The Forgotten Bridge Failure That Rewrote Every US Inspection Rule

On 15 December 1967, at about five in the evening, the Silver Bridge between Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Kanauga, Ohio dropped into the river with rush hour traffic on it. Forty-six people died. The bridge was thirty-nine years old, which is young for a river crossing, and nothing about it had alarmed the men who drove over it every day. The cause was a crack about three millimetres deep, inside the bore of one steel eyebar, forty feet in the air. No inspection then available to anybody in Americacould have found it. Every bridge inspection rule in the United States — the two-year cycle, the national inventory, the fracture-critical category, the person with the clipboard under your local overpass — traces back to that bar. This is the whole story: why the cheaper design was chosen in 1927, why two bars to a joint left nowhere for the load to go, what the investigation had to pull out of the Ohio River to prove it, and what changed afterwards. CHAPTERS 0:00 A three millimetre crack 0:22 15 December 1967, five o'clock 2:30 Before the bridge: the ferry 3:11 Who built it: Greiner and American Bridge 3:45 Wire cable or eyebar chain 6:13 Two bars to a joint, and no way back 6:59 The investigation, and a President's task force 9:00 Getting the bridge off the riverbed 9:42 Eyebar 330, joint C13N 11:02 What the Silver Bridge actually was 12:03 How an eyebar chain holds a road up 13:26 One bar goes, and the rest follows 14:39 The identical bridge at St Marys 16:03 The rules that did not exist until 1971 17:53 Point Pleasant, Mothman, and a town's explanation 18:37 The Silver Memorial Bridge 19:06 620,000 bridges, and why they get looked at SOURCES National Transportation Safety Board, Highway Accident Report NTSB-HAR-71-1, "Collapse of U.S. 35 Highway Bridge, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, December 15, 1967" — the drawings, the fracture analysis and the eyebar tables in this video are from that report. 23 CFR Part 650 Subpart C — the National Bridge Inspection Standards. Archival photographs from West Virginia state and regional collections, the e-WV encyclopedia, and contemporary newspaper coverage. PICTURE CREDITS 74 of the pictures in this video are Creative Commons and their credits are in the pinned comment, where there is room for all of them. Everything else is public domain, US federal government work, or archival press photography.