===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And today we are loading up the car to take a relaxing drive through hills and valleys, over rivers and gorges, and across jaw-dropping expanses. The whole time, keeping our fingers crossed that my car makes it to any of these locations. Yeah, Ed's car is on its last legs. My real- It's new!

It's a new car on its last legs.

Well, it's new to you.

That's true, it's new to me.

Ed's car is actually probably 25 years old.

It's at least 20.

But no, the danger on our drive this week will not be coming from Ed's car as much as it might be coming from the bridges that we are crossing. Because with one in three bridges in the US currently in need of repair or replacement, it seems like only a matter of time before the next catastrophic failure makes headlines. These aren't just little foot bridges in the park either. We're talking massive multi-lane spans that carry thousands of vehicles a day. Many are integral parts of major highway systems. You probably drove over a questionable bridge on your way to work this morning. So what happens when one of these structures suddenly gives way? Where will you be? On it, under it, or in the wreckage? And what's being done to address this ticking time bomb in our transportation system? Today, we'll explore two of the worst bridge disasters in history and the lessons we failed to learn from them. We'll look at the current state of bridge infrastructure in the US and reveal which areas have the most structurally deficient spans just waiting to crumble. And as always, we'll ask the question, how scared should you be? So buckle up, keep your hands inside the vehicle, and get ready for a short drive across a long, scary topic. With any luck, we'll see you on the other side.

What are we scared? When are we?

All the time. Now it is time for time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Happy New Year. This is our first show post 2024. So our first show in 2025, a year that will surely be all cream, all good, all gold.

For us, hopefully.

Nothing bad will happen. But if it does, you'll be sure to hear about it on this show where we are afraid of everything happening. But we wanted to kick off the year with, well, I wanted to kick off the year with a small correction to our Y2K episode. My cousin was listening and she told my grandmother that I mentioned their Y2K trip.

Ed called them cheap.

And no, they're very proud of how cheap they are. And what I got wrong was that I said that they were going to Japan. They were actually going to Belgium. So they were over the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific Ocean. And my grandmother called me because she wanted to make sure that the audience had only the facts.

Sure.

And that I got it correct.

Sure, shit, dude.

Now you guys know.

Those are very different places.

Yeah. So there's that.

Did she have a good Christmas?

Did I have a good Christmas?

Yeah. And we talked about it in the live show with the patrons, but we haven't talked about it to the general audience.

That's true.

I did.

We both did. You had, you got some gifts. You had some next level gifts.

I got some great stuff. I had some friends who got me a bunch of Scared All The Time themed gifts. I got a cool vintage dinosaur lamp from a buddy at a surprise party that Chris and our buddy Max threw for me. It was just like a long, it was a lot of partying with late night editing sessions to get you animals, some episodes on time. But I had really good holidays. All the holidays were good.

I did too. I'll tell you, this is how you know we're getting old, but Anna got me a pillow, a new pillow that has changed my life.

It has an anime girl on it?

Yeah. Anna got me an anime body pillow. Nice. Sick. We've opened the relationship to a third now. This is Kumiko, my stuffed lover. No, she got me a... I shouldn't say the brand. Fuck them. If they want a sponsorship, they can come to us. But holy shit, what a pillow. So that was great. We went to a Morrissey show for New Year's Eve. She's a huge Morrissey fan. So we went and did that. And yeah, generally just a great, warm, exciting holiday season. And now I'm ready to hit 2025 with some resolutions. Do you have resolutions, Ed?

No. There's only one year where I was serious about resolutions, because it never pans out. But there was one year, many years ago, where I was like, I'm going to make a doable resolution. And I think it was, I know what it was. It was to learn how to tie a bow tie.

Oh.

I learned it and just fucking nailed it. Like I killed that resolution. I could still do it today. And it was not anything that I felt bad later in the year that I never completed or anything. So maybe it's not too late by the time our episode drops to come up with one, but no, I had no plans to resolute.

Last year, our resolution was to get Square and to do a year of podcasting.

And we did one of the two.

We did one of the two. So I think we could get Square this year. I think we can continue the four corner journey. The hose boys and the four corner odyssey will do our best.

Shit. Well, that's our on air resolution right now. We're gonna continue. We're gonna do another year of the show and get Square.

All right. I'm in. Okay. So to continue with housekeeping, though, I think we should do some five star reviews.

Yes. The first five star reviews of the new year.

First five star reviews of the new year. For those of you who listen to the show, you know how this goes. You send us a five star review and we read some of them, not all of them, although eventually we may read all of them on the air. So send a great review and if we love it, we'll read it. So I'm gonna kick off. This one's fun. We got this one actually on December 2nd, 2024 from Dee Zamora and it is in French. So I won't try to read it in French because I'll get canceled for disparaging the French language. So I translated it to English through Google Translate and the headline is official podcast of the man in the hat, which in English I think is probably official podcast of the hat man. And the five star review reads this podcast is perfect if you are afraid all the time between scary stories and funny jokes. This show is fantastic. I wrote only in French to cleverly hide the title, crying emoji or crying laughing emoji.

Yeah, it's different. Those are totally different emojis.

Those are very different. Yeah. Feel free to translate Ed and Chris. So we did, we translated, we now know that the French think that we are the official podcast of the hat man and we are flattered.

Yeah, totally. Let me get one here. All right, so this one's a little more recent. This is December 20th from SEPTA LaMoure. The subject is, I like these boys. And the body of the five star review is, they're good boys.

Yeah.

So short and sweet. I'm a fan.

A five star review and 100 percent accurate.

Yeah. So if you read them together, it's I like these boys. They're good boys.

And then I also just wanted to read from Cold Bore Surgeon on December 18th, 2024, a five star review. God bless them hose boys. The review reads, this podcast and it's always entertaining hosts literally cured my artist block. I am a devout Satanist now spelled S-A-T-T-A-N-I-S-T, which is fun.

I like what they did there.

Very good. We may need to start using that. That's great. Hail hose boys. The only thing about this review that gives me pause is their name is Cold Bore Surgeon and I'm worried that this is one of those like serial killers who calls their crimes their art.

Oh no.

We literally cured their artist block. So if there's a bunch of carved up bodies in your area, I guess that's our fault now. So that's Five Star Review Corner. I think that's pretty much it for Housekeeping Edge. Should we?

Well, I have to do the producers in good standing, Chris.

Oh, that's right. Producers in good standing. For those of you who are subscribed to the Patreon, you can be a producer of the show, many of you are, and we thank you at the top of every month. So Ed, go ahead, how about you read us the list of producers in good standing?

All right, here we go. Anita A, Amanda M, Ambrosio L, Annemarie V, Ariel M, Audra M, Bambi F, Buttercup H, Cassandra O, Christopher F, Christopher M, Claire B, David V, Diana E, Donna B, Gabrielle G, Ibis, Ibis, Ibis K, I know you sent me the email and I will remember which one. Isabella CO., congratulations, we got an O on the block now in your name. Jeff Q, Jonathan B, Jonathan L, Justin H, Justin R, Carly C, Catherine L, Kevin W, Kirsten T, Kristen S, Kyle E, Lauren M, Lucas P, Madeline or Madeline MW., Marshall K, Matthew S, Melissa L, Nicole G, Royce D, Samantha C, Sean K, Tabby F and Timothy M. These are your producers in good standing for December, the last month of 2024.

All right, thank you to our producers. Without any further ado, everyone pile on into the car. We're gonna go for a drive into the horrifying topic of bridge disasters.

Yeah, get all your asses in this car. We're gonna test the limits of this fucking bridge.

Yeah. Beep beep.

Beep beep, honk honk. Let's get into it.

All right, so I've never been a fan of Bridges. When I was a kid-

Jeff Bridges?

Jeff Bridges, Lloyd Bridges. No, I'm actually a huge Jeff Bridges fan.

What about Beau Bridges?

Who, Beau Bridges?

His brother.

I'm not actually all that familiar with Beau's work.

You ever seen The Fabulous Baker Boys?

It's a good movie.

Maybe? I don't know. No, I don't think I actually have ever seen The Fabulous Baker Boys. What else is Beau Bridges in? It's a fun name to say. It's a fun name to say.

Super fun name to say. He's in Plunny that I can't think of right now.

Well, here's another fun name to say. The Tappan Zee Bridge.

Oh, I'm very aware of the Tappan Zee Bridge.

You know the Tappan Zee Bridge. I know the Tappan Zee Bridge. When I was a kid, my family would drive from Hershey to Springfield, Massachusetts to visit my grandparents. And that required crossing over the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee, although it's now the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge.

Unless you're entering from New Jersey, where they've either out of laziness, budgetary constraints or just spite, have yet to change it to that. So if you're entering from New Jersey, signs will say like X number of miles until the Tappan Zee still.

Well, I saw a bunch of people debating online. And since the Tappan Zee, thank God, has not collapsed and hopefully never will collapse, there was not much for me to research about the Tappan Zee. But I did see a lot of people debating what it should be called and why it should be called that. I gather the Tappan were a group of Native Americans who lived in the area, it seems like.

I don't know, I've literally never questioned it.

It's an odd name for a bridge, especially when you spell it out. It's Tappan space Zee.

Yeah, I mean, I've seen the sign a million times. I've been saying it as long as I can remember. And this is the new Tappan Zee bridge, right? Cause it was like redone.

They redid it, yeah. Well, this bridge is very safe.

For anyone who doesn't know, should we say where it is or anything?

Well, yeah, it crosses over the Hudson. I know if you look to the right, you can see New York City from when you're in like the middle of the bridge, you can see like the skyline.

I've got some great videos of me going over it in an old Mack truck.

Yeah. I think technically it just goes from New York to New York over the Hudson.

Correct.

Yeah. From the time I was old enough to understand how high up that bridge was and that survival was extremely unlikely should something go wrong, I hated that part of the trip. There's, I don't know, is it like four lanes going each direction?

Yeah, it's pretty big. It's at least four.

It's big. There's people merging, honking. I wasn't thinking at the time as a kid, I wasn't thinking about the bridge collapsing so much as I was, having real concerns about what would happen if you got in a bad accident on the bridge and could your car spin off and fall off the side of the bridge.

But at least it's one layer. It's not like going over the George Washington bridge where you got traffic on one floor and then traffic on the floor below.

Okay, this is how sheltered I was growing up. I saw the George Washington bridge in movies and television. I think part of me, because that looked so insane that you would have cars and trucks stacked on top of each other, going over a bridge like that, I think I thought it was fake. I don't think I knew that your George Washington bridge was real. No, it's real. No, now I know it's real.

But what I was saying, even when you were a kid, they weren't CGing a fake bridge in every movie.

It just seemed insane to me. I guess also the only reference I had for any bridge was the Tappan Zee bridge. That's true. Or a little foot bridge. So any bridge bigger than that, and I guess Golden Gate Bridge.

Our reference for that was sitcom openings. Yeah.

So I'd never, when I finally wrapped my head around the George Washington bridge and the fact that, yeah, it's a double-decker bridge. I've maybe driven on it once. I don't love it. I mean, let's talk just generally about bridges here. This is one of those topics.

I'm gonna stop doing it. I'm gonna stop doing it.

Bridges of Madison County, although-

Hopefully that comes up.

