"...A Price For Human Progress."

There's this video that people keep forwarding to me that shows the Manhattan Bridge (which is an suspension bridge, after all) swaying gently as the subway runs back and forth across it:

The video is usually accompanied by a degree of semi-panicked goggling as people speculate whether that's actually an okay thing for a bridge to be doing. Short answer: it is, at least for now. And chances are that when something really is wrong, you'll know in a hurry.

Take for example the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which collapsed into the Puget Sound less than a year after its completion. You want spine-tingling documentation? At the time of the disaster, a local camera store owner managed to capture footage that makes the Manhattan Bridge thing look quite harmless:


There were no human casualties from the Tacoma Bridge collapse, though there was a dog trapped in that car you see, and it was unable to be rescued before everything fell apart. The video is hypnotic, I've been watching it all day. It evokes a very complex emotional response, something right out of a terrible dream -- one restated beautifully in Gary Peterson's pen and ink drawing, excerpted in the card above.

The event was a failure on a grand scale, and it wound up changing the way all future bridges would be built. But standing and watching that day -- as you can see people doing at the beginning of the video -- I imagine everyone must have felt a profound sense of wonder and vulnerability. All of that money, all of that hard work and scientific derring-do, blown out of the sky by a little bit of wind. Just the wind, that's all, triggering a little-understood principle called "aeroelastic flutter". Scratch any large-scale disaster, however, and you usually find a purely human failing just beneath the surface -- in this case, consultants had replaced the original plans with a speculative design that had cut costs nearly in half.

In drawing allusions to the Ten of Swords, I freely confess that I'm just cribbing from Wikipedia by including this quote by Othmar Ammann:

"The Tacoma Narrows bridge failure has given us invaluable information...It has shown [that] every new structure [that] projects into new fields of magnitude involves new problems for the solution of which neither theory nor practical experience furnish an adequate guide. It is then that we must rely largely on judgement and if, as a result, errors, or failures occur, we must accept them as a price for human progress."

That's cold comfort if it's your car or dog or peace of mind that's left to undulate in the breeze, but I can't think of any path through life that doesn't require each of us to occasionally pay this price. We don't always know what is happening or who is to blame -- the ground is literally dropping out from under us, we don't have the time or the presence of mind to wonder whether it's the inclined cable-stays or the eight-foot-deep plate girders that are causing the problem. It's only after, if we survive, that we find out. It reminds me of that Portia Nelson poem that Buddhists and AA'ers are always quoting:

1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost...
I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in...it's a habit
My eyes are open; I know where I am;
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

5) I walk down another street.
[Via]

Previously On Arcanalogue: The Ten Of Swords