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Galloping Gertie and Other Famous Washington Bridges

© Jerri Brooker

When I was a kid I loved to go to the movies. One of my favorite things was watching the news clips, previews and cartoons at the beginning of each movie. (In those days we got to see two cartoons generally.) When the black and white movie of "Galloping Gertie" appeared on the screen my jaw dropped. Oh, she was not a gal on horseback, but a bridge: a very famous bridge in Washington State. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed before my cinema eyes in a 42-mile-per-hour wind on November 7, 1940 that produced torsional oscillations which brought the bridge to an end - four months after she was built to span the Tacoma Narrows.

Right there on the screen I watched as the bridge contorted and fell 190 feet into the water below. I couldn't believe my eyes as I watched the 5,939-foot bridge oscillate back and forth like a flag flying in the wind. Only one car went down, but the owner had time to run to safety. I cringed at the replay of that fateful event and the gripping the account of the fall of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Read newspaper editor Leonard Coatsworth's gripping eyewitness account of the sheer terror experienced by the owner of the car that went down. It'll grab you, I'm sure, as it did me.

The picture of Galloping Gertie's demise is still etched in memory to this day. If you'd like to experience it for yourself, you can. The best site I've found is Mark Ketchum's bridge site. You'll find links, photos, a movie and the story of the rise and fall of a suspended plate girder bridge that changed the way bridges are built. You can read the technical jargon on Mark's page, too. I leave that to my engineer husband and those of you into the into the mechanics of that fateful event. You will enjoy this site and the link to the technical paper on the bridge collapse.

In 1992 the remains of the bridge remaining in the deep were added to the National Register of Historic Places to protect that piece of Washington State History. Seventy-eight other Washington State bridges are also on the Register.

The now-standing, rebuilt Tacoma Narrows Bridge is the first suspension bridge built in the United States. The Narrows bridge is not the only bridge of fame in the state, however. We have four of the world's eight floating bridges. Two side-by-side bridges form the I-90 Interstate bridge crossing Lake Washington, another is the Highway 520 Albert D. Rossellini Bridge crossing Lake Washington and the fourth is the Hood Canal Bridge crossing Hood Canal which also saw a fateful crash into Hood Canal waters in a strong wind. The Hood Canal floating bridge is designed to part to let large ocean vessels through.

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