Well, I don't think it's really- You cut it out.

I suggested it, folks.

Ed suggested that we check up on the bridges of Madison County because it turns out a lot of the bridges, famously of Madison County, are no longer standing.

No, they're dilapidated and there's, I think there was a, when I was looking it up, I think there was like a petition and stuff to like save the ones that are still good and I didn't look up to see if anyone died.

They're all, they're covered bridges, right?

I think they're covered bridges. I don't remember the movie at all.

I mean, that's a whole other, this is a really funny topic because bridge collapses or bridge acts, bridge disasters, bridge collapses, bridge accidents are very scary. Bridges are such a boring topic.

Yeah.

So I've tried to do a good job on this episode of like balancing stuff to know about bridges and bridge education with stories of disaster. We'll see how well I did in a little bit, but.

Well, what's kind of funny that you just mentioned that I didn't think about it is, you know, when you think bridge collapse, you think that, you know, the bridge collapses beneath you like Indiana Jones and you fall.

Yeah.

But a bridge collapse on a covered bridge, it could just be the covered part falls in on you.

Falls in on you.

And now you're just like trapped under that, like the actual bottom stayed sturdy and good.

I didn't need that.

Oh, sorry.

Well, the only covered bridge accident I can think of is the one at the beginning of Beetlejuice.

Yeah, that's Connecticut.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I think it's supposed to be Connecticut.

But that's not a very, I mean, it's a tragedy that that couple dies and goes to the afterlife, but it doesn't seem like they fall very far when they go off that bridge. No. It's a pretty simple, if anything, it's scary how deadly a bridge accident could be.

At any size.

At any size, yeah.

It's like you can get eaten by a shark in two feet of water.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, bridges, I mean, like this is one of those topics, not quite as bad as earthquakes, although as we'll learn, maybe a lot more reasons to be concerned about this and then earthquakes. But just one of those things that like I, to this day, I don't know that I'm comfortable ever really driving over a bridge. I'm mostly just waiting to get to the other side.

I don't even really think about it until we did the big one. And it was it was like a topic of discussion for a while with us. Yeah, I don't know. I think Comic Steve's mom is is like really not cool with bridges. I think she's one of those people where they hold their breath. There's some like thing where it's like if you're going over a bridge, you do X, Y and Z to help with it.

There's some bridges you definitely can't hold your breath. The whole stretch. Maybe it's close your eyes.

Maybe it's take an ambient.

You can hold your breath.

Maybe it's take a Xanax and between you and Comic Steve with Xanax, if you go from not wanting to get on the plane to being comfortable flying the plane.

Yeah.

So I imagine like, yeah, I'll be a fucking raised bridge operator on this Xanny.

Well, I think similar to my fear of flying, I think the root of my bridge fear is that loss of control in the sense that for the time that you are on the bridge, you are turning yourself over to physics and fallible human engineering. And the loss of control for me is part of the fear. I mean, the difference is at least on a plane, even when I'm zanned up and feeling like I can fly that plane, there's no way that I'm ever gonna fly that plane. Whereas on a bridge, I have the ability to tell myself that I'm a good driver and if something goes wrong, I'll get Mission Impossible with it and drive around and survive. But I don't think that would happen. I think if I actually was on a collapsing bridge, I'd probably just be like, uh, uh.

If there's anything I learned about going through bridges in New York, there's a toll to pay one way or another. Whether it's the actual way too much toll, like George Washington Bridge is like, yeah, that'd be $33. It's actually not that high, but it's significant.

Yeah.

Or Bridge Troll who asked three questions to pass, or a collapsing bridge, which is just the toll you pay is your life.

So these aren't, you're not actually worried about the Bridge Troll though, right? You know that the Bridge Troll is-

I don't know. I'm going to Europe maybe in March, so I think that's where, if they're anywhere, they're there.

How are we going to do the show?

When I'm in Europe?

We didn't talk about this. We'll figure it out. I'm not worried about it.

I have a laptop.

It'll be the month after my kid's born, so.

Maybe we won't even do it. We'll discuss.

We'll discuss. We'll figure it out. But Ed, I know you're a big bridge guy. I know you have a couple of good bridge stories. You saw the Baltimore Bridge collapse live, right?

On TV.

Well, yeah.

Yeah, I was.

You were driving the boat into it.

Yeah, I know. I didn't show up to make sure the plan went according. The plan that I had set out with that captain to make sure that he didn't back out of his side of the deal.

You didn't actually see a collapse on TV, did you?

I know. Although I saw a collapse a hundred times on TV because there actually was a weather camera or something facing that anyway, but I saw it live because I was at the gym. This is back when I can go to the gym. I was there getting square and I was on an elliptical or something, and I remember it was like breaking news, bridge collapses.

Breaking news, bridge breaking.

There it is, breaking bridge. And honestly, I got excited not because I saw a bridge collapse, but it was because it seemed like it's been a minute since I've seen genuine breaking news. They just say breaking news for anything now. And so I was like, oh, that's good. Good job using it correctly.

Do you think that makes me wonder, maybe we could make this show bigger if we had a 24 hour news cycle for just this show. If we were on basically 24 hours a day, we have different people out there helping us out.

We'd need a lot more patrons to make this a reality. So yes, I saw it live, but it was just, I just happened to be facing a television when the news first came in.

Right. Well, and I just, I bring that up because outside of you seeing that, I don't think you or I really have any other bridge stories or near misses or-

No, luckily no.

It's just scary to drive over them. I do know there is one other bridge though that we actually have in common, the Sikorsky Bridge.

Oh yeah, I grew up my whole life.

The Singing Bridge.

The Singing Bridge, yeah.

Yes. So I know about the Singing Bridge because of visiting my grandparents, but you probably know a lot more about it than I do.

I mean, I've driven over it. It's another one that they've not fixed it. They built a new one right next to it. So it's an interesting thing about watching them do a bridge because it's like you can't just close down the bridge. So they build the bridge next to it in stages so that then they'll close one and open the other.

Right. We should explain what we mean by Singing Bridge.

Sure. I think the reason it sings is it's basically a cheese grater. It's like a grated bridge. It's not like asphalt or concrete. It's like metal that you can see straight down to the water.

Yeah.

And when I was a kid, my dad and I would go out in a boat and you have to go under the bridge to go out on to Long Island Sound and you just look up. And it's like looking at fucking glass. I'm just looking at cars. I've seen the entire underneath of cars. Luckily, there was no like Dave Matthews band shit spilled on us. But it's just, wow, because I remember as a little kid, it was exciting to look up because it felt like I was looking at like matchbox cars go by because they're like small. It's not that high that they would see matchbox car size, but it still seemed like they're small cars. But yeah, they would just drive right over you. And that's just kind of wacky. But also, if you put your head out the window and look down, you would see people on boats.

Yeah. And the whole time it was kind of humming.

It's humming. But it's also when I turned 16. So where I live, you have to drive over it all the time. Like that would be our exit, basically. Like just to go from the connector to whatever, to the Merritt Parkway or whatever, like you basically have to go over this bridge all the time. And in the winter, it's terrifying because it like freezes over, it gets icy. When it's raining, it's just insane sounding. And like you feel like you're hydroplaning all the time.

Right.

Because you're like, oh, I went from asphalt or whatever to slippery metal.

Yes. Yeah.

Like, so that's just nuts. Yeah, it was just a, I don't know the reality of how it was made or the history of it, but it just seemed like a bad idea.

Right. Well, as we'll see with some of these other bridges, there are bridges that seem like a good idea at the time, and then they're not.

Sure.

Because we can only build bridges with the technology, the best guess technology sort of of the moment.

Now, did you have any singing bridge stories? You just remember it.

No, I just remember it. And I also remember, I don't remember, this might have been more towards shit. What's the, Hartford. There is a bridge that my grandparents always called the Flying Bridge.

Oh, well, I never went up to Hartford except for to see a concert most of the while.

And I don't, I think it was, I don't even know if it was a bridge or if it was just like a long kind of curved, like interstate off ramp. But they would call it the Flying Bridge because when you crossed it, you kind of, it curved up and out and you felt like you were kind of flying out over the.

That should not be the sensation on public roads.

No, but I do remember them talking about the Flying Bridge and the Singing Bridge. So, but I don't have any negative connotations for either of those things.

And I don't want to to Connecticut's horn too much. Although I was at a party recently, like with just the other night. And this woman I was speaking to was like, you really love Connecticut.

You love Connecticut. I love Pennsylvania. I think it's something that is charming about us.

Yeah. But I mean, I don't know if there, I mean, for all I know is there's a thousand faulty piece of shit bridges there, but it's correct that the two, okay.

Spoiler alert, there are.

Well, the two things that I find interesting that of the two bridges we've brought up so far who are not, it's not surname bridges we've brought up so far, is they're both bridges that were rebuilt without a collapse.

Yeah.

Like the Sikorsky Bridge, they built a better one before it caused mayhem. In Akad eki, but right next door, the Tappan Zee was rebuilt before they caused mayhem.

Interestingly, the Sikorsky Bridge was rebuilt, I assume out of the same materials though, right? Like it's still a singing bridge or did they rebuild a different?

No, when you drive over it now, it doesn't do that.

Oh, it doesn't sing anymore?

No.

Oh, well, that's a bummer.

The song is gone.

They stole the song right out of the bridge's heart.

Yeah, they took the soul of that bridge away, and now it's just a quiet, demure, beaten down, like the rest of us, silent bridge. Oh, I think it was also known as the upside down bridge.

Oh, God.

I have to maybe put something in.

That's a fact bot.

Yeah, that might be a trivia bot thing. I want to say, not only was it made of the weirdest material, I think it was also installed upside down, which is why it had all sorts of other problems.

That's a big fuck up. That's crazy.

If it's not, then I'll have Trivia Bot say it's just a dream I had.

That seems like they would have shut it down as soon as they figured it out, because there's very little room for error in a lot of this bridge building. I think if you put it in upside down.

I don't know. I think I feel like I heard that once.

Apparently, it was not actually installed upside down, but that was the rumor that spread after they tried to quote fix the bridge in the 1980s, only to have people complain that whatever they did seemed to make it much worse.

Well, there are definitely bridge collapses in film and TV that I think have probably gotten under our skin, and that's part of, as with lots of the disaster episodes of this show, most of what we imagine the disaster to be like is what we know of from film and television. So the number one bridge collapse that we could probably talk about from film and TV is Mothman Prophecies, obviously.

It's the number one this audience might know.

Number one this audience might know. More on that bridge collapse later, but the one in the movie is very well done, and I did actually get to see the miniature that they used to shoot that sequence when I moved out to LA.

Yeah, because you knew somebody.

A friend of mine from high school, again, a high school in Pennsylvania, shout out Mike Linsky, his grandfather actually founded a company called Fantasy 2 Film Effects in the 50s, and in the 60s, they won an Oscar for the adaptation of The Time Machine.

Great movie. That's my favorite showing the passing of time device ever is in that old Time Machine movie, that version of The Time Machine. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you know the scene I'm talking about?

No, I've taught my head now.

When he turns on The Time Machine to show that time has passed, it's a static shot of a women's fashion store front window, and it shows how the mannequins change women's fashion. So it's showing like that's the 40s, that's the 50s, now it's like go-go boots and short skirts, and then it's like women's business attire. It's rad. I guess they wouldn't have known the 80s at that point.

