The First Tacoma Narrows Bridge – Galloping Gertie

The drama of the first Tacoma Narrows bridge is hardly relegated to its turbulent end. There’s more to the story – from its inception to financing issues to some surprising legal happenings, and how it spawned entirely new approaches to bridge design.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Okay, Tracy,
I think it's fairly safe to say that almost everyone
in our age group, probably younger and certainly some older,

(00:23):
has seen the famous footage of Galloping Gurtie. Yeah. Even
I have a memory of it being used in a
commercial for something like car speakers at one point, either
the exact footage or or like a spoof of the footage.
But it was like, with the car speaker on, the
bridge is shaking itself apart, but with the speaker off,

(00:46):
it's not I missed that one. Um. Just in case
anyone doesn't know what we're talking about, we're talking about
the first Tacoma Narrow's Bridge, which is nicknamed Galloping Gurtie,
and this footage shows it undulating in ways that to
me are just completely stomach churning until it finally breaks
apart and collapses. It's very dramatic footage. But here's the thing.

(01:08):
The drama of that first Tacoma Narrows Bridge is hardly
relegated just to its turbulent end, there's a lot more
to that bridge's story, from its inception, to financing issues,
to some surprising legal happenings after it fell apart, and
how it spawned this entirely new approach to bridge design.

(01:28):
So today we're going to talk about Galloping Gertie, how
it came to be, it's collapse, and what happened after
its failure. Pretty much as soon as people started driving,
people started talking about how there needed to be a
bridge connecting Tacoma to the Great Peninsula also known as
the Kitsap Peninsula. There were ferry services, there was a

(01:49):
train that could take people south around this big U
shape that's created by the waterway. But as more and
more people started embracing automobile travel, there was more demand
for roadways all over the US, including requests for a
faster way to make that particular crossing. And as these
discussions became more serious, the finances of such a project

(02:11):
came into sharp focus. So there was going to need
to be a toll to offset the costs, but that
was unlikely to generate enough revenue to make up for
the expense of construction and to fund ongoing upkeep. Similarly,
there was a whole puzzle about which municipality could manage
this project. There were provisions in an eighteen fifty four

(02:33):
law that gave the county's jurisdiction over ferry services to
get across waterways, but bridges were not even mentioned in it.
There was an operating ferry service that would need to
be bought out. It had exclusivity rights that had been
granted in order to cross this narrows, and so they
would have to buy out that contract for a bridge,

(02:53):
or else it would create a whole legal problem for
the state in terms of that contract. Still, the allure
of this because it would shorten a two and a
half hour drive down to something closer to eleven minutes,
kept interest in this project very steady, and by the
end of the nineteen twenties, the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce
had assembled a committee to investigate whether such a bridge

(03:14):
was realistic and also to raise funds for a survey
to make that determination. Much of this effort had been
stoked by a man named Edmund Chandler. He had a
financial interest in seeing this bridge built because Chandler already
ran another toll bridge that connected White Salmon in Washington
State to Hood River in Oregon across the Columbia River.

(03:36):
So he had experience and expertise to offer the bridge project. Uh.
He kind of thought like he could become the toll
guy and like run another toll bridge and potentially have
that as a money making um endeavor. And so he
worked to promote the need for this bridge in Tacoma.
Bridge engineers Joseph B. Strauss and John L. Harrington independently

(03:59):
complete feasibility surveys is the first step for the Chamber
of Commerce's committee that was finished in ninety. Both the
Harrington and Strauss reports were pretty positive, and by early
nine a license was approved by the state to build
a toll bridge. That license was renewed every two years. Yeah,
the license renewal kept happening because they weren't in the

(04:21):
midst of building it. They were still like, we're planning,
we're planning, we need their license to carry for so
they would renew it as they continued to raise funds.
Because even though the paperwork side was moving things along. Uh,
it is worth noting that the country was about to
hit the Great Depression when this whole thing started, and
naturally that complicated the enterprise because money for a large

(04:44):
scale project of this nature became harder and harder to
come by as the projected budget needs were also expanding,
and there were also legal limits on how much money
the county could borrow. Those limits, of course, were intended
to keep the county from taking on insurmountable at but
as it related to this particular initiative, it was making

