Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse "Gallopin' Gertie"

[95medox]

Came here after i physics class :D

[markflack]

Was it ever re-built???

[jayguy173]

why did it start moving until it collapsed

[Kauwhaka]

This is the best, most complete video I've seen of this bridge. (And the music fits in ok).

As for the d...d...d...DORKSSS saying it's fake, go back to watching your Ted Crusty videos.

[songwright]

The music would be great for certain things but in this context I find it unbearable.

[momak47]

That's cool we watched that in school :)

[berserkley]

Alright, what's the music called?

[phelps12471]

@berserkley Deep Sea Orchestra.

[octalex11]

This thing was moving like it was made out of playdough

[kamikazeboy123]

Why do you kids care so much of the music?mute and just add in your lady GayGay song

Anyway this footage seems creepy.heeeehehee.Good video for a bridge designer

[RunningWithWilds]

I liked the music, unlike other people. But it erked me about keeping it on during the vidoe, as the Odd paperlike swaying of the bridge & the music made it feel like a Horror film where some Zombie alien vampire is going to pop up. And physics also brought me here.

[GonzoNugent]

@RunningWithWilds When I first posted this video in 2006 it was silent. Some bitched and wanted sound so I found this piece of music that I found fitting. Some like it some don't. Can't please everyone. Besides whats wrong with Zombies?

[bombarderoazul]

This is fake, just like that bridge in russia.

[Th3Punish3r1805]

The music EFFING SUCKS.

[hyp92]

wait so we have color footage of a retarded bridge and but all the footage of the nazis and WW2 are in black and white?

[amesbury555]

that is sad

[foxxx414]

Nice bit of physics going on there

[FallenAndForgotten24]

wow..it almost looks fake just because it's moving soo much. mind just cant believe it. I hope bridges are built 10 times more secure for when gale force winds happen. legit makes me not want to be on a bridge like this haha

[SkyrimTVCommunity]

Oh hey Final destination 5.

[Fettoww]

This is so f**king creepy. The music only makes it more.

[AFCYBER]

Great footage, but they need to change the background music.

[GonzoNugent]

@AFCYBER There is no "THEY" it's just me and i'm not changing it.

[petrusem]

@GonzoNugent Why don't you change it?What's wrong with you?

[FatPlus1]

@GonzoNugent I love this music! I feel like I'm watching X files!

[HEKKO1235]

@GonzoNugent dont have to be a big dick about it! it's shit music!

[GonzoNugent]

@HEKKO1235 I can be as big a dick as I want, it's my video. If you don't like the music, turn down the sound. You weren't forced to watch it. Go troll someone elses videos.

[JairohFindsRest]

Foundations of Security book brought me here :D

[AlanCSSNub]

The music just makes this video so much worse

[DarkLBear]

THAT'S SO CREEPY IT COLLAPSED ON MY BIRTHDAY!!!

[MrWellminded]

@DarkLBear your old as hell no offense. lol

[DarkLBear]

@MrWellminded i mean November 7th no the 1940 part My real birthday is November 7th 1999

[indygangz]

It's the "resonance".

[mohamadhazrul95]

Physics brought me to see this video.

[demonstar513]

THATS CREEPYY its like concrete jello D:

[marshman1278]

Hey, its not fake, i live there. My grandparents told me about this...

[maxxchannel]

It's a living...

[BamfIamone]

Minute physics brought me here.

[animekitten789]

That obviously wasn't very well designed.

[IronChicken78]

Friend thinks its fake. Like if you disagree.

[paulktmrider]

@IronChicken78 i live in seattle cross the new bridge several times its no fake

[OmgVk64]

This is exactly Just Like Final Destination 5.

[latinlobster]

There must be a good reason the gate at the toll booth is down with a "closed" sign attached

[telx2010]

Life would be so much more exciting if all bridges wobbled like that.

[ROCKSOLID19]

The most lethal bridge ever built.