But they wouldn't have known the 80s or the 90s. They did not predict grunge.

No, it did not predict grunge. But it was, oh, he comes even further back, so it would have been like the 1800s through. But either way, it's such a smart use of a locked camera to completely understand, and without writing anything on the screen, you know what decade you're in.

You don't need a spinning newspaper to fly up and say, be-deep-beep, be-deep-beep. Yeah, no, it was weird, because I was friends with this guy, Mike, and it wasn't until one day for some, it wasn't show and tell, it was something in high school where we were bringing family heirlooms in or something.

He brought them off, man.

No, he brought a gremlin, a stop-motion gremlin.

Oh, wow.

And a Pillsbury Doughboy, like an acrylic, is that the right material?

Well, acrylic is just a paint, I think.

No, almost like a Funko Pop-scented feeling.

Okay, so it's almost plastic.

Like a plasticky Pillsbury Doughboy that's halfway through the hoo-hoo, like his hands up, his mouth open. And I was like, he knew I liked movies. He'd never mentioned before that his family owned this company. And he was like, I was like, where did you get this? And he was like, oh, it's my grandfather's. They did the old Pillsbury Doughboy commercials where they were stop-motion.

Yeah, I remember those. Yeah, and you'd press them in his belly.

Yeah, so when I moved out to LA, I got in touch with other people from his family and they toured me around. They had miniatures from Gremlins and Underworld. They had one of the mini tractor trailers that they used for the big action scene in Terminator 2.

Oh, cool.

With mini Terminator hanging off of it. And they had a water tank in the back that they'd originally built because Cameron was going to need to shoot. They weren't going to shoot Titanic in the tank, but it was like there was certain elements that they were going to be shooting there. And then I think they never ended up using it because he moved the whole production to Mexico. But that tank was then standing, and that was the tank that they used to shoot the Mothman Bridge collapse, and they still had the bridge up and everything. It was great. This was like 2008, and I think they're maybe out of business now.

That's very likely.

Yeah, I remember Transformers was just like coming out, or it had just come out, and I remember a lot of talk about how everything in there had been done digitally.

Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine. You have a miniature from Terminator 2, which is like the first full body CG character. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pretty sure the writing was on the wall. Yeah, but anyway, so Mothman, great bridge disaster. The opening disaster in Final Destination 5.

Is it with the logs?

No, we're talking about bridge collapses. It's a bridge collapse.

I don't know if my go-to Final Destination is the logs.

No, well, so the opening disaster of a lot of the Final Destinations, I think we could probably just do a series of episodes of this show based around Final Destination movies.

Absolutely.

Because we did plane crashes already.

Yeah, which is what Final Destination is based on.

Yes.

It's based on The Soul Survivor, which is a movie that they based Final Destination on.

Well, it's also sort of based on...

I mean, not only is it based on Soul Survivor, because it's the exact same premise, the log death is in Soul Survivor, and it's way scarier.

Wait, so you're saying Final Destination 2 is a pull of Soul Survivor.

So did you ever see Soul Survivor? It's a movie from the 70s or 80s.

I don't know if I have.

It's a woman survives a plane crash, and death is trying to get her the whole rest of the movie.

Okay, no, I haven't seen this.

It's literally Final Destination. But one of the deaths in Soul Survivor is a lagging truck exactly the same as Final Destination. But it's better because it's real, and I think they fucking kill someone to do it. But yeah, it's rad as hell. And when that scene happened, I was already thinking, this movie's very Final Destination. And then when that scene happened, I gotta look it up now, and it was like, yes, the franchise is based on Soul Survivor.

Well, but the franchise is based on an X-File spec script.

Is there nothing original about Final Destination?

No, so Jeffrey, God, I'm gonna forget his last name now.

Jeffrey Combs?

No, who wrote the first Final Destination.

Jeffrey Katzenberg.

He'd originally written it, and you can download the script. I downloaded it at some point. He had written an X-File spec where it's, I forget if it's Mulder or Scully is on the plane, and they get off the plane because people have a premonition. Someone panics and then Mulder or Scully falls them off the plane and then everybody starts dying. And he'd written it as an X-File spec and it never got made. And then he turned it into a feature film and then that became Final Destination.

But it really sounds like this is a guy who watched a movie called Soul Survivor. Again, it may be based on Soul Survivor. And then was like, I'm going to remake this no matter what.

My point is those movies were really good at stoking fears. The opening disasters and all of them, you know, we've already covered half the topics. There's a plane crash, a roller coaster disaster is number three. A bridge disaster is number five.

I don't think I ever got to the fifth one. That's why it's not five is actually really good.

There's a fun twist in five that I won't spoil for the listeners.

But when did five come out?

Fairly recently, like I think I might know members of the cast two thousand and like nine maybe or ten relatively recently.

None of this matters.

No, I know. But I could talk about I had I had a meeting with one of the final destination producers once. I probably can talk about this because it didn't end up happening. At the time, this was also like, again, a decade ago, they were trying to do a final destination movie that was set in medieval times, which I thought was kind of a fun idea because back then, people really believed in the Grim Reaper, that there was this sense that death was a physical presence coming for you.

I still believe in that. My mom is hospice training. I feel like they probably teach that in day one.

And they had a bunch of cool, gross medieval torture style deaths. And I was like, oh, that sounds awesome. And then it never happened, but pretty sweet. Anyway, yeah, maybe we'll do some final destination themed episodes.

That sounds awesome. It's a great idea.

Golden Gate Bridge has gotten wrecked a dozen times in film and TV.

Oh, film and TV? Yeah, yeah.

Godzilla, 2014, definitely. Although in that, it's the monster that's scary, not the bridge collapse.

But it's great. It's Japanese facing. It's a long bridge over the water. It's got a great view behind it. I can see why you just keep... Japanese facing is because Godzilla.

Doesn't it melt in the core? The movie The Core? Do you remember The Core?

The only thing I remember about the movie The Core is that they made their like underground bebop and rocksteady machine out of Unobtanium.

Did they call it that?

They call it Unobtanium in the movie, which I think is the same...

Yeah, from Avatar.

Maybe. I know it's also what Oakleys claimed to be made out of like as like a marketing thing a bunch of years ago.

That's... Well, did Oakleys do a promo with Avatar? Because it's definitely Unobtanium in Avatar.

I think based on what we're saying right now, Unobtanium might just be a non-trademarkable royalty-free word.

Maybe.

Because everyone's using it.

One thing we are always scared of here at Scared All The Time HQ is how many podcasts exist in the world. I believe the official number is too many. It's impossible to keep up with all the scary, strange, hilarious and informational podcasts that are dropping every day out there, which is where we come in. We are always taking the time to check out new podcasts so we can give you a heads up when something truly excellent catches our ears.

Yeah, and this week we'd like to introduce you to Belief Hole, which Trivia Bot assures us is actually a podcast and not just a place where our beliefs go to die.

It is. Trivia Bot is correct. Belief Hole is a podcast. It is a podcast that presents the strangest true stories in the world through corroborative research and immersive storytelling, from documented cases of near invisible sky creatures that float hidden in the world just above to sinister mimicking entities that lure you into the dark. The Belief Hole is a grab bag of the bizarre.

And whether you're hungry for new stories of scarcely heard hauntings, unsettling encounters with roadside dogmen, or clandestine cases of psychic government projects, the Belief Hole is your place to dig in and find those.

The show is hosted by three brothers, Jeremy, John and Chris, which makes me think they're just straight up stealing from us.

Which is true. We are the Chris's.

I am the Chris's. I am the Chris's. You are the Ed's.

If they get an Ed, then we're gonna have to discuss it with them.

Yeah, our high-priced lawyers are gonna fire over a letter. No, we're kidding. These guys rule, even they're Chris. He rules too. And what's great about them is they're kind of like us. They take their topics seriously, but they have a natural brotherly banter and are just weird enough to make us feel like we're laughing in the dark with friends, which is really all we're doing here. That's why we started a podcast. We wanted more friends to laugh with us in the dark.

And unlike us, they're not in the dark. They're very much lit. They have a YouTube component and a video component that I'm not sure we'll ever have.

As soon as we finish getting Square and get our Hawkeye makeovers, we'll be on YouTube video.

Yeah, then we'll get on YouTube. So until then, you can join us in listening to the Beliefhole Podcast, which is available on Spotify, YouTube, like I said, or really anywhere you get podcasts.

So go check them out and tell them we sent you. Anyway, you're here because you want to know, Bridges, what are they made of unobtanium? What are they? Why must they fall? Are they made of unobtanium?

The London Bridge, it's falling down that song, right?

Falling down, falling down.

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad you asked, listener, because as I researched this show, there's a lot of bridge facts and information and history that I think is all kind of interesting. And I tried to pare it down to like what you really need to know, but let's start with what is a bridge? The constructor.org tells us that a bridge is not a construction, but a concept. The concept of crossing over large spans of land or huge masses of water or connecting to far off points, eventually reducing the distance between them, which I don't think a bridge really reduces distance. It's the same distance. You might feel more connected.

Yeah, we had done a thing, and this I might not be able to talk about, but we had done like a Rick and Morty B story where like.

Ed did not get approval to share this story. So let's move right along.

If we could build something that could literally reduce the distance between two points.

Stargate.

Yeah, we'd have a stargate, we'd really be on to something. The constructor.org tells us the bridge provides passage over the obstacle of small caverns, a valley, a road, a body of water, or other physical obstacle. Designs of bridges vary depending on the nature of the terrain, the function of the bridge, and where it's constructed. The first bridges were believed to be made by nature, a log fallen across a stream. The first bridges made by humans were probably spans of wooden logs or planks and eventually stones using a simple support and crossbeam arrangement. And I only put all that in there because even though the website I found that on, I think it's kind of a piece of shit website, it is kind of interesting to think of a bridge as more of a concept than a construction because like ancient people were really more interested in getting from one side to the other than they were the architecture or the forces that allowed them to do so.

Well, yeah, I mean, necessity is the mother of invention.

Yeah, and the advancement of bridge building, I think, really is one of the great human expressions of that maxim because it's, you know, situations where humans pretty quickly reach the point where a fallen tree was not going to do the job, you know? So we had to start coming up with, okay, well, the tree is not going to do it, so how are we going to support a span over this thing and then this thing?

And then in the Oregon Trail, it's like, do you want to forge this river or whatever? I never saw any bridges in that game. It was always just oxen fucking drowning.

No, but there are a lot of bridges now heading out there at the time. They decided no bridges, but over time. explainthatstuff.com adds, rather menacingly, since then, bridges have grown longer, tactically more sophisticated, and much more awe-inspiring, slowly evolving from simple stone arches to gracefully swooping suspension bridges several miles long, buffeted by winds from above, scoured by rivers from below, pounded by traffic all day long. It's a miracle that bridges stay upright as long as they do.

Yeah, shit, dude, that's true.

This article also gives us a great explanation of how bridges work, which I think is an important thing to understand before we dive into all the times that they haven't.

Sure.