(05:04):
the Tacoma Narrows Bridge seemed less and less likely to
become a reality. Once again, Edmund Chandler offered his services.
He worked with Pierce County and the Tacoma Chamber of
Commerce to set up the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Company. This
was a private corporation and Chandler owned it, and this
setupment that the limits that would be applied to a

(05:25):
government entity borrowing for the construction of a bridge, those
limits were no longer a hurdle. The plan was that
Chandler's company would borrow the money, build the bridge, and
then sell it to the county when it was done.
Feels a little shady, which will come up again. The
Tacoma Narrows Bridge Company applied for a three million dollar

(05:47):
loan from the federal government's Reconstruction Finance Corporation. On the
one hand, that loan had kind of a favorable view
because this one bridge was genuinely valuable. It would connect
to national parks, to military bases, so on paper, this
project made total sense. But on the other an assessment

(06:07):
by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation determined that the tools that
the bridge would collect, we're just not going to recoup
the loan amount in any kind of worthwhile time frame.
The application was temporarily withdrawn for reworking, and in the meantime,
the state governor had allocated seven hundred thousand dollars for
the project, and the law that had initially not granted

(06:28):
county's jurisdiction over bridge building was amended to include that capability.
Chandler's company once again submitted the loan application, but this
time he went to the newly established Public Works Administration
and the hope that some of the funding would be
from a grant rather than this entire thing coming as
a loan. But this plan did not work. The application

(06:51):
was denied citing the fact that quote the funds of
the Public Works Administration are now practically depleted, and further,
the of Washington has already shared liberally in these funds.
It did not help that the p w A could
plainly see that the Tacoma Naro's Bridge Company had been
set up to sidestep that law regarding loan sizes, and

(07:14):
the whole thing made Chandler seem really, really shady. Additionally,
the p w A felt that the numbers in his
loan application were way off. It seemed like the estimates
for toll revenue were higher than was really realistic, and
that the estimated cost of the construction was lower than
it should have been. So at this point it seemed
like the bridge was back to square one. When the

(07:35):
state minimized Chandler's role and created the Washington's Toll Bridge
Authority in ninety seven, it helped this project finally gain
traction with the p w A. Incidentally, Chandler later sued
the w t b A for moneys he believed he
was owed for a quote preparation of estimates, surveys, maps,

(07:55):
and other items which he prepared prior to nineteen thirty
six in connection with the then proposed construction of a
toll bridge across that portion of Huget Sound known as
the Tacoma Narrows that case was dismissed in in creating
the Washington Toll Bridge Authority, the state had been really,
really careful and deliberate, nothing had been rushed, and the

(08:18):
w t b A was modeled after other organizations in
places that had been able to get p w A
funding by meeting all of their very specific requirements, including
the California group that had obtained capital for the construction
of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ultimately, the funding came through
as roughly half as a p w A grant, in

(08:39):
the remaining amount as a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Although this meant that more than six million dollars had
been secured, the bridge's budget had to be really carefully managed,
and the years after the collapse there was a lot
of scrutiny into how that money had been spent and
if any of the budget based decisions had led to

(09:00):
the bridge is failure. We're gonna come right back and
talk about the firm that was hired to design the
bridge and some early indications that something was wrong, But
first we will take a quick sponsor break. The New

(09:20):
York firm of Leon s moc F designed the superstructure
of this bridge. Mossyf had worked on the engineering of
the Golden Gate Bridge as well as just about every
other suspension bridge that had been built in the US
during the nineties and thirties, so his firm was kind
of the ideal choice for the project. Depending on how

(09:40):
deep down a research rabbit hole you'll go, you'll find
people that say that he lobbied for it and was
put a little bit of pressure on on the state
of Washington to get this job, But most had become
known for his bridges designed based on deflection theory, which
stated that longer suspension bridges could be built with less
steel because their weight didn't require trusses built beneath the

(10:01):
road to a stand wind in traffic. That approach, which
required two towers for the bridge work to stretch between,
rather than what you've seen in bridges that are older
that have physical supports from below all along the length
of the bridgeway, had been very successful on many bridges
already long before Mosciff was given the Tacoma Narrow's job,

(10:23):
and he used that same design approach again. Construction started
in November of night, and while the bridge was being built,
workers had noticed that there was a lot of movement,
just a rippling movement, even in a light wind. Towards
the end of construction, that movement had become so common
and intense enough that workers were said to have tewed

