Gephyrophobia (Part III): Critical junctures

There was a tradition amongst ancient Roman folk which dictated that whenever an engineer completed the construction of an arch and the capstone was to be hoisted into place, he would assume accountability for his work in the most profound way possible: by standing under the arch. The Romans had it right. If you strive to mastermind, innovate and have claim to fame, you should equally be prepared to hold your hands up in case things don’t go according to plan. Structural errors translate to money down the drain and bodies down to Hades. Engineering history has afforded both…

Take the Tay Rail Bridge for instance, a bridge carrying the rail-line between Dundee and Fife in Scotland. Shortly after its opening in 1878, Thomas Bouch, the main architect, was knighted by the Queen in recognition of his achievement and became Sir Thomas Bouch. Eighteen months later, the bridge collapsed when a train crossed and 75 people were killed. Root-cause analysis identified glaring errors in construction. Bouch was stranded on an island of irrelevance and two years later he died with his fame destroyed.

Design defects are not the only culprits. A creepy enemy of bridges (although not so much nowadays) is resonance. In 1831, the Broughton Suspension Bridge (Lancashire) collapsed after a regiment of soldiers marched across four abreast. The bridge vibrated with their steps, the soldiers were thrown into the water but miraculously all survived. In April 1850, the collapse of Angers Bridge in France (also resonance) wasn’t very happy-ended: 226 people were killed in one of the most disastrous bridge collapses ever recorded in history. The nature of Washington’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was unprecedented, as the cause was "aero-elastic flutter": the wind twisted the bridge one way while gravity and tension twisted it the other, therefore the wind was able to twist it even further the other way and the bridge ended up tearing itself apart. In 1278, around 200 people were caught up in a dancing frenzy on a bridge over Moselle river in Maastricht (Netherlands) and danced so hard that the bridge collapsed. The name of the Yorkshire town Ponterfact derives from the Latin for “broken bridge”. The story has it that the Archbishop of York was welcomed back from Rome by a huge crowd of people who had packed the bridge screaming and dancing, resulting in its collapse. It turns out His Eminence was a harbinger of miracles (in old wives tales men of the Cloth often are), as everyone came out in one piece. The list goes on…

Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, 2nd December 2017: As the calendar pad is leafed in the countdown to another milestone and with almost everyone carried away in the rapids of Christmas gift-giving binge, the scene captured by the entrance of the suspension bridge (Bristol side) is befitting of both time and season. The murmur of traffic has slowly raised its decibels in the last couple of hours and right now, 14:17 PM GMT, it feels like it is reaching a climax. Only a couple of miles behind me and downhill are town markets, restaurants and boozers plying a heavy trade. Up here, at the dizzy heights of Clifton, there is a strange sense of ethereal serenity and reverence, both, I think, generated by sight of the suspension bridge and void. I stood on this very spot for about twenty minutes, clicking away and thinking if the sign reading “Low-Weight Bridge” would ever prove an ominous one. I hope no man, vehicle, cable or beam will ever have to plumb the depths of river Avon…

If you have read Parts I and II, you might ask me if I am acrophobic. Just a bit. Gephyrophobic? No, I crossed the bridge twice. I kept looking straight and passed with flying colours (OK, maybe I just scraped through). In my mind there were two noteworthy recollections that carried me through the process, both remnants of my life-long trivia-gathering psychosis. First, a memorable quote by Sir Isaac Newton: “We build too many walls and not enough bridges”, highlighting his longing for a humanity with tendency towards unity and not division. Second and more important, a 2013 wonderful, truly wonderful photo (one of the best I have ever beheld), courtesy of my National Geographic fellows. It illustrated a train crossing a bridge somewhere in Fukushima prefecture, in the rural Japan. At crack of dawn, above rolling mist and dense forests, a magically serene world emerged. It was a photo I found inspiring and can only describe as the epitome of restfulness and, fittingly, the antithesis of the 2011 Tohoku biblical scale disaster (an earthquake and resulting tsunami crippled the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing a meltdown that left around 300,000 people homeless). Perhaps bridges are rightly perceived as symbols of critical junctures of our lives that require determination and optimism. Perhaps they do glorify the transition from misery to recovery. If the long trouble-laden Japanese fearlessly cross them, I say so should we.
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