On the day the first bridge over Puget Sound collapsed 75 years ago this week, a mixed-breed cocker spaniel named Tubby was the only life lost with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in what now is known as one of history’s most spectacular engineering failures.
Photos and film of the last moments of Galloping Gertie are iconic to this day. The bridge’s fall on the windy morning of Nov. 7, 1940, is still taught in schools. It is regarded as the birthing event of the field of wind engineering in building design.
“Aerodynamics, all of a sudden, became important, very important,” bridge engineer Andy Herrmann, past president of the American Society for Civil Engineers, said recently of the collapse.
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