(10:45):
on lemons to stave off motion sickness. This sounds miserable
to me as a person prone some motion sickness. Uh.
The thinking had been that once the bridge is concrete,
lanes were poor, so traffic could cross the bridge, that
rippling would diminish, but it really did not. There were

(11:05):
various efforts made to try to get this vibration to
stop or even just be reduced, none of them really
had a significant result. Of course, this was concerning so
a study was commissioned by the Washington Told Bridge Authority
to examine the issue. And that study was headed up
by a professor of civil engineering from the University of Washington,
that was Fbert Farkworson, and he made a detailed scale

(11:30):
model of the bridge and he put it through various
conditions in a wind tunnel to see how it behaved.
He gave a preliminary report, but even though it included
some suggestions about how to manage this movement problem. Farkerson
also included his opinion that really there needed to be
more study of this movement, but having the report on

(11:50):
file with suggestions was all The bridge project engineers felt
that they needed to give assurances to the public that
this bridge was safe. On July one, the bridge opened.
A local newspaper, The Spokesman Review of Spokane, Washington, ran
the headline quote share six million, four hundred thousand dollar

(12:10):
bridge opening east Side citizens will attend dedication of Tacoma
structure today. The opening ceremony was attended by the Governor
Clarence dy Martin, as well as highway officials and heads
of the three counties who had stakes in this project.
Colonel E. W. Clark, the acting Commissioner of Public Works,
gave a speech at this ceremony, and he touted the

(12:32):
bridge's beauty and noted how it was going to expand commerce.
Like Clark, the press coverage spoke about what a boon
the bridge would be for tourism, stateing quote, the bridge
will bring closer to the population centers of Puget Sound
and the heavily traveled lanes of tourists the Olympic Peninsula.
It will form a connecting link between Mount Rainier National

(12:53):
Park and the Olympic National Park. The press coverage also
noted the bridge's significance for military connect activity, writing quote.
In addition to providing access to the tourist attractions of
the peninsula, the bridge connects the two great military and
naval centers of the state, Fort Lewis and McCord Field
at Tacoma, and the huge Sound Navy Yard at Bremerton.

(13:15):
The bridge opening was tied to McCord not only because
it created a physical connection to it. The bridge in
the airfield were actually sharing a birthday week. The airfield
had been in operation for ten years at that point,
but had been a municipal airport before becoming part of
the military's war preparation, and it was renamed for Army
Air Corps Colonel William McCord. The same week that the

(13:37):
Tacoma Narrows Bridge was opened, another floating bridge across Lake
Washington was also opened. That same week. There were five
days of events and ceremonies as the area celebrated all
of these new openings, and there was a water carnival
in honor of the bridges leading up to a huge
Fourth of July party, which concluded the holiday and the

(13:57):
celebrations of the new bridges and rename airfield with a
spectacular fireworks show. The papers also ran statistics on the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It was the third largest suspension bridge
in the world. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco
and the George Washington Bridge that spans the Hudson River
between Manhattan and Fort Lee, New Jersey, were the two

(14:18):
bigger ones. On the Tacoma side of the bridge, there
was a toll center and an observation plaza where tourists
could stop and take in the view. Per the Spokesman
Review quote, each of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge tower stands
four hundred twenty five ft above the water. The cables
carried by these towers were spun from six thousand, three
hundred eight wires anchored at each end two huge blocks

(14:41):
of concrete weighing approximately fifty two five hundred tons. The
two main cables have a total weight of approximately three thousand,
eight hundred seventeen tons, and the total suspended weight which
they sustain is an excess of eleven thousand, two hundred
fifty tons at the final tally. The Public Works Administration
grant had provided two million, eight hundred eighty thousand dollars

(15:05):
to the project, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation loaned the
State of Washington another three million, five hundred twenty thousand.
This bridge allegedly had the nickname galloping Gurdie from the
very start because of its tendency to undulate. Construction workers
are said to have started calling it that as it
was being built. It also got another nickname among motorists,

(15:28):
which was the roller coaster. Was not unusual to be
driving across the bridge and just see the car in
front of you dip out of you, which in the
daytime was unsettling, and at night and minute just sometimes
looked like their lights suddenly blinked off. That kind of
sounds more unsettling. There were even some drivers who sought
out that unsettling thrill. They would try to time their

