Name: The Collapse of West Virginia's Silver Bridge | Atlas of Cursed Places
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T20:26:33.000Z
Duration: 4 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You can bundle it up under the blanket of a curse,

but you can't deny that there is something at work

here, some relationship between West Virginian industry

and a seemingly endless cycle of calamity.

And since Austin Caperton won't be providing any answers,

So what we do in this lab is we build stuff.

And we break it to figure out how to make it stronger.

SAM SHERIDAN: No disaster is woven into the local folklore

of West Virginia quite like the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

SAM SHERIDAN: Although I'm fairly certain a flying cryptid

didn't cause this disaster, the Silver Bridge did collapse

at the exact spot where the Battle of Point Pleasant

MATT HEBOON: This is a model of the Silver Bridge.

So the Silver Bridge was similar to a suspension

So tell me exactly how the Silver Bridge failed.

It was actually located at the end of the eyebar.

That flaw was extremely small, and actually

And in this case, the very small flaw initiated a fracture.

Can you show me what that would look like?

MATT HEBOON: OK, so we're going to apply a tension lug,

In the case of the Silver Bridge, this happened so fast.

So we're going to simulate the fracture of the eyebar

there just wasn't enough capacity in the rest

of the system to resist all of the weight of the structure,

and therefore the entire bridge collapsed.

SAM SHERIDAN: So the Silver Bridge collapses.

What's the way this could have been prevented?

MATT HEBOON: The original designs for this bridge

But they decided to opt for a less redundant system

with the eyebar chains, which allowed them to dramatically

But it also dramatically reduced the redundancy in the system.

who never took an interest in civil engineering,

So if they hadn't done this with the lowest bidder,

there's a possibility that that failure would have happened,

but they would have had enough redundancy that the bridge

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Collapse of West Virginia's Silver Bridge | Atlas of Cursed Places

stuff

extremely

figure

immediately