[jetconder]

that scared the hek out of me

[spawnkiller25]

Give u $200 to jump it in a station wagon

[emrekocak92]

i'm calling the fringe division right away.

[Carbon657]

Thumbs down this insulting and vile comment please, thanks

[champster6288]

2012 

[The0rangePanda]

Guess Chuck Norris was napping a little to close to the bridge this time huh

[TheAnneRobinson]

@The0rangePanda I know it's a joke but according to research This Is November 7 1940 SO Chuck Norris would only be 7 in a half months old HE WAS JUST A FREAKING BABY AT THE TIME! Sorry for making myself text rage. but It's just the research.

[The0rangePanda]

@TheAnneRobinson nah your wrong

[WeAreNotBoring]

Amazing :o

[ClementineMan1]

Aeroelastic flutter is the real cause of the collapse. It's like a swingset.

[YooEssBee1]

@ClementineMan1 i bet you were watching minute physics

[ClementineMan1]

The bridge builders didn't fail. Watch the minutephysics episode on this to see what really caused it to collapse.

[MrCubansamxxx]

i wanna run on it XD

[HurricaneCity4000]

i all ways say tobacco insted Tacoma

[327bran]

wiggle wiggle wiggle yea, wiggle wiggle wiggle yea

wiggle wiggle wiggle yea,wiggle wiggle wiggle yea, yea

[miceblue425]

I have to watch this for my physics pre-lab. :X

I wonder what the engineers were thinking when they saw this video... "HOLY $H|T WE FUCK3D UP!"

[Ikbenwieikben1975]

This is why bridges shouldt dance T_____T

[JJAB91]

R.I.P. dog.

[marcoosmp]

Engenheiros dessa época nao sabiam fazer pontes.. ¬¬

[tall32guy]

Too bad he went for the dog and never got her out of there. Still, it's good that she was the only "casualty" of the bridge going down! Could have been way worse! lol

[tall32guy]

@sd31263 Sorry for calling him a her, not like it makes much of a difference anyway. LOL And now I know the true story there, about him biting his rescuers. He probably was just extremely scared and confused....

[Birimbeto]

Essa porra é feita de que, borracha?!? Affe Maria!!! Oo'''

[marcoosmp]

@Birimbeto OOOO brincadeira viu.. que porra é essa? essa ponte foi feita doke?

[ToscanoRomano]

FREAKIN' SCARY SHIT!

[cansomeonehelpmeout]

The sideeffects of resonance

[cocacola443]

@cansomeonehelpmeout The Tacoma Narrows collapse was NOT due to resonance. It's like the Bernoulli Principle explanation for how planes fly....doesn't work for symmetric wings or planes that fly upside down.

The wind was a constant input to the bridge, not periodic. The collapse due to aeroelastic flutter, as it acted as an underdamped system when it started the twisting motion. The bridge deck would act as a wing, and the cables on each side would alternately act as springs under tension.

[DL3CE]

@cocacola443 It was resonance. Of course the wind was itself a constant input, but the force acting on the bridge was dependent of its momentary twisting angle under the conditions of this special day. So the excitation caused by wind was exactly on its resonant frequency. The power supply of an electrical oscillator is also a constant input.

[DL3CE]

@DL3CE Of course, it was not the schoolbook case of resonance with soldiers walking over a bridge with exactly its resonant frequency. Its very unlikely that this will happen. You would need a high Q-factor to make that oscillating energy devastating, which leads to narrow bandwidth. The natural variations in thier walking frequency would be much wider. Even if you are spot on, you will have to pump the needed energy into the resonator at first.

[DL3CE]

@DL3CE That means the will have to walk a few hundred steps before the energy oscillating in the bridge will cause them to collapse .. and long before that walking in lockstep will be rendered impossible by the floor.