(15:51):
crossing of the bridge to the best wind conditions. They
could really get that roller coaster effect. Yeah, there were
also pedestrians that did this. It were like, I'm gonna
walk across that bridge when it's all crazy. I don't
think that sounds fun, but everybody has their own desires.
On November seven, just four months and six days after

(16:12):
the bridge open, it famously collapsed. That day, the wind
blowing from the west to east reached an estimated forty
two miles per hour that's about sixty seven point six kilometers.
And while it was common for the bridge to buck
up and down in the wind, the motion that the
westerly wind stirred up seemed a little bit different that day.

(16:32):
The sides of the bridge were rippling, but not in
phase with one another, so the bridge started this twisting
side to side motion as well as up and down.
This was a motion that was not normal for it
at all. So one of the reasons we can say
that it famously collapsed is that there is footage of it,
quite a lot of footage of it. The most famous

(16:52):
footage was shot by Barney Elliott and Harbin Monroe. They
owned a Tacoma business called the Camera Shop, and both
of them always kept their cameras loaded. According to the
account of Monroe's widowed decades later, quote, when they got
the call the bridge was really jumping, They jumped in
their cars and prayed they got something. That's something being pictures,

(17:14):
and they did. Their film made it into newsreels that
were shown in theaters all over the US and around
the world. That footage was awarded Outstanding Domestic Newsreel of
the Year by the National Headliners Club. Copies were requested
by engineers around the world so they could study what happened.
But it is very likely that most people have seen

(17:35):
this footage at the wrong speed. According to a paper
that was released in by Texas State University physics and
astronomy professor Don Olson and collaborators Joseph Hook and Russell Dosher,
when reviewing the footage, which had been converted from film
to video a very long time ago, the researchers noted
that the bridge was shown having eighteen twisting cycles per minute,

(17:59):
but this didn't match up with the recorded information that
had been noted by engineers the day of the collapse.
That data listed the most rapid pacing of the twisting
at twelve cycles per minute. Elliott and Monroe's footage had
been shot at sixteen frames per second, but when it
was converted to video, it had been presumed to have
been shot at twenty four frames per second, so the

(18:21):
movement has long appeared to have been even more frantic
than it actually was. We still don't want to play
this down. It was plenty frantic in reality. Yeah, I
feel like even at the slightly slower pace, that would
almost be more alarming because you could really see the
movement of it, and how dramatic was it was a

(18:42):
little bit clearer. Yeah, it's funny. I read one while
I was I was researching this particular part of it.
One uh quote, I don't remember if it was from
the main researcher or not, that was like, no, slow down,
it's really quite beautiful and elegant. I was like, for real,
beautiful and elegant and uh and terrifying. Regardless of the speed, though,

(19:04):
the various footage taken means that you can easily see
this twisting motion which it points had the roadway tilted
at a forty five degree angle. The last pedestrian on
the bridge, who had been one of those thrill seekers
who had wanted to cross it on a windy day,
reported seeing straight down into the water below at one point.

(19:25):
Because of the pitch of the bridge, he was able
to crawl to safety. I'm not sure if he is
specifically the person in the picture I found for this episode,
but I did find a picture of a person trying
to get off that bridge. I think that is the
journalist that we'll talk about in a bit. Okay, Um,
this was a person that got off the bridge well

(19:45):
before the collapse, but was just like as it was starting,
was like, WHOA, I can look right down to my
right and it's like looking into the water. Um. That collapse,
though was not instant. The bridge had been closed to
traffic as soon as officials realized just how extreme and
unsafe the situation was, and from the beginning of the
failure conditions to the actual collapse that took between forty

(20:08):
five and sixty minutes, so there was enough time for
several different people to get their cameras out and get
footage of the whole thing finally reaching its crescendo of
movement and collapsing at eleven am. A large section of
the bridge fell, as included concrete and steel girders that
had been part of the center deck, and the rest

(20:28):
of the center span fell right after it. The main
cables went slack and the towers leaned away from each
other and towards the side of the river. The bridge
at that point was just gone. On a bit of
a sad note, there was only one fatality that day.
It was not a person but a dog. That dog,
named Tubby, was the pet of a man named Leonard
Coatesworth and coats Earth was a reporter working for the

