Bridges: Failures in Design and Construction

History of Bridges: Most Famous Bridge Disasters

http://www.historyofbridges.com/facts-about-bridges/bridge-failures

Worst Bridge Collapses in the Past 100 Years (Time Magazine)

http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1649646,00.html

Dee Bridge (1847)

An Engineer's Aspect: The Dee Railway Bridge Disaster of 1847

Tay Bridge (1879)

Tom Martin's Tay Bridge Disaster

Quebec (1907 and 1916)

A Bridge with Two Tragedies

An Engineer's Aspect: The Bridge Collapse of August 29, 1907

Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940)

Lessons from the Failure of a Great Machine

University of Washington Exhibit: History of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

"One hundred years prior to the Tacoma bridge's collapse, much debate had taken place over whether suspesion bridges were safe under any circumstances.  There were known wind problems, and the early to mid-nineteenth century had witnessed a slew of failures.  In the day, John Roebling, a German American civil engineer, studied these failures and devised three basic principles to shepherd the construction of safe bridges.  First, a bridge must be of sufficient mass and inertia to quell excessive wind excitation.  Second, since the wind can either lift up or push down on the bridge, the structure must have stays tying down its deck, either deck to ground or tower to deck.  And third, to be adequately stiff, the bridge must have trusses.  Roebling built a number of bridges with this failsafe formula, most notable the Brokklyn Bridge, completed in 1883."

All three components were eliminated in the design of this bridge... and "from the ruin emerged a long overdue science of bridge aerodynamics."

- from Wind Wizard by Siobhan Roberts, Princeton University Press, 2013