[cocacola443]

@DL3CE From the abstract of "Resonance, Tacoma Narrows bridge failure, and undergraduate physics textbooks," "...in many undergraduate physics texts the disaster is presented as an example of elementary forced resonance of a mechanical oscillator, with the wind providing an external periodic frequency that matched the natural structural frequency...This paper emphasizes the fact that...forced resonance and self-excitation are fundamentally different phenomena."

[DL3CE]

@cocacola443 Thats correct, but "fundamentally different" is not really the case. A resonantor is just a narrow band filter. An oscillator is an amplifier with positive feedback through a filter. The wind in combination with the actual twisting angle was the amplifier in that case, the bridge itself the filter.

The only difference between forced resonance and self excitation is an open or closed feedback loop.

[cocacola443]

@DL3CE Cool, thanks for the explanation :-) I don't that much about oscillators, resonance, and self-excitation, but you've encouraged me to read more and study about it. ;-)

[cocacola443]

@DL3CE But an electronic or mechanical oscillator will still oscillate without being driven by a resonant input. Are you saying that the original Tacoma Narrows motion before the collapse was due to its oscillation at its resonant frequency, or that the oscillation was caused by forced resonance, where the input force was applied at its resonant frequency? I still don't see the connection with the latter and aeroelastic flutter, the explanation for the collapse that I tend to believe.

[DevonBates1]

i really like that song

[66Metallicaman66]

This is one of the most famous videos in history. And this just looks so unreal. The swaying of that asphalt and concrete just seems so impossible. That sway is just so like...miniature model looking. That just seems so fake...

Then that car too. I didn't see where that fell. I know that it fell into the water. But I didn't see it fall.

[TheFartingPenguins]

AEROELASTIC FLUTTER!

[elduderon]

Damn you Magneto!

[Graid]

Something about the music gives this quite surreal clip an even stranger quality. Atmospheric and odd. It is sad about the dog though.

[bradq]

obviously it gets very windy through the narrows. all of south Puget Sound empties out (and in) through the narrows during tidal activity. The waters move swiftly as well. And there are some of the largest octopus in the world below the bridge. pretty kewl. i get the heebie jeebies when I travel over the bridges still. Partly because they are so high and partly because of the toll now on the bridges

[Sebaztien1]

@bradq how much is it to cross?

[bradq]

@Sebaztien1 not sure. I think the toll is one way only. they just put up a second bridge a couple years ago so now there are two. i think it is 3 or 4 dollars. you can take the bridge if you don't want to take the ferry to the peninsula.] and drive around. now you would have to go to Olympia if you want to drive.

[MzJacksonKOP]

So whatever happened to the bridge?? Did they fix it and reopen it? Or did they demolish it?? Its like a soap opera..the "what happened next" thing I got goin on here :/

[cocacola443]

@MzJacksonKOP The bridge was rebuilt stiffer and heavier (this was the reason for the problem in the first place...the bridge was too long and light for its length, and the beams underneath the road deck caught enough wind that the bridge could flex. It would usually go up and down, though, it only twisted on the day of its collapse, as far as I know). It had to be rebuilt from scratch, though, as the towers were damaged by the uneven loading after parts of the deck fell into the water.

[DL3CE]

@cocacola443 Its a common misunderstanding that making something stiffer prevents oscillation by itself. Actually, it only shifts the resonance to higher frequency and even improves the Q-Factor of the resonantor. By making it heavier, you shift the resonance to lower frequency .. so making it "stiffer and heavier" only leads to an even better resonator. They did another thing, they changed the construction to remove the degree of freedom for this movement.

[cocacola443]

WSDOT:"The fundamental weakness of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge..was its "great flexibility, vertically and in torsion." Several factors contributed to the excessive flexibility: The deck was too light. The deck was too shallow at 8 feet (a 1/350 ratio with the center span). The side spans were too long, compared with the length of the center span. The cables were anchored at too great a distance from the side spans. The width of the deck was extremely narrow compared with its center span length..