(20:48):
Tacoma News Tribune at the time, and he had to
leave the car on the bridge and crawl to a
safe spot. He later described this ordeal quote, just as
I drove past the towers, the bridge game to sway
violently from side to side. Before I realized that the
tilt became so violent that I lost control of the car.
I jammed on the brakes and got out, only to

(21:10):
be thrown onto my face against the curb around me.
I could hear concrete cracking. I started to get my dog, Tubby,
but was thrown again before I could reach the car.
The car itself began to slide from side to side
of the roadway on hands and knees. Most of the
time I crawled five hundred yards or more to the towers.
My breath was coming in gasps, my knees were raw

(21:32):
and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the
concrete curb. Toward the last I risked, rising to my
feet and running a few yards at a time, safely
back at the toll plaza, I saw the bridge in
its final collapse and saw my car plunge into the narrows. Incidentally,
Focusson had attempted to rescue this dog when the bridge's

(21:54):
motion eased for a brief period, but the dog, obviously frightened,
bit him. He wasn't able to get it from the
car before needing to get back off of the bridge himself. Yeah,
far Coorson is another person who took footage that day.
You can actually there's footage of him walking back from
trying to save the dog, and you can see him
kind of cradling his arm that has been bitten. Um,

(22:17):
we're going to take a quick sponsor break, and when
we come back we will talk about what happened after
the bridge collapsed. Papers around the world ran the story
of the bridge for days underheadlines like galloping grdie lies

(22:39):
down in river. One of the biggest issues immediately following
the bridge disaster was, of course, placing blame somewhere who
or what entity had dropped the ball and as a consequence,
endangered the public in the process. There was a lot
of finger pointing. Congressman John Coffee, who was born and
raised in Tacoma, made public statements that corners had been

(23:02):
cut to meet budget limitations. The bridge engineering firm that
the federal government had assigned to the project, including Leon
mosey Of himself, was initially blamed for the failure by
the project's engineer, Clark Eldridge, but he walked those statements
back almost immediately, claiming that he had been misunderstood by
the press. Eldridge had been frustrated about the bridge budget

(23:23):
from the very beginning. He had estimated the needed budget
at eleven million dollars that was almost twice what was
eventually obtained. It seemed really natural to him to blame
Mocyfs cost cutting design. And as for mocyf, he told
the press quote, I'm completely at a loss to explain
the collapse. Yeah. Do keep in mind he had built

(23:44):
a lot of bridges before this time on this same
set of principles and there had not been problems. There
were twenty three different insurance companies involved in trying to
sort this whole situation out well at the same time,
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Federal Public Works Administration, and
the Washington Toll bridge authority were feverishly trying to ensure

(24:06):
that no government entity was made a scapegoat. To that end,
multiple investigative commissions were established by those various entities and
insurance companies to analyze all of the information available and
to try to identify the critical failure that had caused
the bridge to collapse. Bert Farkworson also continued his own
examination of the bridge using his lab and wind tunnel

(24:28):
set up. The various commissions and investigations initially all had
similar assessments. The materials were ruled out as a problem.
That put down rumors that inferior material had been used
to cut costs. Similarly, the workmanship was deemed to be sound.
That meant that the problem was somewhere in the design,

(24:48):
But most assessments were that the project had been designed
in accordance with current standards. Naturally, Leon Mosef's firm began
a very careful watch of some of the or other projects,
including their other famous suspension bridge on the West Coast,
the Golden Gate Bridge. There were of course fears that
it too could have issues that could result in a

(25:11):
similar catastrophe, but it never evidenced any of these problems
or instabilities that had ultimately led to the collapse of Gurdie.
I think if at that point, if I had been
if I had been Leon Mosef, or if I had
been anybody that needed to drive back and forth across
the Golden Gate Bridge, I probably would have been terrified
for just uh an indefinite amount of time. After this, yeah,

(25:34):
investigations continued. The road deck was scrutinized as part of it,
and one problem identified there was that it was too
light and flexible to handle windy conditions, although it was
definitely strong enough to handle the loads of vehicular traffic
that it had been designed for. But it was an
aerodynamicist from Pasadena who really started introducing some theories into

(25:56):
these investigations that would ultimately change how bridges are just mind.
Theodore von Carmen of the California Institute of Technology put
forth the idea that focusing on the flexibility of the
roadway was really not getting at the cause of the
bridge's disastrous end. The real problem, in his estimation, was
the way that the structure of the roadway met the wind.