So it continues, it's far from obvious, but when something like a skyscraper looms high above us, or a bridge stretches out beneath our feet, hidden forces are at work. A bridge goes nowhere because all the forces acting on it are perfectly in balance. Bridge designers, in short, are force balancers. The biggest and most pervasive force in the universe, gravity, is constantly tugging things down, which isn't really a problem for a skyscraper because the ground underneath pushes straight back up. But for a bridge spanning a river, a valley, a sea, whatever, it's different. The huge deck, which is the term for the main horizontal plan.

What you drive on.

What you drive on has no support directly beneath it. The longer the bridge, the more it weighs, the more it carries, and the bigger the risk, it'll collapse.

Oh my god.

So how is this avoided?

I don't know. I'm fucking somebody figure it out.

Mike, it's avoided by carefully balancing two main kinds of forces. Compression, which is a pushing or squeezing force that acts inward, and tension, which is a pulling or stretching force that acts outward. And those two forces channel the load. There's gonna be a lot of load talk in this episode. We'll do our best.

And we've had it in other episodes and I've cut it out.

So, these forces channel the load, which is the total weight of the bridge and the things it carries, onto abutments, the supports at either side.

You mean abutments?

Abutments.

I don't know. We'll have to look it up. I think it's abutments.

It's probably abutments.

We got loads. We got butts.

These forces channel the loads, which is the total weight of the bridge and the things it carries, onto abutments, which are the supports at either side.

I hate that you're saying it confidently now. I have no idea if I was right.

And piers, which are the supports in the middle of the bridge.

Okay.

So you have supports in the middle, you have abutments, which support on either side, and then you have these forces that balance the whole thing.

Sure.

Although there are many kinds of bridges, virtually all of them work by balancing compressive forces in some places with tensile forces elsewhere, so there's no overall force to cause motion and do damage. One of the reasons humans have built so many different types of bridges over the centuries is that the most basic bridges is called beam bridges and arch bridges, which are, if you picture an old timey bridge, it's basically what you're picturing.

Like a couple stones are kind of going up and you go over, up and over.

Yes. These bridges can only stretch so far before they collapse under their own weight. Some of these old school bridges, though, are, they quite literally stood the test of time. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest datable bridge in the world that is still in use is the Slabstone Single Arch Bridge over the River Malaise in Eastmere, formerly Smyrna, Turkey, which dates back to 850 BC. So, I found a photo of this bridge. It's not the most impressive bridge.

Is it long?

No, it just goes over like a little stream, basically.

Gotcha, but it's still there.

It's still there, it's still usable, and while they're no longer traversable, there are remnants of ancient Greek bridges that date to 1600 BC over the River Havos, and there's evidence of Mesopotamian bridges from even further back than that. So we've been constructing bridges as long as we've been creating societies.

Yeah, I mean, there's gaps, bro.

There's gaps.

Not just in my resume.

No, and what really kind of blows my mind, maybe I should say blows my mind because this is not like a holy shit, man, but like the earliest bridges were over spans that were so small that it's kind of like, well, why did you put all the effort in to build the bridge? Just go down the one side and go up the other side.

That was a bet.

But I guess maybe if you had really early wheels, maybe they couldn't do that.

Yeah, there's probably all sorts of stuff. Also, once you go down, you got to carry with all your fucking might up. As you said earlier, gravity is working against you. So the way down was pretty... There's this... What movie was it? There's this fucking crazy old Western movie that was like a travel across, you know, to the West and all of the issues you run into it. I'll try and find the name of the movie. It was a crazy movie.

The Oregon Trail.

No, it's like that. It's basically the Oregon Trail. But it was about like bringing wives to the West where like they promised these guys wives and these women they like picked up in Boston. It was insane.

This is actually not the first time Ed has brought this movie up on the pod, but it is the first time he followed through on looking it up. The movie he is thinking of is 1951's Westward the Women. He's only seen it once, but remembers liking it.

But their largest losses of their wagons and stuff is just trying to get down the hill.

Right.

It was like that was the thing.

Because there's no brakes.

Yeah.

Or maybe they had something that could, but you're basically just skidding.

Yeah. You're dragging. They're holding ropes, trying to get it down, and they didn't want to like fuck up the animals. So the animals got the day off. And it was just like, it was harrowing. It was just getting down a hill.

Yeah. It's one of those things we just don't think about how hard that is.

Yeah. So it's probably that. It was probably just like a bridge would be great here.

A bridge with just a flat surface. You can go one on one side of the other.

And also, I'm sure there was somebody who was like, what do you, you fucking, who says I can't? You need that in like, you need that in every society, but it can't be followed by a illegal act.

Right.

Like it has to be for the good of the people.

Creation. It should be followed by creation.

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm sure some of those were the creation of laws after. But, you know, yeah, you just don't want someone who's like, who says I can't rob? Who says I can't, you know, insert commandment, thou shall not there. But yeah, it's good to have a fucking make-it-your-beeswax to get a bridge made person in your town.

For sure. The article continues that the gradual evolution and extension of bridges has been made possible partly by a deeper understanding of engineering.

Made possible by listeners like you.

Yep. And listeners like you. And the development of far stronger materials. Arch bridges were popular in the Middle Ages, for example, because they were quick and easy to build from locally sourced materials and lasted a long time with little or no maintenance. And if you're curious, you can find pictures of some of these older simple bridges online. I've went down a few rabbit holes with them because all these old bridges are sort of weirdly beautiful. I mean, they're kind of boring to talk about because you're just really describing, or at least someone like me, who's I don't know anything about architecture or what any of the terms for any of this stuff is. So, you know, you're just describing piles of rock and wood. But, you know, they stand the test of time.

And I like anything that stands the test of time. I mean, it would be heartbreaking, I guess, if you like went up to the world's oldest bridge and someone had like graffitied on to it or disrespected it. I think there's like a certain amount of time you exist where people should just leave you alone, like you earned it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think it's equally heartbreaking when you watch like the war in the Middle East in the early 2000s, and it's just fucking 3000 year old mosque or you know what I mean? Or this old library. It's not necessarily from invading forces. It could be regime changes on the ground. But anything 2000 year old torn down, or you're just like, that sucks. But it must have happened a million times prior to that.

Yeah, I mean, how many cultures and kingdoms and. But yes, like humans, it's funny how little humans or how little importance humans sometimes place on preserving our own history, especially if it's the history of a perceived enemy. You're very willing to toss it, burn it, you know, blow it up, flood it, whatever.

As a collector by nature, I do get upset, I guess, just seeing anything that's like, that should be preserved. Should be in a museum. Should be in a museum. That's right, Indiana Jones.

So when iron.

That guy's a thief, but it should be in a museum, I guess.

All right, well, here's one of the most British sentences ever spoken. When Iron Bridge, the world's first cast iron bridge, was built at Colebrookdale in Shropshire, England in 1779.

I don't know, I've heard more British sentences than that.

Well, Colebrookdale is the amount of suffering and misery that I feel like that the name of that place breaks the mind. But when Iron Bridge, the world's first cast iron bridge was built there in 1779, it revolutionized bridge construction. During the 19th century, hundreds of other bridges were built from iron and later steel, including New York City's famous Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, which has a span of 1,595 feet. Suspension and cable-stayed bridges rely on those most dependable of modern materials, reinforced concrete and steel. Some of the newest bridges naturally use the very latest composite materials. So something that I think is really cool as someone who does not spend much time thinking about bridges other than how they will kill me, is that conceptually they are some of the oldest structures in the world, but modern bridges are insanely high-tech executions of that concept.

Yeah, it's like Martin Scorsese's career. He's the only one getting older, but using more modern techniques.

Yeah, basically. And bridges are doing it really well. They are, I'm sure they're working on using unobtainium or whatever sort of spiderweb steel we're generating in labs now. And they all kind of look the same and do the same thing, so you don't think about how high-tech they are, because there's no iPhone of bridges that's like a digital thing.

Yeah, well, what's weird is like a suspension bridge, like TAP and Z or something, where you see these big kind of string looking, and I guess to some extent, like I feel like on the Golden Gate Bridge, you can like really see it, you know, because you have superheroes running up it and stuff. But the TAP and Z or even those like bridges next to TD. Bank, North Garden, I don't know if it's still called that. You know what I'm talking about, the one you go over, they're all angled with like fucking.

It's a bridge in Boston we're talking about.

I forgot the name of it at the moment, but it's just like pillars and angles. And there's nothing that like looks like it would connect a bridge from one side or the other. And so you're like, I know it's doing something.

Well, it's all balancing forces. It's all tensile forces versus compressive forces.

And that is the coolest thing in the world to me because I'm like, what are you? Like I can't look at you with my stupid brain and go, okay, I can clearly see that this metal wire connects to here. And of course, yeah, if I was making this in a classroom to hold an egg or something, I can see that. But I'm just looking at shit that just looks like modern art.

Yeah, well, I think it's one of those things where if you, again, maybe if you're an engineer or an architect, you feel differently about this. But for lay people like Ed and I, if you look at a suspension bridge, it doesn't look like something where if you were to cut some of those cables, the whole thing would fall apart. It looks very sturdy. It looks very big.

But I guess the question is, is if maybe you're getting to this, is if you did cut one of those, would it fall?

Yes.

All right, well, let's move on then.

Well, I mean, you know, there are some bridges that have multiple-

I imagine there's like-

Fail safes.

Yeah, exactly.

Yes, but the idea-

There's no single point of failure probably.

I'm just saying they look so strong. You don't really think of them as- bridges aren't houses of cards, but there is an element to the way that forces are balanced in a bridge that it could fall apart almost completely, which is what happens when bridges crumble.

When bridges crumble.

If the research-

Sounds like a real song.

If the research tells us anything, though, I'm not sure we need to worry about building any more bridges. I think we need to start worrying more about taking care of the bridges we have because these bridges be crumbling.

Oh my god, dude. There is a bridge when I was a kid that it's somewhere in Maine. My friend Josh and I, like his family, had like a place in Maine. It was in like a paper mill town. I don't remember the name of the town, but there's a bridge, a driving and footbridge that goes into Canada. I just remember as a kid, he's like, do you want to go into Canada? We're just kids. I don't remember having a passport or anything.

No.

But like walked into Canada, bought Kit Kats that were like in French, that had like a weird flavor and like came back. But my real memory from that is that right across, there's like directly in the center of the bridge becomes Canada. And the bridge looked like absolute dog shit on the American side. It was rusted. There were stickers and fuck it, just a hobo probably laying on the ground that we stepped over because the society we're raising people in. And then the second it became Canada, it was beautiful. Like all new paint, all new everything. And I was like, what a fucking, I would never let that happen. If that was my town, because I'm an optics guy, I'd be like, we need to have at least as good a side bridge.

It's funny you bring that up because, I mean, we've never talked about this before, but I actually in like seventh grade, I visited Niagara Falls and I had the exact same reaction as a kid to going to the Canada side. I remember discussing with my family being like, it's really clean over here. And that's Niagara Falls. I don't remember if it was a bridge. I just noticed there's no trash on the streets. There's no stickers on anything. And they're not a dictatorship where if you put a sticker on something, they're gonna cut your hands off. Yeah, they just do a better job of taking pride in their surroundings, I guess.

