The 11 Worst Bridge Disasters In US History And Why They Happened

Infrastructure is easy to take for granted. It's something that everyone relies on all day, every day, but tends to overlook ... until, that is, something catastrophic happens. And here's the thing: According to experts, catastrophic things are going to keep happening, because the U.S. has the perfect storm of aging infrastructure, a lack of motivation — and money — to fix it, and an ever-increasing amount of stress on those ever-increasingly compromised structures. Take bridges. In 2023, National Geographic spoke with some of the country's top engineers and experts, who weighed in on things like bridges. Amlan Mukherjee of WAP Sustainability Consulting shared a terrifying thought: "If you have to think in terms of catastrophe, we're already there." (We already know that the destruction of many major mega-buildings would be devastating for the entire nation.)

Estimates suggest that out of the 617,000 bridges in the country — give or take — around 10% of them fall into the category of being significantly compromised. What does that mean? About 178 million times a day, someone crosses one of those dangerous bridges. Are ya feelin' lucky?

And there have been some terrifying instances where we've seen exactly what a catastrophic bridge failure means. If we're lucky, it happens when there's no one around. When we're unlucky? It happened in the middle of rush hour, and some collapses have killed dozens of people. While they're sometimes precipitated by unsafe infrastructure, sometimes, it's the result of a freak accident. Let's talk about some of the worst bridge collapses the U.S. has experienced, and what we've learned from them.

The 1993 collapse of Alabama's Big Bayou Canot bridge only happened because of a strange set of circumstances, bad weather, and delays. It started with a towboat and six barges that were being piloted along the Mobile River as a spell of bad weather made visibility next to nothing. The towboat pilot ended up getting diverted into the Big Bayou Canot, and in the process of trying to find somewhere to wait out the weather, the towboat pilot collided with the supports of a railway bridge.

The boat didn't collapse the bridge, but it did bend the supports. Still, things were about to get worse: A train that was supposed to have passed half an hour before had been held up by an air conditioning malfunction, crossed the bridge eight minutes after the collision, and the entire thing collapsed into the mud and water. 

By the time rescue workers had cleared the wreckage, 47 people were dead, and more than 100 were injured. Among the survivors was then-11-year-old Andrea Chancey, who spoke with the Associated Press (via Alabama) in 2018 and said that she was still dealing with the trauma: "I smell the oil. I see the fire, I hear the screaming." Chancey lost both of her parents in the accident, and as one of the survivors was passed out of a burning passenger car by unseen hands, she was dubbed the "miracle child" in media coverage.

Newspaper reports from the August 11, 1904 edition of The Colorado Transcript are harrowing stuff. They covered a bridge failure and subsequent train wreck that had happened a few days prior, and it was reported that of the 125 passengers, between 80 and 100 were assumed dead. They painted a grisly picture: Other trains — one filled with doctors and rescue workers, the other with coffins — were dispatched to the scene, where a collapsed bridge had plunged a train into the muddy, rushing creek below the river. The scene was so chaotic and the river was running so violently that several train cars were missing and presumed to have ended up downstream ... somewhere.

The creek bed was an arroyo — an area that was dry most of the time, but flooded with storms. An investigation following the collapse confirmed that the bridge had been built with a standard sort of construction, it had been in service for years, and exactly what happened remains conjecture.

It's believed that a wave hit the train as it crossed over the bridge, and that wave may or may not have also been carrying the remains of a bridge that had broken free and collapsed upstream. Floodwaters carried the train cars away with them, drowning most inside. The fireman, David Mayfield, survived to recall (via Structure), "I scarcely know how it happened, as I was dazed in the mud on the bank of the creek. It all happened so quickly — and, my God, it is so terrible."

The Truesdell bridge tragedy is kind of the ultimate irony: When it was built, it was designed and approved by a city that was sick and tired of wooden bridges collapsing and getting washed away by flood waters. In 1868, they approved new plans ... in spite of the fact that alarm bells had already been raised by those who thought this new design was actually a pretty bad idea.

It was. Four years after it was built, it collapsed — and media coverage referred to Lucius Truesdell's bridge design as The Patent Wholesale Drowning Machine. When it went down, the iron bars folded in on themselves, trapping people underwater in an iron cage. And there were a lot of them, mostly women and children walking in a baptismal procession from the church to the river. One survivor, Gertie Wadsworth, later recalled (via the Associated Press), "You could look down and see their faces. They couldn't get to the surface because all that iron was on top of them. It's frightening to look down, but to look up and to see daylight, to be only 12 inches from air?"

Several other Truesdell-designed bridges had collapsed in the previous years, and it was widely condemned from the beginning. Engineers pointed out that the bridge's foundation was way too lightly built to support the actual bridge, and investigations into the incident generally agreed. Truesdell, meanwhile, continued to defend his bridge and the design. Of the 200-odd people who were on the bridge, 46 died.

Of all of the deadliest bridge disasters in world history, it's West Virginia's Silver Bridge that has perhaps the strangest history. It was located in Point Pleasant, and yes, that's where the bizarre cryptid known as Mothman is said to reside. But first, the bridge. When it opened in 1928, it was a huge deal: It connected West Virginia and Gallipolis, Ohio, with a pretty revolutionary structure. Fast forward to 1967, and the bridge collapsed and killed 46 people. An eyewitness described the scene, saying (via Popular Mechanics), "It didn't just fall into the river. It sort of slithered like a snake, then it buckled and cars began falling off sideways."

It was later found to be the fault of a single iron bar that had corroded, snapped, and started a chain reaction that devastated the area. Understandably, the entire area struggled with grief, loss, and that age-old question: "Why?" And here's where things get weird.

Mothman sightings had started just the previous year, with countless people convinced that they had not — as local wildlife experts insisted — seen a sandhill crane, but a mysterious, winged monster. John A. Keel's book, "The Mothman Prophecies," suggested that the appearance of the Mothman was a sort of otherworldly herald, warning of imminent disaster. Keel claimed that there were other warnings issued, too, and with the Silver Bridge tragedy as so-called proof, the Mothman mythos was firmly cemented into one of the U.S.'s favorite cryptids. Go figure.

There are plenty of occasions when taking shortcuts might be perfectly acceptable. When building a bridge? Not so much — but that's exactly what happened in the lead-in to the collapse of Missouri's Gasconade Bridge. In a nutshell, the Pacific Railroad had taken on the task of connecting St. Louis and the Pacific Coast. There were all kinds of delays, and corners got cut ahead of an inaugural, celebratory train journey that would carry 600 people from St. Louis to Jefferson City. There were two bridges that the train would cross, and one was erected hurriedly as a temporary measure.

The bridge collapsed under the weight of that celebratory train (pictured), although one small mercy was that only 31 out of 600 people died in the wreck. Hundreds more were injured, and one St. Louis paper published this somewhat fanciful description of the scene (via Structure): "Immediately after the accident, the heavens grew dark and black, as though the night had come. ... hoarse thunder bellowed its cruel mocking's at the woe beneath. It seemed as if the elements were holding high carnival over the scene of slaughter."

The backlash was swift, and although the exact details were never agreed upon, it seems as though the train's speed, coupled with uneven weight distribution and rushed construction, all came together to end in tragedy. On the plus side, the disaster went a long way in pushing through requirements to have trained engineers overseeing future construction.