[cocacola443]

@DL3CE Right, and if the bridge were stiffer in that degree of freedom (i.e., stiffer in the direction of torsional motion), then the collapse wouldn't have occurred. By stiffening the bridge in general, it would have still resisted the torsional twisting which started the underdamped oscillations in the first place.

[rudegyal321]

hahaaa we are learning about standing waves in grade 11 physics so our teacher showed us this video! poor dog:(, so happy to live in a time where someone in the world is smart enough to know that winds wouldn't have been right to build it there!

[Mafekie]

The man on the bridge looks like Hitler.

[mcada99]

Every time I see this video it gives me the creeps

[zoo1619]

When I was ten I saw a video of this bridge in a documentary about bridges. It scared me so much that I couldn't get to sleep. Just imagining how that would have looked, and how the bridge was moving that fast, it's hard to explain, but still scary.

[McGturtle3]

Fuck. That.

[BeautyHealthZoneBlog]

I can't believe my eyes.

[deadhope]

The music makes me want to murder people.

[guitarholic999]

This caused by AEROELASTIC FLUTTER.

*people who watched Minute Physics will understand this*

[adamal93]

@guitarholic999 Which is resonance in its essence

[MrThemiz24]

Poor dog? Poor bridge!

[RSE0616]

@MrThemiz24 I just toured the Golden Gate Bridge in SF and one of the engineers was the main engineer of this bridge in the video. He built it too cheaply because he believed he could do it better for less money. He cut corners and this is the result. It took 10 Million to build this bridge. The GGB was built for somewhere around 40 million.

[chaz313MT]

@RSE0616

Uh...you talked to one of the engineers of the bridge in this video, which was shot in 1940? Reeaaally?

[RSE0616]

@chaz313MT NO! i went on a tour of the GGB and the tour guide told us the history and all about the engineers.

[Manonthe3up]

>Leaves car and dog to die

>Has enough time to film them die

Priorities!

[yesman2079]

@Manonthe3up The owner of the dog was not the man recording. The owner was the last man on the bridge. he tried to save his dog but his dog wouldn't get out of the car and tried to bite him every time the owner attempted to pick him up.

[fenderguy0982]

Wow, I would have saved the dog and left the human. Some people (I have experienced this) say why save an animal and not a human? Well, that's because some humans don't deserve to be saved.

[sd31263]

@fenderguy0982 If it had been you on the bridge, you'd have saved your own ass, and you know it. Or maybe you don't deserve to be saved, either.

[fenderguy0982]

@sd31263 Nah. I think I'd do my best to save a dog. But, you know, if he didn't want to leave, it's kind of obvious that I'd leave it in the dust.

[spyergirl4]

I can't understand how that could have happened at 3:00. Wouldn't the asphalt and concrete just have been cracking everywhere, not fluidly swinging back and forth?

[etvb1]

Holly crap! Scary!

[ervinabacan619]

reminds me of Final Destination 5.

[jameson63926]

@ervinabacan619 That canine was probably a pound pup who was scheduled to be put down the day he was adopted.

[rjstunt88]

That shit cray

[Sh4d0wch40s]

final destination 5

[TullyOlson]

like if cracked brought you here

[everclear21]

@TullyOlson

No

[munecaeburro]

In my country we have no such problems. Politicians and the contractors had stolen the money and the bridge would never have been built. 

[oi32df]

@munecaeburro Here in Québec the collaps occurs during construction : Pont de Québec & more recently Viaduc du Souvenir .

[Priestbot]

Remember seeing this at uni... file it under "shit you shouldn't do at your job"

[ManuelDr]

Haha this some eFukt type music, love it.

[luxlucisvia]

say thanks to CRACKED! go there, great site

[skuterixas91]

Thumbs up for the guy who tried to save dog

[NickSparkss]

So surreal...

[BRBgottaskate]

The fact that i live in washington sent me here. SHUT UP, JUST CAUSE YOU READ A CRACKED ARTICLE DOESN'T MAKE YOU COOL. it makes you pretty average, a lot of people read those.