But even if you didn't, even if you went fucking three miles down that road, kilometers, whatever nonsense they're gonna say up there, but I'm saying even if you went around the bend and it was just the blight, just blight as far as the eye could see, if I had a connecting establishment, I would make it my business to make sure that it looked just as good as the other side. I don't want to be known as the shitty side.

Yeah, it's not great PR for your country that your half of the bridge is a mess.

It just looked like a fucking Scooby-Doo ghost town on the American side. And the other side was like primered and beautifully painted.

Well, remember that statistic I gave you at the beginning of the episode?

One in three bridges are going to need to be repaired. I do remember.

That is according to the American Roads and Transportation Builders Association, who produced a report in 2024 on the state of our crumbling infrastructure. They calculated that each year in the United States, there are 168.5 million crossings on nearly 42,100 bridges that are rated in poor condition.

Crossings meaning like a car drove over a bridge.

Yeah, yeah. That's a lot of bridges. Percentage-wise, it's not a huge amount of bridges in the United States, but 42,100 bridges in the United States are rated in poor condition. The worst state for structurally deficient bridges is Iowa.

Take that.

Followed by West Virginia.

Take that.

Followed by South Dakota.

Okay, these are all, we're just kind of kicking some horses while they're down.

Then Maine.

Oh no. But that's where I saw that bridge.

Yeah, that's where you saw the shitty bridge. Rhode Island, Puerto Rico and then Pennsylvania coming in at number seven. Now, what's interesting here is-

And that's by percentage that has more crumbly than non-crumbly bridges? Or like more of- Like if you had 10 bridges and five of them are crumbly, you'd be like 50% of our bridges need repair. Yes. Okay.

So California in this arrangement of the data, California comes in at 28 and Connecticut comes in at 36.

So it's doing well.

So it's doing well. So I guess out of this list, I'm most in danger when I'm at home in Pennsylvania.

Connecticut must be doing halfway decent because it's a small state that's low in the list.

Yes.

California, I could see them just be like, yeah, we got a lot of bridges. We're a whole coastline.

We're going to get to that in a minute. Pennsylvania though, shame on Pennsylvania. They've identified 12,604 bridges that need repair in the state, which is up from 11,946 bridges in 2020.

It's up.

It's up. So they fixed no bridges and have more bridges that are in danger of crumbling.

Oh my god, there were some bridges that were hiding. We didn't even see them over here.

I guess.

Do we have to report these? Yeah, we have to report them.

Yeah, shit. They're U-shaped.

They're all bent down.

I dug a little deeper on these statistics. And so, yes, we just discussed that these, so the list that I just read, the one through seven, is ranked by what percentage of the bridge inventory is structurally deficient. If you just go straight by how many bridges are structurally deficient, Pennsylvania pulls up to number two.

Oh, wow.

And California shoots up to number seven. So both of those states, the two states that I spend the most time in, have a lot of bad bridges. You're just less likely to be driving on them than you would be in other states.

Sure.

Even more concerningly, for us Los Angelenos, City of Angels, is that you know I couldn't help but click on the report header titled Top Deficient Bridges.

Okay, yeah, we need to know for the show.

And that took me to a page that informed me just how bad things are in California. The top three structurally deficient bridges in the United States are in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles County.

In Los Angeles County, and I think I've driven on all three of them.

Probably on the way here.

But very likely. To be clear, these are ranked, from what I could tell, again, and I'm pretty sure I read all this information correctly. But the way that the top deficient bridges are ranked is in order of how many people drive on them every day, not how deficient they are.

Yeah.

I think mostly because I'm sure quantifying what makes one bridge more deficient, more structurally deficient than the other is probably tough.

Yeah, I'm sure once the Infrastructure Act bill went into effect, they found ways to show that it wasn't deficient.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they can pocket that money in some way.

So in order, the number one most structurally deficient bridge in the United States by crossings per day.

Top of the podium.

Is the bridge over...

Bridge over troubled waters.

The Interstate 110 bridge over Slossinav with 300,000 crossings per day.

Wow.

I can almost picture exactly where that is without even looking at it on Google Maps.

Is that South Central under USC?

That's not where I was picturing, but maybe.

I don't know. You have a map, clearly.

I don't have a map. I'm reading this off my facts.

So 110 over Slossin?

That is... I was picturing it more over by Culver City.

Bro. Bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro.

Yes, sir. What are we...

It is exactly where I said, South Los Angeles.

Okay.

Which used to be called South Central. So it's basically like Slossin and 58th or something.

Well, if you've driven south on the 110, you've crossed over this bridge, technically.

If you got off the exit where this bridge is, you've met prostitutes. Now, you'd have to go like maybe 10 streets more south.

So that's the number one, most efficient bridge in the United States.

Okay.

Based on drivers. Then the 101 over Kester is number two, with 293,000 crossings per day.

Okay. I don't know that area as well. There's no prostitutes there.

And then the 405 over Vermont at 190th Street, with a measly 269,000 crossings per day.

Per day.

So every single one of those people per day on all three of these bridges is driving over a dangerously deficient bridge. And keep in mind here that these bridges that we're listing here aren't super noticeable bridges.

No, like you wouldn't realize that you were really-

You're just driving over another street.

Yeah, you're driving over. So there's a term which I use all the time outside of Los Angeles, but surface streets. I don't think that's actually maybe relevant other places, but like, oh, I'm getting off the highway, I'm going to take surface streets. And I think that's because most of our highways are above regular ass roads. And so yeah, it's not like we're going over this huge expanse of water. You probably don't even realize you're on a bridge.

You're just on the highway. That's what I'm saying. I'm pretty sure I've been on all three of these.

You definitely have. You have to go through every one of the things you just said is just on the way to places.

Yeah. So those crossings, those are us. Those are me and Ed.

Those are your hosts.

There's one other LA bridge and one other San Diego bridge in the top 10, plus three Philly bridges in the top 10. So seven or eight out of 10 of the busiest, structurally deficient bridges I've probably driven on. Hate it.

Trank being done under each one.

Hate it. Again, this report is in the show notes, so feel free to go look up your state and which bridges you should probably avoid, or which ones to listen to this episode while driving on if you're feeling like you need to spice up your work week a little bit. We're not saying you should do that. We probably wouldn't, but life's an adventure. You know, grab it by the horns.

They say life is a highway.

They say life is a highway.

And turns out many of them are constructed on deficient bridges.

You're gonna ride it straight into the ground. The reason that these structurally deficient bridges are so concerning is that when they collapse, they collapse catastrophically, which is-

I think it's not the bridge's fault. There's no easy way for a bridge to float to the ground.

That's true, yeah. And catastrophic collapse is exactly what happened to the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia on December 15th, 1967.

And I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with this bridge, because Astonishing Legends has done a 761 part Mothman series.

Yeah, most of you listening to this episode know that there's a Mothman connection to this bridge collapse. So we're not going to dive too far down that rabbit hole, because we're more focused on the actual bridge disaster than the Mothman part. But it does add some interesting color to the situation, and is worth touching on for anyone who isn't aware of what went down, since I'm sure a lot of the discussion on Facebook or whatever is going to revolve around Mothman for this episode just because. So if you don't know, November 12th, 1966, in Clendenin, West Virginia, a group of gravediggers working in a cemetery spotted something strange. They glanced up from their work as something huge soared over their heads. It was a massive figure that was moving rapidly from tree to tree. The gravediggers would later describe this figure as, quote, a brown human being, which in West Virginia in 1966 was the nicest way you could put it, I guess.

Oh my god, no, that's, you're out of control, bro.

A few days later, on November 15th, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallet, told police they had seen a large black creature whose eyes glowed red, standing at the side of the road near the TNT area, which was the site of a former World War II munitions plant in Point Pleasant. Linda Scarberry described this figure as a slender, muscular man, about seven feet tall with white wings. She was unable to discern its face due to the hypnotic effect of its eyes.

Interesting that the colloquially known city of angels has a bridge problem, and a town where actual angels are also has a bridge problem.

Well, the quartet took off in their car. They say the creature followed them at speeds of up to over 100 miles an hour, which, if you were driving a car in the 60s that was going over 100 miles an hour.

Plenty of cars, I mean, hot rods were in the 60s.

Yeah, but I don't think they were in a hot rod.

Be cooler if they were.

It would be cooler if they were. According to the eyewitnesses, this thing rose up like a helicopter, and though it was a clumsy runner, they said, when they saw it at the power plant, it excelled in gliding and easily kept pace, even as the car reached 100 miles an hour. The creature's debut ruffled the town's feathers, making for an unsure headline the next day in the Point Pleasant Registry. The headline was, quote, couple see man-sized bird ellipses creature ellipses something.

Oh my god, really?

Yeah, that's the headline.

That's such a like, Dottie, take this down. And then like, and then took it down verbatim and then rushed to print.

The sighting also attracted the attention of Mary Hire, a journalist with the Athens, Ohio messenger, the local news source for the northern neighbors of Point Pleasant. And she published her first article on Mothman entitled, Winged Red-Eyed Thing Chases Point Pleasant Couples Across Countryside, The Next Day on November 16th, 1966. You may recognize her name because she's the one who joined forces with New York paranormal journalist, John Keele.

John Keele.

To investigate, which would lead to the publication of Keele's 1975 opus, The Mothman Prophecies. And it is the prophecies part of that title that intersects with this bridge collapse, because part of Keele's theory surrounding the Mothman is essentially that its presence in the area was a harbinger of doom, specifically the doom that would befall travelers on that cold night in 1967. Super interesting book. Definitely one of the cornerstones of modern 14 literature. Well worth reading. We're not going to get into it any further.

Now, and if you want to hear again, 300, 400, 500 parts on it, Google Astonishing Legends followed by the word Mothman and you'll find it.

Yeah, tough to miss. Whether or not the Mothman was sent to warn us of oncoming disaster, the actual collapse of the Silver Bridge is the stuff of nightmares. It happened during peak rush hour traffic as cars crawled across the Silver Bridge connecting Point Pleasant and Gallipolis, Ohio.

Could be anything.

It looks like Gallipoli, but it's got an S. Gallipolis.

They didn't want to get sued.

Multiple Gallipolis in one place in Ohio.

We have a murder of Gallipogies. Yeah. Gallipolis.

We gotta go for Gallookagoos.

Gallookagoos on the bridge.

According to eyewitness Charlene Wood, who was driving home from work when she went over the Silver Bridge, she noticed a vibration coming from the bridge beneath her and reversed her car. Just as she made it back to the precipice, the bridge gave out in front of her.

Wow. I thought it was this fucking rush hour.

I don't know how she backed up. I don't know how she backed up. And I don't know technically what's considered the precipice. I don't know if that literally means she went all the way back to the start of the bridge. That's what I imagine.

Yeah, because the precipice is the beginning of something.

So I don't know what kind of stunt driving Charlene Wood was doing to get all the way back there, but she survived, so she must have reversed enough.

Oh my god, Hong Kong beep beep, I'm coming back.

Yeah, so the bridge collapsed. It was a nightmare. State Trooper Rudy O'Dell was one of the first responders on the scene. When he got there, 31 cars and 64 people had already fallen over 100 feet into the Ohio River.

That's a ton of cars.

It's a lot. By the end of the night, 46 people had either drowned in the water or died on impact as sections of the bridge landed on top of their vehicles. I could hear them hollering for help, recalled O'Dell. There was absolutely nothing I could do. It was a long way out into the water. If you were in the water alive in the freezing cold Ohio River.

