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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.
“Cooper”1 page
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2. 62 on the right side, measured at a total load of 600,000 lbs. in the bar. Considerable variation was noted at different load levels and at the opposite faces of the eyebar, indicating some departure from ideal geometry of pin fit. The range of stress concentration factors varied from a low of 2.33 to a high of 2.93, all based on the nominal stress in the shank of the eyebar. ## D. STATUS OF BRIDGE INSPECTION AND MAINTENANCE The Federal-Aid-Highway Act of 1968 required the Secretary of Transportation to establish standards to provide for the proper safety inspection of bridges in the Federal-Aid-Highway system, and to establish a program designed to train employees of the Federal government and of state governments to carry out such inspections. In March 1968, the "Informational Guide for Inspection of Highway Bridges" (hereinafter referred to as the Guide), developed by the Bureau of Public Roads in cooperation with the American Association of State Highway Officials, was distributed to all states, to all counties, and to 2,400 selected cities in the United States. The Guide requested that an inventory of all highway bridges be furnished in two lists, for use in a two-part program for bridge inspection by each jurisdiction. The basic division is for bridges constructed prior to 1935 and those constructed later. Bridges of certain critical categories are included with those constructed before 1935. The Guide recommended that each authority undertake an immediate action program to inspect all bridges in the first category not later than November 1, 1968. With respect to the second category, it was recommended that those bridges be inspected not later than January 1970. In January 1969, Committee 3, National Study to Assure Bridge Safety, of the President's Task Force on Bridge Safety, issued its report, including a compilation of bridge information submitted by states, counties, and certain cities. Information in that report showed that 34 states met the November 1, 1968, deadline, and that 43 states planned to meet the January 1970 deadline. The report also stated that 17 states had previously established bridge inspection programs, and that the other 34 states had initiated or revised their inspection programs. As of October 15, 1970, almost all states had completed inspection programs for all highway bridges under their jurisdiction. In its interim report in October 1968, the Safety Board recommended that the Department of Transportation make available the product of the Federal-Aid-Highway Act of 1968 and the Guide to the owners of approximately 330,000 bridges and related structures not on the Federal-Aid-Highway System. Those bridges are owned, inspected, and maintained entirely by state, county, or city authorities, or by private concerns. As a result of the detailed inventory monitored by the Federal Highway Administration in 1968, the number of bridges not on the Federal-Aid System was revised upward to total approximately 398,000 of the overall total of 563,500 highway bridges in the United States.
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.