(26:18):
This wasn't something that all of the other researchers embraced Initially,
aerodynamics had not at this point really been a part
of projects like this. The calculations that were made in
design were all about strength calculated using static forces. So
while wind was considered, for example, it was just about
how strong a gust could be at a given speed,

(26:38):
and it didn't really include analysis of how that wind
might move around a structure. Incidentally, von Karmen weighed in
on the tacoman Eras bridge collapse because the initial investigations
had chalked up the disaster basically to being a freak accident.
There was no fault found with the bridge design, so
papers reported that the plan and was to rebuild the

(27:01):
structure according to the same design. When von Karmen read this,
he worried that the exact same thing would just happen again. Yeah,
he was like, I have I have information, I have
ideas you should hear. Uh. There are a few different
factors that contributed to this bridge collapse. This is something
that has evolved over time, so we'll talk about this
a bit. One was the width of the roadway on

(27:22):
the structure, so it was a two lane bridge. If
it had been wider, it would have been heavier and
less likely to twist and buck in the wind like
it did. The decision to make it a two lane
structure was driven by two major factors. One at the time,
they weren't really anticipating that it was going to be
a heavily trafficked roadway. Keep in mind, this was thought

(27:43):
of as like a connector for tourists and a connector
for military things, not really like part of the infrastructure
that would be used every day by a bunch of citizens.
And for another thing, they were trying to maximize their spend,
so they were like, we can get the whole roadway,
but it should be narrower other than wider. But what
has come to be known as a Carmen vortex street,

(28:05):
or sometimes just vortex shedding, has long been considered the
big contributor, and what happened very basically, when wind meets
an object, it forms eddies as it's cleaved by that object,
and those eddies than exert their own vibrational force. This
means that alternating zones of high and low pressure above

(28:25):
and below the bridge deck were causing it to move
up and down in a way that made the road
twist side to side while simultaneously rising and falling the
way it always had. Yes, as we talk about all
of this, keep in mind, like I said, our knowledge
of this is evolving. So this is what was believed
to be entirely it at the time. Because the bridge
had been built with solid plates on the side rather

(28:47):
than open trusses that would have allowed the wind to
pass through, the wind was hitting those plates, forming those vortices,
and then interacting with the bridge at the same time
it was experiencing its usual undulation. So in addition to
suggesting that open trusses be used on the sides of
the new structure, von Karmen also recommended that there be

(29:07):
greats in between lanes of the roadway that would allow
air to pass through that angle of the structure as well.
Most testing models supported von Karmen's assertions, even though there
was still some resistance within the engineering community about his
thoughts on bridge design. He was brought into the rebuild
project as an advisor by the Washington Toll Bridge Authority.

(29:29):
For a long time, really decades, the failure of the
bridge had been chocked up to resonance, meaning a scenario
when a force vibrating at the same natural frequency of
a second object forces that second object into an amplified
vibrational motion that can destroy things. But that explanation oversimplified
what was happening with the bridge the day that it collapsed.

(29:51):
I feel like I had this and as an example
in like a physics class, you absolutely did. You absolutely did,
because it really wasn't until fairly recently the last decade
that this idea changed a little bit, like that's a
completely sound explanation. You know, as the bridge was dropping
on one side, there were high and low pressures forming

(30:13):
above and below it that countered each other and would
cause it to twist the other way. But today that
idea of vortex shedding as the cause has been refined
to reflect that after the bridge twisted one way due
to vortex shedding, its momentum is it returned back to
its flat position. Meant that it was actually carrying it
past that flat state and into the other direction, allowing

(30:35):
winds to catch it again and increase the ongoing twisting
in what's called arrow elastic flutter. The big difference here
is that the mechanism isn't the vortex shedding applying force
to the objects. The movement of the object itself is
contributing to the flutter. That's basically saying it essentially rocked
itself apart. One of the kind of like easy day