It was close to Christmas, if I remember from my readings.

I just had the date.

I think there was famously imagery wise, I think they talked about wrapped presents in the water and stuff.

Yes. There were presents in the water. There were people in the water. It's a fairly modern bridge collapse. If you're out in the water in the Ohio River screaming for help thinking, hey, I survived the bridge collapse, someone's going to come out here and save me. Rudy O'Dell here is saying it was tough.

I mean for Rudy, but hopefully they radioed Coast Guard or something.

It would take weeks for the victims to be recovered.

I was just going to say weeks for the Coast Guard to arrive.

Yeah.

Hello, Bridgeport Coast Guard.

Well, wait, it's between West Virginia and Ohio. What kind of Coast Guard do they have?

I guess this is not the ocean.

No, no, this is, this is, there's no Coast Guard. Maybe you're coming down from the lakes.

Lake guards?

They gotta have boats.

They gotta have cops on boats.

Cops on boats.

Write us in, are you a cop on a boat or do you have cops on boats? I've seen cops on boats on Long Island Sound, but that doesn't in fact connect to the ocean.

They gotta have somebody. It would take weeks for the victims to be recovered.

Sorry, because we're not laughing at you.

Since the collapse had crushed so many of the cars below, workers were unable to lift the vehicles out of the water until the bridge pieces could be removed. The US. Army Corps of Engineers leased 50-ton cranes to local authorities to help. Which seems like in this situation like this, fuck leasing it, just let them borrow it.

You gotta pay? People go, I don't know. Yeah, it sounds like they're making them pay.

Meanwhile, the job of tagging victims' bodies fell to Odell, who identified some people he personally knew, including a father and his young son.

Is Point Pleasant a big town or a small population?

It's pretty small.

I was just listening to a podcast the other day called It's Murder Y'all, which I've been enjoying, and they were talking about like a fireworks accident that was like in a small town. It was like the most insane sounding explosion.

Yeah.

Like there was that explosion a couple years ago, like a year ago, it was in the Middle East somewhere, or Turkey or something, that we saw on video, that was like the most crazy explosion.

It was a port explosion.

Yeah, it was something where it was like, holy shit, that's bigger than any movie explosion I've ever seen. The way they described this fireworks one was so fucking big, but like the really depressing part of it is because it's a small enough town that like everyone was able to identify everyone. It was like, oh, part of Susan is in our backyard. And it wasn't like we had to find, like everyone was kind of related or knew each other from school.

At least they all went out doing what they love, watching fireworks.

No, it wasn't a fireworks show. It was in a legal fireworks factory that no one knew was operating. And that exploded and it was like regular people like mowing their lawn.

You can operate in a legal fireworks factory that no one knows is churning out fireworks?

Yeah, I don't think you'd test them there.

That's true.

I think you're just making them. And I don't know the operations of that, but I imagine it's like vats of...

It's basically a gunpowder plant.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that little bit of a side is just that like, yeah, when it's a small town, to me, it's kind of like extra depressing that that cop was like, oh, I'm putting a tag on Susan.

Like I know this person. I think the area was small enough that even people from the opposite sides of the bridge probably knew a bunch of each other, you know.

From school.

Sadly, two bodies of known victims remain missing to this day. allthatsinteresting.com, a site we turn to over and over again for this show, tells us that from the very beginning, people were cutting corners while constructing the Silver Bridge.

Of course they were.

It was originally meant to be suspended with traditional wire cables, but an alternate...

You said they used yarn.

Yeah, shit. God damn it, again.

The cats have brought down the bridge again.

It was originally meant to be suspended with traditional wire cables, but an alternate bid for what's called an I-Bar design ended up being cheaper, I-Bar, E-Y-E-B-A-R.

Okay.

Now, I had to look up what an I-Bar was, and I guess first thing to mention is that this wasn't some like crackpot. It's not like the water ride we talked about in ride accidents, so it took that kid's head off. It wasn't someone being like, I've got a crazy idea for a bridge and it's dirt cheap. This is the I-Bar is a traditionally well-known used technique. Yes, it's a real kind of bridge. I had to look up what an I-Bar was. You've probably seen them on bridges before. If you're curious, you could just look up the word I-Bar and I'll show you. But they're essentially these long rectangular-ish with slightly rounded edges, linking chains. And they are used to create a type of suspension bridge, basically.

Are they embedded in the ground you drive over?

No, so they're along the sides. The I-beams are along the side. It's also confusing because I-beam is a thing.

Yes, it is.

Yeah. I'm sorry, the I-bars are along the side.

Sure, it'll be in the show notes. I don't think we're able to explain this.

Yeah, you kind of have to see it.

You kind of got to drive over it.

Yeah, when done correctly, these bridges can last a long time. There's some that were built almost a century before the Silver Bridge that are still in use today. Basically though, what happened here is these I-bars are usually stacked together so that each link in the suspension chain is like five or six I-bars thick. If you think of a suspension bridge, now imagine that those suspension curves or whatever aren't built out of actual suspended steel cable it's these individual bars that are linked together like a necklace kind of yeah and now each of those are usually stacked I-bars so it's not just one I-bar connected to the next I-bar.

For points of failure.

Yeah, you stack a bunch of them and then that way if one or two of the I-bars in the stack fail the rest hold the weight.

It's like when you see a big rig going down the street and has two you know on each axle it's got two sets of wheels so if one pops it's not.

Yes, yes, exactly they're stacked just like that actually. According to Wikipedia the problem here was that quote the I-bars in the Silver Bridge offered little to no redundancy which I bet is where the low budget cost savings came in because they're using not enough I-bars per link.

Yeah, they're saying like no it's got multiple I-bars is like yeah but if that whole I-bar section goes down then it's not.

Well each chain link consisted of just two I-bars placed sandwich style.

Oh, instead of like the five we talked about.

Yes, yes. So there was a sandwich of two I-bars in parallel instead of five or however many. These I-bars were made of a new higher strength steel which was more than twice the tensile strength of other steels of that era. So it was genuinely very strong and it did genuinely mean that fewer I-bars per link were needed to achieve the required strength to support the bridge which Wikipedia notes yes, earlier bridges often used four or more I-bars per link.

But they would have needed it because that type of metal wasn't as strong.

Right, however, in this case, even though these I-bars were much stronger than previous I-bars, with only two per link, the failure of one of them would hugely increase the load on the other.

On the other, yeah.

Accident investigators found that quote, had there been three or more I-bars per link, there would have been the possibility that the failure of one would not have led to disaster. So, not only were these overlooked redundancies a problem in the construction of the Silver Bridge, but, and this is a problem for every old bridge.

Cryptids.

Well, sure, I mean, obviously, every bridge has a cryptid, every bridge has a troll or a moth man or something, a goat man throwing people off of it.

Exactly.

When the Silver Bridge was first built in the 1920s, the average car only weighed about 1,500 pounds.

I was gonna ask this.

By the 1960s, most cars weighed about 3,000 pounds.

There's no fucking way a Cybertruck's getting over this.

No, for comparison, I checked, cars now weigh roughly around 4,000 pounds on average.

Google how much the Cybertruck weighs. All these electric cars are way too fucking heavy.

5,100 to 6,600 pounds.

Yeah, if you built it with two I-bars and you think you're gonna start carrying the same amount of Cybertrucks as you had Model Ts, it's not gonna work out for you.

It is actually kind of interesting to me that cars, I would have thought like in the 60s, I mean throughout 50s through 70s, let's say, there was a lot of chrome and steel, really heavy materials being used to build cars as opposed to now. It's a lot thinner plastics, metals, you know, form molded up.

Did you see the difference in weights?

No, I suspect they're probably averaging out the insane size and weight of like Hummers and SUVs and Megatrucks.

And big rigs that need to be on it.

Yeah, so yeah, I mean the average weight of a car has gone up, what, close to 2,500 pounds since these bridges were built. So they weren't designed to take this kind of a beating. Anyway, in 1967, up to 4,000 of these heftier vehicles made their way across the bridge per day, causing stress on the I-bars. And I will say, to state inspectors' credit, the Silver Bridge was examined somewhat regularly. After one inspection, and just two years before the disaster in 1965, the structure underwent about $30,000 in repairs.

Yeah, all that went into the inspector's pocket to look the other way.

Yeah. Two further inspections followed in the summer of 1967, so just a couple months before this disaster. But according to Wikipedia, no one would have been able to detect a crucial problem with one of the bridge's I-bars. Quote, inspection prior to construction would not have been able to notice the tiny crack that had formed. The only way to detect the fracture would have been to disassemble the I-bar. The technology used for inspection at the time was not capable of detecting such cracks. The stress crack in this I-bar, known as I-bar 330 formed through what's called fretting wear at the bearing and grew through an internal corrosion, which is a problem known as stress corrosion cracking. The crack was only about.1 inches or two and a half millimeters deep when the link failed. So this was a small, small crack that sounds like sandwich deep into the I-bar.

Yeah, no one's really at fault in that sense. It's not like you missed it, Johnson. You didn't catch this quarter inch crack that you couldn't see.

Well, like some of the plain stuff that we've talked about where people are being rushed to assemble things and they're not using enough screws or whatever. This isn't the case here. This is more, well, we'll get to it in a second. When the lower side of this I-bar failed, all the load was transferred to the other side of the I-bar, which then failed via something called ductile overload, which is basically just too much weight. The joint was then held together only by three I-bars and another slipped off the pin at the center of the bearing, so the chain was completely severed. A collapse of the entire structure at this point was inevitable since all parts of a suspension bridge are in equilibrium with one another.

Okay, which is why when you see, and I can't trust it too much because it's like visual effects in movies, but I'm sure it's based on something. When you see like a bridge, it looks like it gets all wobbly and crazy on a suspension bridge during an earthquake and stuff. They actually stay up usually from that. But I'm saying like they're pretty malleable bridges when they're hanging on, but when they're not, then I imagine they very quickly just collapse.

Everything falls. That's why I say they're not.

You're a thin guy, so this may never happen to you. I have ripped many pairs of pants sitting down, just getting up and like a little hole can turn into like an embarrassingly large rip on your butt.

Yeah, one stand, one sit.

Yeah, yeah, but it only takes that little tiny. I don't think that's actually the same at all. And I just revealed for no reason that all of my pants are ruined.

I think this is what I was saying though about like a suspension bridge, all parts are in equilibrium with one another is something that you don't think about when you look at a suspension bridge. I don't think most people necessarily, they just go, wow, what a big, strong structure.

This is the first I'm hearing of it.

And you don't think about the fact that like, again-

It's a house of cards.

House of cards, yeah, it kinda is. I mean, it's a big, strong, unlikely to fall down house of cards. But if you move just a little, if the physics don't work exactly right, they don't work.

I feel like if someone is in a room explaining that, just exactly as you explained it, I would be like, so yeah, as many redundancies as we can get. Yes. You're saying that this is a, like you've just described something that seems so breakable.

Yeah. Interestingly, while the failure of the I-bar ultimately caused the collapse, there's this writer named Henry Petroski who wrote a book in 2012 called To Forgive Design Understanding Failures. And he ultimately placed the blame not so much on cheaping out, but on design flaws. He says the Silver Bridge featured, quote, a design that inadvertently made inspection all but impossible and failure all but inevitable.

