Tacoma Narrows
inbridgeinThe history of bridge design
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Written by
Hubert Shirley-Smith,
Philip N. BillingtonAll
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: •Article History
In 1940 the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened over Puget Sound in Washington state, U.S. Spanning 840 metres (2,800 feet), its deck, also stiffened by plate girders, had a depth of only 2.4 metres (8 feet). This gave it a ratio of girder depth to span of 1:350, identical to that of the George Washington Bridge. Unfortunately, at Tacoma Narrows, just four months after the bridge’s completion, the deck tore apart and collapsed under a moderate wind.
At that time bridges normally were designed to withstand gales of 190 km (120 miles) per hour, yet the wind at Tacoma was only 67 km (42 miles) per hour. Motion pictures taken of the disaster show the deck rolling up and down and twisting wildly. These two motions, vertical and torsional, occurred because the deck had been provided with little vertical and almost no torsional stiffness. Engineers had overlooked the wind-induced failures of bridges in the 19th century and had designed extremely thin decks without fully understanding their aerodynamic behaviour. After the Tacoma bridge failed, however, engineers added trusses to the Bronx-Whitestone bridge, cable-stays to Deer Isle, and further bracing to the stiffening truss at Golden Gate. In turn, the diagonal stays used to strengthen the Deer Isle Bridge led engineer Norman Sollenberger to design the San Marcos Bridge (1951) in El Salvador with inclined suspenders, thus forming a cable truss between cables and deck—the first of its kind.
Lessons of the disaster
The disaster at Tacoma caused engineers to rethink their concepts of the vertical motion of suspension bridge decks under horizontal wind loads. Part of the problem at Tacoma was the construction of a plate girder with solid steel plates, 2.4 metres (8 feet) deep on each side, through which the wind could not pass. For this reason, the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1950), as well as Ammann’s 1,280-metre- (4,260-foot-) span Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York (1964), were built with open trusses for the deck in order to allow wind passage. The 1,140-metre- (3,800-foot-) span Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, U.S., designed by Steinman, also used a deep truss; its two side spans of 540 metres (1,800 feet) made it the longest continuous suspended structure in the world at the time of its completion in 1957.
The 972-metre- (3,240-foot-) span Severn Bridge (1966), linking southern England and Wales over the River Severn, uses a shallow steel box for its deck, but the deck is shaped aerodynamically in order to allow wind to pass over and under it—much as a cutwater allows water to deflect around piers with a greatly reduced force. Another innovation of the Severn Bridge was the use of steel suspenders from cables to deck that form a series of Vs in profile. When a bridge starts to oscillate in heavy wind, it tends to move longitudinally as well as up and down, and the inclined suspenders of the Severn Bridge act to dampen the longitudinal movement. The design ideas used on the Severn Bridge were repeated on the Bosporus Bridge (1973) at Istanbul and on the Humber Bridge (1981) over the River Humber in England. The Humber Bridge in its turn became the longest-spanning bridge in the world, with a main span of 1,388 metres (4,626 feet).
Truss bridges
Although trusses are used mostly as secondary elements in arch, suspension, or cantilever designs, several important simply supported truss bridges have achieved significant length. The Astoria Bridge (1966) over the Columbia River in Oregon, U.S., is a continuous three-span steel truss with a centre span of 370 metres (1,232 feet), and the Tenmon Bridge (1966) at Kumamoto, Japan, has a centre span of 295 metres (984 feet).
In 1977 the New River Gorge Bridge, the world’s longest-spanning steel arch, was completed in Fayette county, West Virginia, U.S. Designed by Michael Baker, the two-hinged arch truss carries four lanes of traffic 263 metres (876 feet) above the river and has a span of 510 metres (1,700 feet).
Cable-stayed bridges
European designs
Beginning in the 1950s, with the growing acceptance of cable-stayed bridges, there came into being a type of structure that could not easily be classified by construction material. Cable-stayed bridges offered a variety of possibilities to the designer regarding not only the materials for deck and cables but also the geometric arrangement of the cables. Early examples, such as the Strömsund Bridge in Sweden (1956), used just two cables fastened at nearly the same point high on the tower and fanning out to support the deck at widely separated points. By contrast, the Oberkasseler Bridge, built over the Rhine River in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1973, used a single tower in the middle of its twin 254-metre (846-foot) spans; the four cables were placed in a harp or parallel arrangement, being equally spaced both up the tower and along the centre line of the deck. The Bonn-Nord Bridge in Bonn, Germany (1966), was the first major cable-stayed bridge to use a large number of thinner cables instead of relatively few but heavier ones—the technical advantage being that, with more cables, a thinner deck might be used. Such multicable arrangements subsequently became quite common. The box girder deck of the Bonn-Nord, as with most cable-stayed bridges built during the 1950s and ’60s, was made of steel. From the 1970s, however, concrete decks were used more frequently.
The Vasco da Gama Bridge that crosses over theTagus Riverestuary inLisbon,Portugal, spanning 17.2 km (10.7 miles), was the longest bridge inEuropeat the time of its inauguration in 1998. It was surpassed by the controversial Crimean Bridge (also called the Kerch Strait Bridge), which was formally opened byVladimir Putinin 2018. The Crimean Bridge spans 19km (12miles) and was damaged by an explosion in 2022.
