How Did Tacoma Narrow Bridge Collapse

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WHY DID TACOMA NARROW BRIDGE COLLAPSE
INTRODUCTION
The Tacoma Narrow Bridge is pair of twin suspension bridges that span the Tacoma strait of Puget Sound in pierce county Washington. () The bridge connects the city of Tacoma with the Kitsap Peninsula and carries state Route 16. But the paper focus on the Tacoma Narrow Bridge of the 1940 and some of the reasons that led to its collapse. The 1940 Tacoma Narrow Bridge become operational as from 1 July 1940 and unfortunately collapsed on November 7 the same year, just four months after. At the time of its construction and destruction it ranked the third longest bridge after the Golden Gate Bridge and the George Washington Bridge.
DESIGN AND …show more content…

This was due to the torsional vibration mode. This is where the left side of the road went down, the right side would rise and the central part of the main span remained motionless. The torsional vibration mode was caused by aero-elastic fluttering (Billah and Scanlan, 1991).
Fluttering is a phenomenon (physical) where several degrees of freedom of a structure become coupled with unstable oscillation driven by wind. This movement injects energy to the bridge with each cycle so that it overcomes the natural damping of the structure bring about a counter (negative damping) causing an exponentially growing response. In other words, the oscillations increase in amplitude with each cycle as the flutter velocity inserts more energy than the flexibility the structure can dissipate. Eventually this causes the bridge to fail due to excessive stress. Consequently the amplitude of the motion generated by the fluttering velocity increased beyond the strength of the focal point, in this case the suspender cables. On the event of failed suspender cables the weight of the deck shifted to the other cables causing them to break and making the central deck fall into the water below the

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