Tay Bridge collapseIn 1879, at about 7:15 pm, as a train crossed the Tay Bridge during a gale, the central navigation spans collapsed. The locomotive and six carriages of pasengers fell into the Firth of Tay at Dundee, killing over 80 people, with no survivors. The Tay bridge, then the longest bridge in the world, had 85 spans and was nearly 2 miles long. The collapse of the bridge, opened only 19 months before, shocked the Victorian engineering profession and general public. The Court of Inquiry concluded that inadequate design and construction led to insufficient cross bracing to withstand the gale force winds. The designer, Sir Thomas Bouch, died only ten months after the disaster. To date, it remains the worst structural engineering failure in the British Isles.«[Image: collapsed span in water beside broken columns after the collapse of the Tay Bridge.] |