(30:57):
to day world examples that people give when they're to
explain this is like if you're holding a blade of
grass or a piece of paper and you blow on
the edge of it, you'll see it like flutter, And
it's kind of the same thing, but just at a
massive scale. This catastrophe and all of this study also
led to the development of the field of bridge aerodynamics
aero elastics. There was perhaps surprisingly, only one person who

(31:22):
had legal ramifications after the bridge collapse. It had nothing
to do with its design or construction, though it had
to do with insurance. On December four, the following article
appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle titled Galloping Gurdie insurer
bailed out. Quote insurance agent Hewett French forty four, who

(31:43):
wrote an eight hundred thousand dollar policy on galloping Gurdie,
was free on two thousand dollars bailed today on a
charge of grand larceny. His company, the Merchant's Fire Insurance
Company of New York, charged that he had failed to
remit seventy thousand dollars in premiums, including an eight thousand
dollar premium on the policy he issued against galloping Gertie collapsing.

(32:06):
The company said it was unaware that it had issued
a policy on the bridge. French was the company's general
agent and was authorized to issue policies without prior authorization.
The policy is binding, but company officials did not expect
their loss to total more than two hundred thousand dollars
because much of the bridge can be salvaged and the
total loss will be pro rated among twenty two companies

(32:28):
which had issued policies on it. Yeah, so just in
case it's not clear he had written a policy, had
collected the premiums, and had pocketed those premiums. He was
not actually then turning that over to his company. They
didn't know he had written this policy and was collecting
money on it, so they weren't catching it on the
books because there was no record of it. Um. But

(32:51):
because of his high position in the company, he had
issued a valid policy. So, uh, that's even more ridiculous
than I really understood from having said that barag account.
I mean, that's like that's a that's a brazen con
right there. Um, he took a gamble on this one
and lost very badly. Don't be like Hallett, French kids

(33:14):
um That last line, though that Tracy read about the
bridge's salvage ability turned out to be untrue. Engineers working
for the Washington Toll Bridge Authority determined that the bridge
could not be salvaged and deemed it a total loss.
This assessment was supported by additional independent studies. The back
and forth over this over whether they could actually reuse

(33:34):
some of the bridge material, led to a trial being
scheduled in nineteen forty one to rule on the dispute
between the w t b A and the insurance companies,
but that case was settled out of court before the
trial began. In that settlement, the state of Washington was
given salvage rights and four million dollars in nine The

(33:55):
parts of the original bridge which had not been pulled
up from where they fell into the water in nineteen
forty were added to the National Register of Historic Places,
in part to protect them from salvagers trying to go
and pick up these relics from the ocean. As for
how it our French, he returned at chunk of the
money he had pocketed and begged for mercy with Judge

(34:15):
Malcolm Douglas. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison,
but got out on good behavior after serving just two. Yeah,
he remained I believe in Washington, Washington, for the rest
of his life. I think he died. I'm pulling this
from memory, not from immediate notes. Uh. In the late
nineteen sixties, Leon Mosey I continued to study what had
happened in Washington and used his ongoing examination of the

(34:37):
failure to improve the field of bridge design. His reputation
had definitely suffered, but he also seemed to really have
wanted to try to make some good come out of
the fall of Galloping Gertie and to advance his field
through the knowledge that could be gained from this. He
had less than three years to work on that, though.
He died of a heart attack at his summer home

(34:58):
in New Jersey in ninete, at the age of seventy.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was rebuilt, and the new bridge,
dubbed Sturdy Gurdie, was opened in nineteen fifty. This bridge,
which was designed to incorporate the learnings from the nineteen
forty bridge collapse, remains in use today. On July fifteenth
of two thousand seven, another Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built

(35:20):
parallel and just south of the nineteen fifty structure to
accommodate more traffic volume, So the nineteen fifty bridge carries
westbound traffic and the two thousand seven bridge handles the
eastbound flew. When the two thousand seven bridge opened, the
first car to cross it after the Runners of a
Charity five K, was a ninety three Lincoln touring car,

(35:41):
which was the exact same car that had been the
first one to cross Galloping Gurtie back in nine And
now for an element of the story that is almost
worthy of an October Halloween season episode, it has long
been rumored that a mammoth version of the giant Pacific
octopus species lives in the wreckage of Galloping Gurtie that
remains on the floor of the Narrows underneath those modern bridges.