That's really interesting and I'll let you continue on that, but just as soon as I heard that, it was pretty shocking. You're probably just gonna say it, but fuck it. I love interrupting.

Go for it.

It takes something like this to go, you know what? We should now start designing being able to see beyond the first thing.

Yes.

Like something where we can see moments of like, we don't want any more hidden, but I don't know how you address that. I don't know how you then start designing with that in mind, but you make everything out of glass.

Well, I think it's both an evolution in design and an evolution in-

In safety protocol.

In inspections and you know, like now we have not ground piercing radar, but I'm sure you can examine the exterior of a bridge.

Oh, now you can like X-ray it of sorts.

Yeah, like I think there's-

But that's not embedded in the design, that's new additional ways to pierce.

So the rest of Henry's quote is-

I'll never let you finish it. What else can we talk about?

A design that inadvertently made inspection all but impossible and failure all but inevitable. If ever a design was to blame for a failure, this was it. If there's anything positive about the Silver Bridge failure, he concludes, it is that its legacy should be to remind engineers to proceed always with the utmost caution, ever mindful of the possible existence of unknown unknowns and the potential consequences of even the smallest design decisions.

Wow, I mean that's little fucking Monday morning quarterbacking.

Also don't cheap out on your eye bars. I mean, I think that's a pretty easy lesson.

We lived in the city of the Big Dig for a long time. I mean, that was the ultimate cheap out on watered down concrete or whatever. I like made that tonal collapse.

I was actually, I was just talking with some friends about this the other night because I mentioned we were going to do bridge collapses. And they were like, you're going to talk about the Big Dig. And I was like, it's such an or a tunnel than a bridge. But same idea, same problem.

That one seems like that was kind of famously or infamously very they have receipts for how fucking many corners they cut.

Yeah.

But no, I this is just a writer. Is he also an engineer? I feel like he's because he basically just wrote like a diss track to that engineer is like the designer.

I didn't look too much into Henry Petrowski's bio. I mean, his book is called To Forgive Design Understanding Failures.

So I assume that's kind of a bullshit title because it's like to forgive my ex-wife for being a bitch. It's like he's it's like you're still throwing insane shade even if I said to forgive like I'm a forgiving person. So, okay, let's someone brought this guy's book or article to the designer. Be like, you're still insane about you.

Okay, so so this is what Amazon tells us about this book. When planes crash, bridges collapse and automobile gas tanks explode. We should get this book for the show. This is right off the bat. I'm in.

Send it to us, bro.

We are quick to blame poor design, but Henry Petrowski says we must look beyond design for causes and corrections.

But in this book, I will fucking firmly plant a flag on the designer was at fault. Is what you just quoted me.

Known for his masterly explanations of engineering successes and failures, Petrowski here takes his analysis a step further to consider the larger context in which accidents occur. In To Forgive Design, he surveys some of the most infamous failures of our time. From the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse and the toppling of a massive Shanghai apartment building in 2009, to Boston's prolonged Big Dig and the 2010 Gulf oil spill. These avoidable disasters reveal the interdependency of people and machines within systems whose complex behavior was undreamt of by their engineers until it was too late, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on. But it sounds like he's not out there trying to take down...

I don't think he's out there to take it down. I just find it interesting that the title says one thing and then the quote from within the book was, I actually am going to blame design and I'm not going to forgive it.

Look, maybe this is the last one in his book where he says, if ever a design were to blame for failure, this is it. So he's reached the end of the road, it sounds like. He's examined his others and he's saying.

I hope that designer gave that book a one-star review.

Probably. When it comes to bridges, there are a lot of things to be cautious about. Almost anything you can think of that could bring down a bridge has.

We just saw a boat do it in Baltimore.

Yeah, in addition to structural deficiencies and design flaws, everything from earthquakes to fires to train crashes, boat crashes, floods, construction accidents and even the god damn wind can take down a bridge.

The fact that the wind doesn't take down the bridge is surprising, like because San Francisco is super windy, it's a long suspension bridge.

Well, wind did take down. One of the most iconic examples of spectacular bridge failure in modern times is due to the wind.

Oh, well, the wind's out there.

It happened to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on the morning of November 7th, 1940. At the time, this was the third largest suspension bridge in the world behind only the George Washington and Golden Gate bridges. It connected Tacoma to the entire Kitsap Peninsula in Puget Sound and opened to the public on July 1st, 1940. As soon as the bridge opened, people knew the wind would cause it to sway.

As soon as it opened. Oh, this? The wind's going to affect this.

Ernie hit the nickname Galloping Gertie, which does not describe the kind of bridge I want to drive on ever.

Oh my god.

It's like being like, oh yeah, this bridge over here, we call it Dottie Disaster.

Yeah.

Go for a drive, it's totally safe.

Everyone who drives in this gets sick immediately, motion sick.

To be fair, most suspension bridges, I think as you mentioned earlier, and maybe in the context of earthquakes, sway in the wind and structures like bridges are particularly good at shedding the energy generated by wind or passing cars or earthquakes. So on its own, sway is disconcerting, but it's really not indicative of collapse.

It's baked into the engineering. We are expecting some sway.

If you're ever on a suspension bridge and you do feel it swaying even fairly dramatically, that's fine. It's probably, I mean, well, someone's going to come back and sue us and be like, I was on the bridge and it was swaying.

I did not back up to the precipice because you said it was fine. Meanwhile, I'm upside fucking down.

Maybe it's not fine, but sway does not indicate danger of collapse. But four months later, under specifically bad wind conditions, the bridge was driven to twist uncontrollably. Now, you've probably seen footage of this before.

That might be kind of what I'm thinking of, the twisting and up and down and go, which is what I was envisioning when I was talking about the earthquake thing.

There's very famous film and video because this went on for more than an hour of the bridge twisting and turning and rolling and shaking and looking like a rope, basically.

That's what I was thinking. That's a good way to describe it. It's like a rope bridge.

Yes. After more than an hour of rocking and rolling, the middle section collapsed and the bridge was destroyed.

Hold on, question, did anyone? I mean, you have an hour. I guess if it's that moving, you can't really get out of your car and run. You'll fly off.

So, miraculously, no one was killed.

Yeah, you had an hour to deal with this.

There was a puppy casualty, which is very sad.

From the letters.

It was a man had the puppy in his car and this pussy, when the bridge started shaking, he jumped out and left his dog behind.

Wow, what a pussy.

And then he and two other guys made three individual attempts to get back out, to get to the dog. In the men's defense, the third guy did get to the dog. And when he reached in, the dog bit him and he was like, ah, and then the bridge really started going and he took off. So I don't want to blame the dog, but it did bite the guy.

God set you three wraps.

Yeah, exactly. So neither the dog nor the car were ever recovered from this disaster. A lot of the cars weren't. There's still pieces of the bridge and cars submerged in the water. They rebuilt the bridge, but the broken pieces, I think I read, have become almost like a reef, like an artificial reef in the water.

Is it just because they were too deep or is it just like it's not financially responsible?

I think it probably wasn't necessary, especially because there weren't any bodies. So it was like, what are you gonna, there's nothing to pull up really, except just Julie. RAP, God bless.

RAP, God bless that dog. We actually just a couple years ago, and by we, I mean weirdly Jeff Bezos, recovered one of like, I think the Apollo, one of the like 60s era capsules that like sank way too deep in an insane place.

Oh.

It's weird that no one knows this, myself included until just recently. He spent like a super ton of money and a long time recovering this, and now it's at the Smithsonian or something.

Hmm.

That's cool. I don't like to give him credit for much, but yeah, I know that sometimes in that case, it was like, it's too deep, it's too far away, it's financially irresponsible to go for it.

Right, right. Yeah, it's a piece of history, but is it worth it?

It's way too fucking dangerous.

Yeah. So part of the reason I wanted to cover this bridge, in addition to the Silver Bridge, is because, well, two things, it is one of the most famous bridge disasters in the United States, even though no one died. It's one of those pieces of crazy video that you see, and you're like, what the fuck was that? And that's always a fun thing to cover. I also am covering it though, because you know I love dispelling myths on this show, and I had always heard, so I'd heard of this bridge before, and I was under the impression that the reason that it collapsed was because the wind was blowing at the same frequency as the bridge's resonance frequency.

I don't even know what that is.

So this is something that comes up in physics class, like introductory physics classes a lot. Never took them. The idea of resonance frequencies. This article from Forbes explains it better than I can. Forbes tells us that every physical system or object has a frequency that's naturally inherent to it, its resonant frequency.

Do we have it? Do humans?

Yes. A swing, for example, has a certain frequency.

No one's here to see how dismissive that yes was.

Everything. Forbes says it. Yes, it kept moving. I don't know what the human resonance frequency is, but Forbes tells us that a swing, for example, has a certain frequency you can drive it at. As a child, you learn to pump yourself in time with the swing. If you pump too slowly or too quickly, you'll never build up speed. But if you pump at just the right rate, you can swing as high as your muscles will take you. Resonant frequencies can also be disastrous if you build up too much vibrational energy in a system that can't handle it, which is how sound at just the right pitch is capable of causing a wine glass to shatter. That's resonance frequency. And so I don't remember if someone, if a teacher showed me this bridge or something and said, but I remember growing up being like, yeah, if you blow wind at just the right frequency, you can like take down anything.

Yeah, and that's why it got weird when you're like, I hate this bully, every day makes fun of me. I swear to God, tomorrow I'm gonna come in and blow this guy. And everyone was like, what? And you're like, you know, cause he's been so mean to me.

Yeah, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow him and he'll.

And then it won't be an issue anymore.

I'll blow him until he falls over.

And that was the day he became the most popular kid in school.

Yeah, everybody started calling me Hoover lips.

Nobody called you that.

Nobody called me Hoover lips.

Even when we were kids, Hoover had already had its time as the vacuum king.

So somehow it became like an early like science meme that the wind must have been blowing at the resonance frequency of the bridge, which is what caused it to vibrate and collapse. But that's not really what happened at all. Basically, what happened is that strong, sustained winds called vortices to form and pass over the bridge.

Called? You said called vortices, like they called out to them. Vortices, find me.

Basically, strong, sustained winds caused vortices to form and pass over the bridge. Over time, these vortices caused an aerodynamic phenomenon known as flutter, where the extremities in the direction of the wind get an extra rocking motion to them.

That's the Robin Williams movie? No, that's Flubber.

No, it's Flubber. This caused the outer portions of the bridge to move perpendicular to the wind direction, but out of phase from the overall up and down motion of the bridge. And I realized we've talked about flutter before. It's in the airline disasters episode.

That would make sense.

It's brought down planes. Flutter is known as a dangerous thing that can bring down planes.

Is it like jet wash?

No, it's just, it causes the extra rocking motion in the two opposite directions.

Oh, not Dutch Angle.

Well, there was the Dutch Roll, and then there's the other one, and that's flutter, basically.

So flutter's out there, everyone. Watch out for the flutter.

Watch out for flutter, but don't watch Flubber. Not a very good movie.

I never saw it. I remember even as I was too old for it.