[kingjusticei]

the poor dog :"(

[youtuuberoxx]

boy they sure don't build bridges the way they used to eh grandpa

[andrewpuppi]

So even 1940s logic was to film the bridge collapsing before bothering saving any lives?

[tryithere]

@andrewpuppi What lives, No one died.

[andrewpuppi]

@tryithere You know what I meant.

[ravenkiller1]

With a name like "Gallopin' Gertie" it had to be the 40s.

Should have put Rosie the Riveter to work on that shit.

[angryparrot]

Son of a bitch should have died with his dog. What kind of a shitty owner doesn't let the dog out of the car when a bridge is collapsing around it?

[RearBrigadier1]

Why the fuck would you stop driving?

[FMJFortunateSon]

so he had to get out quickly and leave the dog behind... so he could film, see that bridgr over there go jump off of it sick fuck



[PrettyBluePeople]

Hahaha the first time I ever saw this was in my physics class and we were talking about the physics behind it but when my teacher said that the dog died I said "What?!?! How could that owner leave the dog in the car?!?!" and my teacher said "He didn't want to die!!!"

[UnDeadGamers]

isn't this the logo for a production company?

[retrogamerSam]

@UnDeadGamers Double Hemm?

[hatmonkey]

that looks fun

[TheLegendofPatrick]

Cracked, bitches.

[pokerguy94]

At least get your dog out of the car, dipshit.

[AssassinJ2]

I didn't know they had color film cameras back then. Huh.

[jjaecks71]

@AssassinJ2 um... ever see a little film called "The Wizard of Oz"? That was made in the 1930's....

[reapervampire]

@jjaecks71 It was one of the only 2 color films made in '30s. Color back then was super expensive, so it would be weird if this was from the '30s.

[BlasterTon]

What song is this?!?! I love it!!

[TheSuperDerp]

I'm gonna speed this up and sync it with J-Pop!

[TheFrostyJackson]

Though the dog is dead, the video lives on. Twas a noble sacrifice.

[Smithburg01]

If he had time to get out and film he could have opened the door for the dog to get out -_-

[skuterixas91]

great music choice i had to say it !

[YOUSUCK242]

Final Destination 5

[whitewolfe001]

Poor dog. :(



[Racso64]

Mario Kart?

[WillyDotTurnip]

The guy who filmed this left his dog in the car. He could have left the door open at least!

[bshinn4884]

@tackyman2011 10 more feet of thickness??? You are an idiot sir. Do your research.

[jsdart123]

cracked anyone?

[danoisaballa]

The bridge collapsed because there were no holes in it therefore was affected strongly by the winds

[IIIIIbarcodeIIIII]

@danoisaballa The bridge collapsed due to aeroelastic flutter!

[86thPatriot]

5:40 'CLOSED'

No shit

[sweetness902101209]

saw this in Physics class

[frequenceplaisir]

Wow demons can be strong!

[Mossey8]

Problem, bridge collapsing. Answer, dont make bridges out of rubber.

[DJLeonAQP]

WOWWWW



[agha4561]

what is the reason for this gallopin ?!

[phelps12471]

@agha4561 either the wind or the bridge is just goddamn retarded! lol

[agha4561]

WTF

[KorwinizatorPL]

Dzień dobry tu Polska!

[DCkid96]

I live in tacoma and when i first saw this i was amazing about the flex... the new bridges here are so nice now though..

[ilovepets400]

the dog dedad

[ilovepets400]

its creepy to me and music is scary and serious and also we watched this in garde 3 oh the old days i loved it but i got sad

poat me

[ruaridouglas]

2:41 Diagnosis: Hitler was responsible.

[buggyiscool]

This should be a Disney ride!

[msabolijoshi]

Is anyone else watching this for a physics project? O.o :D

[HEY8461]

Ha ha i bet the architect was like.

"Shit.. didn't think of that..."