Silver Bridge. I think there's reason behind it. Yeah. It just didn't happen to happen. They said that the Moth Man appeared before the bridge fell. It's like a legend.

SAM SHERIDAN: Although I'm fairly certain a flying cryptid didn't cause this disaster, the Silver Bridge did collapse at the exact spot where the Battle of Point Pleasant was fought. And some say that was the cause of Chief Cornstalk's dying curse. So what does science have to say about that peculiar coincidence?

MATT HEBOON: This is a model of the Silver Bridge.

SAM SHERIDAN: Cool. So the Silver Bridge was similar to a suspension bridge except that the suspension cables were actually eyebars. So tell me exactly how the Silver Bridge failed. What happened? There was a flaw. It was actually located at the end of the eyebar. That flaw was extremely small, and actually wasn't visible because it was hidden under the cap of the pin. And in this case, the very small flaw initiated a fracture. Can you show me what that would look like? Yeah.

MATT HEBOON: OK, so we're going to apply a tension lug, meaning we're going to pull on this. [creaking] What's this kip? What is that?

SAM SHERIDAN: So a kip is 1,000 pounds. So we're at 0.21 thousand pounds, or in other words, 22 pounds. It's incrementally adding load. This no longer is contributing at all. All the force that was in this component is now dumped into this one.

SAM SHERIDAN: Right. In the case of the Silver Bridge, this happened so fast. The first one failed and immediately—[snap] Let's—let's do it on our model.

MATT HEBOON: OK.

SAM SHERIDAN: And here's where we smash stuff in the name of science. So we're going to simulate the fracture of the eyebar by cutting one of the yellow strings. [dramatic music] When one eyebar failed, there just wasn't enough capacity in the rest of the system to resist all of the weight of the structure, and therefore the entire bridge collapsed.

SAM SHERIDAN: So the Silver Bridge collapses. What's the way this could have been prevented?

MATT HEBOON: The original designs for this bridge called for a suspension cable. But they decided to opt for a less redundant system with the eyebar chains, which allowed them to dramatically reduce the cost. But it also dramatically reduced the redundancy in the system.

SAM SHERIDAN: For those of you at home who never took an interest in civil engineering, let me spell it out for you. Redundancy equals safety. So if they hadn't done this with the lowest bidder, there's a possibility that that failure would have happened, but they would have had enough redundancy that the bridge wouldn't have collapsed. That's right.

More Articles

View All
Hiring Engineers with Ammon Bartram
Hey guys, today we have Almond Bartram, co-founder of Socialcam and Triplebyte, and he is here to talk to us about hiring. So, could you just give us a quick intro about what you’ve worked on? Cool, so I joined Justin.tv fresh out of school in 2009. It w…
How Short Your Life REALLY Is
For the past month or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about life. And when people say that, they usually mean what they want to do in life; whether that be their career or relationships, or entertainment or leisure? But I’ve been thinking differently. Of cou…
2d curl formula
So after introducing the idea of fluid rotation in a vector field like this, let’s start tightening up our grasp on this intuition to get something that we can actually apply formulas to. A vector field like the one that I had there, that’s two-dimension…
Forget Scarecrows—Falcons Protect This Farm | National Geographic
We’re kind of like security guards. We arrived before the sugar content of the fruit starts going up. As the foods ripen, the birds are more and more attracted to it, so we stand guard ten hours a day in that field until basically the fruit is harvested. …
Plessy v. Ferguson | The Gilded Age (1865-1898) | US history | Khan Academy
Long before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, Homer Plessy boarded a train car in New Orleans to protest Jim Crow segregation laws. Plessy was arrested and convicted in Louisiana, but his test case for segregated public transportation rea…
I'm quitting my med school
I’m quitting from my med school. If you have been following this channel for a while, and if you have ever watched my med school vlogs, you might think that, “Oh, I knew that because this girl was so unmotivated to go to med school.” She was doing all of …