Anyway, flutter has brought down more than a few planes, but it had never been seen in a bridge before.

Flutter's branching out.

Quote, when the flutter effect began, one of the steel suspension cables supporting the bridge snapped, removing the last major obstacle to this fluttering motion. That was when the additional undulations, where the two sides of the bridge rocked back and forth in harmony with one another, began in earnest. With the sustained strong winds, the continued vortices, and no ability to dissipate those forces, the bridge's rocking continued unabated and eventually caused a full collapse. So I forget, I don't know if we actually had flutter as the term in the airline episode, but just to go back for a second, because I think I really botched the explanation of it. We were talking about it a minute ago. You know, we talked about how when there's the Dutch roll, you can get the side to side and the up and down at the same time, and that's what kind of like tears the plane apart.

Yeah.

That's what we're talking about here. The bridge is getting moved in all four directions at once. Sure. Eventually, it just breaks apart.

Yeah.

It's Raptors testing every part of the fence at that point.

So it's not resonance. If anyone ever says that there's a bridge that wind blew at the right frequency to destroy it.

You knock whatever is in their hands out of their fucking hands. Call them a loser. They're wrong.

Don't let them on your trivia team ever.

You say fucking scram, nerd.

But here at Scared All The Time, we don't want to just scare you. We also love practical steps about what to do if you find yourself in the worst situations known to man. So we dug up some helpful hints for what to do if you find yourself on a collapsing bridge. This information comes to us from an article on whatifshow.com. So I will say, just as a get out of jail free card, if these tips don't help you survive a bridge collapse, haunt them, not us.

Yeah, we're just reading this website.

First, they tell us to roll down our car window or roll down your car window.

In the car I'm driving right now, that's a physical motion. You have to physically roll down the window.

Yeah, so that can be tough. Whether you're falling into the water or onto solid ground, you're gonna want to do this if you find yourself in a bridge collapse. They say, on land, closed windows can suffocate you by preventing oxygen from entering the vehicle. Also, they can muffle your screams and make it harder for rescuers to find you. Which, not my screams, bro.

They have the resonance to break all the windows, all the glass in this car.

They're gonna wonder where the car full of little girls is trapped and they're gonna come find me.

Oh my god, I sent three guys to save him. He bit one.

The article also notes that water pressure will trap you in your car once it is submerged, so roll down your windows and climb out of your car as soon as possible if you've fallen into water.

Yeah, like you can't open your door because of the pressure.

Right, which is something I feel like I see all the time in movies and then immediately forget. I'll make note of like, oh yeah, that's right, like you want to roll down the window, that's how you'll get out. But if the windows are stuck, you can break them with something like an ice scraper and you should aim for the edges of the window, which I didn't know.

I didn't know about the edges either.

I wonder if it had something to do with surface area. Like if you hit it in the middle, it like disperses the blow maybe.

Oh, maybe. I'm not sure. I have one of those little things in my car that has like, it's got like a seatbelt cutter and then the bottom is like, you have to have that here because there's no opportunity where we would have ice scrapers. So yeah.

Yeah. Even if you have an ice scraper, you should have, it's like a little, not a ball peen hammer, but it's something like that. You should have one of those in your car to break glass with. Cause an ice scraper ain't gonna do it. Maybe your car, but new cars.

My windows are just Saran wrap. That are taped to it.

Yeah. Helpful hint number two is to buckle your seatbelt, which barely counts as a tip.

It should never have been unbuckled.

No, yeah, it should not be unbuckled. The article says, one reason people have survived falling dozens of feet are vehicular safety features such as the seatbelt. Don't even think of removing it until you're certain the impact is over and you've landed.

So in this case, they're taking it off while falling.

Yeah, I don't know who's like, here we go. Maybe they're trying to eject from the car or something. But prematurely removing the seatbelt could cause you to knock your head on something and become unconscious. If you're not conscious, you can't help yourself or scream to help rescuers find you. So put your seatbelt on and I guess if you feel the urge to rip it off while you're falling off a bridge, just don't.

Contain that.

We can contain that? I mean, I feel like at this point, one of the tips should be like, make sure you have airbags.

It's actually tough. If you're falling straight down, airbags, depending on the type of airbag, is designed for certain types of impact. So I don't think falling directly down, like if it just fell straight down, it might just think that you've parked hard. Like, I don't know if anything would go off.

Tip number three, and I'm just noticing that these are labeled as steps, which is extra not helpful because...

So step two is to keep your... Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

Step one is roll down the window. Step two is keep your seatbelt on. Step three is look for cracks.

You're at this point, at this point.

The website says, one of the main reasons a bridge collapses is its wear and tear. We've discussed it. Think of every car around you. Those tons of steel have weakened the bridge until suddenly, at this very moment, it collapses. When you enter a bridge, it is critically important to look for any cracks.

I'm going 70 miles an hour. I'm not...

Or if there's cracks beneath you.

Yeah, this is terrible advice.

It's personally inspect the bridge before driving over it.

I guess maybe they think you're always in traffic.

Maybe.

Like if you're sitting there in standstill traffic, like buckle up.

Buckle up, roll down your windows.

You're rolling down the window to be like, any cracks out there? Like you're yelling to other... Other drivers won't hear you ask if they see cracks out there if they're rolled up. So you gotta roll them down.

Useless. Step four. Step four, again, honk your horn. Most bridges fall the same way a little at a time and then all at once. Okay, to survive, you need to either get off the bridge in a split second, which is not always possible.

You gotta hit that precipice.

You gotta hit that precipice. I guess if you're Carolyn Woodward or whatever her name was, you could, it was possible.

Yeah, local medium Carolyn Woodward, who was able to just know from feeling, I gotta get out of here.

It says this is not always possible or use the resources around you after the fall to call for help. Use the car horn to make a loud noise. Your battery could die, but this could help rescuers find you faster.

I will say many of these steps, and again, they shouldn't be called steps, you're right. It's unclear, like which steps are for pre fall and which steps are for post fall.

Yeah, well, especially step five, stop driving. And they don't just mean in general.

Don't worry, the bridge will make sure of that.

Yeah, if you're on a bridge that has started to fall apart, again, how slowly do they think bridge is? If you're on a bridge that has started to fall apart, do not try to drive away from it, which I will say the only person in this whole episode who survived is a lady who did exactly that.

Yeah, she's like, I'm out of here.

This step says the bridge could make your vehicle drop straight down on top of pieces of the bridge before hitting the water, but water can provide some cushioning and save your life. If you're severely injured, stay put and yell for help and wait for the rescue team to come to you. Don't panic and remember that your odds of dying in a bridge collapse are one in several million. You're more likely to die of a lightning strike.

Okay, this list is written by a fucking Mad Libs writer.

Yeah, it's not good. It's not good. We could have written a better list. Step one, fall. Step two, don't be dead. Step three, open the window.

Step three, open the window. Step four, ask if anyone else is dead.

Yeah, ask around. Look for the helpers.

Step seven.

These tips basically break down to good luck, which is, you know, it's all I got for you. I've got nothing. If you're on a collapsing bridge, this is what you should do. The Scared All The Time Bridge Safe Promise. Don't ever drive on a bridge. And if you have to, go look it up in the show notes to see if the bridge you're about to drive over is structurally deficient.

Yeah. The thing that's fucked up about the structurally deficient bridge thing, cause I opened it when you said it, is the number of bridges that I was surprised to see were like made in 1994. Cause I thought it would be all bridges that are 100 years old. And they have bridges that are 100 years old right next to a bridge that was made in 1994. So you just can't trust any bridge you're on.

I guess maybe the older bridges were just, they were such engineering marvels and miracles that maybe there was a little bit less cost cutting. And in 1994, they're like, we can slap one of these things together.

I'm going to go ahead and say it's exactly what happened. There's just no version where that's not, I mean, I have a North Face backpack that you'd have to kill me to take away. It's so good. And then I tried buying, is it for my mom or my dad? I'm like, I'm gonna buy you the same backpack as me. This has traveled all over the world for me. I have fucking filled it to the point where the metal tangs of the zipper are hanging on for dear life. And it's never had an issue, never had a thing break, never had whatever, nothing, no ripping it. And I went online to buy them the exact same model. And it's all one star reviews. And then I Googled, why does this suck? And it was like, oh, North Face sold the company to some international conglomerate in 2013. So I went on eBay to find them an old one from my time. And they were all like 150 bucks. Like people knew what they had.

You know what would make bridges a lot safer?

Flying cars.

Yes, obviously.

Make the rest of us a lot less safe. I don't trust people with two degrees of fucking motion.

After a bridge is built, the engineers and construction offices are placed on the other side of that bridge so that they have to drive across the bridge that they've built to get to work.

Oh, yeah.

Then you're on to something.

I think a lot of these bridges survive for a while, so I'd be pretty comfortable with it.

But that takes us to the structurally deficient fear tier. Where do you think this fear lands on the fear tier for you, Ed, of bridge disasters or just bridges?

I'm going to go seven.

All right.

Pretty high for me. Not the highest, but after doing this episode, and I don't know all the metrics. I don't know exactly how they make their decision that this bridge is in poor condition, that we would feel comfortable through whatever metrics is accepted enough that we can say it's in need of repair. It's one in fucking three. Obviously, I'm not feeling... I wouldn't play Russian roulette if it was one in three.

Yeah. No, I know. I'm putting this... I think I might even put this at an eight.

Yeah. And watching the Baltimore one and just kind of having a video of a boat with no sound on in the gym, it might as well have just been like, bink. From that wide shot of it and stuff, I was like, oh, a boat ran into a bridge at one knot.

I hope everyone on the boat's okay.

There's a lot of shit that did fall on that boat. But it looked on camera, the way the angle was and blah, blah, blah. It looked like a boat hit the bridge at one mile an hour, and then the bridge fell down. And so I was like, holy shit. So yeah, that would make this a seven to eight for me. I'm not even mad at the bridge, and I'm not mad at the engineer. It seems like people are doing their best. Bridges seem like they want to fall down.

Well, they do, because of physics.

Because of gravity.

Because of gravity, yes.

Bridges are looking at-

Quite literally the truth. Bridges do want to fall down.

Yeah, when I was going, when I was in Pittsburgh, they have all these bridges.

Yeah.

Portland, Oregon has a lot of bridges too, like that.

I do like the bridges in Pittsburgh.

Yeah, it's cool. It's called like Something Bridge, Three River Stadium. So there's a bunch of bridges going over it. And you know those bridges are turning to each other, being like, we shouldn't even be up here.

No.

And because of the electric vehicles, which I saw something recently, and I did not click into it to see if it was written by like, you know, the Society of Gas Automobiles Only organization. But there's a lot of talk about their weight, and not even just in like bridge stuff, but because of the ratings of guard rails on highways, that's like built to stop a 3,000 pound car when you run into it. And if something 6,000 pounds like over its rating, could just blast through it into the other side of the highway and stuff. So yeah, you add the soon ubiquity of electric vehicles, especially in the state of California.

Heavy electric vehicles.

Yeah, that I would say like it goes from a seven to an eight for sure.

Yeah, can see a lot more bridge collapses in the near future. Hopefully none of you listening are on one, but until the bridge is fall, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

You've been listening to Scared All The Time and we will see you next week. Bye bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fifle.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is.

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