Documents / Document
This is the final highway accident report (NTSB-HAR-71-1) from the National Transportation Safety Board, adopted in December 1970. It covers the collapse of the U.S. 35 bridge between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Kanauga, Ohio, on December 15, 1967, which killed 46 people. The Board found that the cause was a cleavage fracture in eyebar 330 at joint C13N. That fracture grew from a flaw produced over 40 years by stress corrosion and corrosion fatigue, in a spot that could not be seen or found by inspection.
“The Advance”2 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
65 or 70 feet north of its original position. This caused a general racking of the Ohio tower, and carried the south chain at panel point 9 to the north close to a tree some eight or ten feet north of its final resting place. The completion of the rotation of this portion of the Ohio tower south leg below the horizontal position apparently returned the south chain part way toward its original position. Additional fractures occurred in the south leg as it struck the north leg again (Reference 14) and dislodged the saddle, which was now in an almost inverted position, depositing it on the ledge at the north end of the Ohio tower pier footing. Further evidence of this return motion of the south chain was observed in the vicinity of panel point 7, where it was obvious that it had been moving to the south in its final motion, scraping a considerable amount of earth ahead of it. 3. The testimony of witnesses who observed the fall of the bridge from a distance is generally in accord with the sequence of collapse discussed above with but a few exceptions: Wesley F. Wears, who was at the City Ice and Fuel Company dock about a quarter mile downstream on the West Virginia side, stated in part: "... I turned around and looked and saw the Ohio towers falling. The tower legs seemed to twist counterclockwise (when viewed from the top) and fall upstream and towards the center of the river. The center span of the bridge broke in the middle and fell straight down. It looked as though the cars on the center span all fell with the bridge and looked like they were falling in a funnel - some falling backward, some falling forward. I didn't see any vehicles fall off the bridge - just fall with the bridge. After the center span fell, the West Virginia towers and span fell...the bridge was all down in a matter of five seconds as I estimate it". ... "None of the Ohio tower structure seemed to change shape or bend as they fell." (See file of written witness statements) James Neil Britton, who was also at the City Ice and Fuel dock, testified at the public hearing in May of 1968 (see pages 162-169 of transcript) in part as follows: "As I was sitting there idly counting traffic, I noticed the towers, which would be the Ohio towers, begin to twist in a clockwise motion approximately one-eighth or a quarter turn before they actually seemed to turn loose and the floor of the bridge break, and then the Ohio span over here collapsed, and in a simultaneous motion it worked its way back to the channel span
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 202 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.