(36:04):
King Octopus, as he is often called, is practically a
local celebrity. There are g p os giant Pacific octopuses
that live in the area, but the sad fact is
they are not a long looped species. They only live
about three to five years at most, so the idea
that there has been one that is there for decades.
Is very fun, it's not really founded in reality. There

(36:26):
are some sad aspects to that whole octopus thing that
we'll talk about in our behind the scenes. Yeah, I'm
glad you picked this one. It was one of those
things where I was like, I'm surprised somehow neither we
or any of the previous hosts have taken us on. Well.
I think it's one of those things that people think
everybody knows about, right because we have all seen that footage,

(36:47):
But like all of the crazy insurance and financing and
like weird stuff that doesn't really ever hit the public
knowledge in the same way. It's like disc I see
a lot of discussions about like what caused this bridge
to collapse and what have we learned from it in
like physics discussions, But when you get into the actual

(37:08):
mechanisms of you know, bureaucracy and red tape that are involved,
it becomes a whole other story with its own sub
dramas that play out. Yeah. Yeah, I think I mostly
remembered it as like physics problem dramatic footage and what
I have now confirmed as we took a moment to

(37:31):
leave room for an ad break a Pioneer car audio commercial. UM.
I don't know exactly when, but yeah, yeah, somehow I
missed that one, even though I think I probably have
always watched more TV than you. I it seems like
this would have been when I was in maybe high

(37:52):
school or possibly college age. But I could just be
making that up, I have. I did not confirm when
that commercial was actually airing. Uh do you have? Do
you have listener mail? I do? I actually have two
pieces of listener mail. The first is from our listener David,
who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I'm a longtime listener
and huge fan. I always enjoy recommending an episode to

(38:12):
friends who mentioned an event or a person you've covered
in depth. I also suspect my teenage kids have picked
up a cool anecdote or perspective by Osmosis more than once,
so thank you for that. When I was listening to
the Grand Central episode, you mentioned the extensive cleaning the
building received a few decades back. One of my favorite
little details to point out to visitors is the tiny
little spot on the ceiling that the crew left filthy

(38:34):
on purpose. You can still see a tiny rectangle of
layered on soot and smoke and grime. If you know
where to look, stand between the famous clock and the
west stairway facing the steps, look up and to the
right along the vaulted edge, close to the painted image
of the constellation Cancer, and you will see a small
area that was left blackened to give you a sense

(38:55):
of just how bad it was. I was there for
the first time in about fifteen months last weekend. Took
a photo and he sent us photo and it is.
It's a very tiny It looks almost like someone put
a sticker on the wall because it looks so completely
different and weird. But in fact that is historical dirt,
which I absolutely love knowing that it's there. Um, So

(39:17):
thank you for that. I'm gonna absolutely be looking for
that the next time that i'm there. So thank you
for that, David, because I'm looking. Our second email is
from our listener, Aaron. This email delights me utterly. Uh
Eron writes, Hi, Tracy and Holly just wanted to let
you know that lu Garu, the beloved Rugaru at the
Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, is now vaccinated. He has

(39:40):
been social distancing and wearing his mask all year, but
is ready to start meeting in small groups soon. As
you can see on his vaccination card there's a photo
attached he received the I believe this is pronounced zodas vaccine,
which is used for the great apes. He enjoys dressing
up for holidays throughout the year. As Kim easily be
seen through a quick Google search. Hopefully he'll be ready

(40:00):
to go for the next Ruguru festival so you can
visit soon. I enjoyed the podcast in your New Orleans
Live show. Is great. Thanks for all that you do, Aaron. Um.
I did not know that there was a rugarou at
the Audubon Zoo, and now there's another place I have
to go. This is adorable. It's basically a cute figure
that they have set up, a rugaru standing there in

(40:21):
his his majesty, wearing a mask, so for anybody, it's
not an actual animal, it's a display. It's adorable though.
I want to go so bad now, and I love
that he's got a little vaccine card. Um that means
we can hug him. I hope, um so, Aaron, thank
you so much because that is an absolute delight and

(40:42):
the thing I didn't know about now I know and
look out, look out zoo, I'm coming. If you would
like to write us, you can do so at History
Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find
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you can do that on the I heart Radio app,

(41:02):
at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen. Stuff
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