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.
“Masters”10 pages
2. Studies at the Battelle Memorial Institute 45 a. Non-destructive search for eyebar flaws 46 b. Residual stress investigations 46 c. Fracture toughness of eyebar steel 47 d. Crack growth rates due to fatigue, hydrogen-stress cracking and stress-corrosion 54 e. Fractographic examination of freshly open crack 58 f. Fracture toughness of A7 steel 62 3. Investigations at U. S. Steel Applied Research Laboratory 64 a. Chemical and mechanical tests of eyebar steel 64 b. Slow bend test of eyebar steel 65 c. Depth of pitting in eyebar No. 33 65 d. Fractographic analysis of freshly opened crack 66 4. Laboratory Tests at Structures Laboratory, Fairbank Highway Research Station, Federal Highway Administration 68 a. Fatigue tests of eyebar steel 70 b. Scale model tests of eyebar joint C13N 70 5. Investigations of the Possibility of Fretting-Fatigue by Professor W. L. Starkey of Ohio State University 78 6. Static Tests of a Full-Scale Eyebar at Lehigh University 79 D. Status of Bridge Inspection and Maintenance 82 IV. ANALYSIS 84 A. The Properties of the Steels in the Point Pleasant Bridge 84 1. Chemical analysis of A7 steel of various laboratories compared 85 2. Mechanical tests of A7 steel of various laboratories compared. 85 3. Chemical analysis of eyebar steel 87 4. Mechanical tests of eyebar steel 87 5. Fatigue properties of eyebar steel 88 B. Actual Stress Levels in Various Components of the Structure as Compared to Primary Stress Analysis 89 1. Significance of secondary stresses 89 2. Stresses induced by wind excited oscillations 90 3. Stress concentrations in the eyebar head 91 C. The Mechanism of Collapse as Determined by the Process of Elimination 93 1. Elimination of causes other than fracture in eyebar No. 330 94 2. The fracture of eyebar No. 330 94 3. Mechanism of flaw growth to critical size 95 D. Compatibility of Established Mechanism of Failure with Observed Facts and Witness Testimony 100
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 202 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.