People have been obsessively filming bridge collapses for over 70 years. Here is some footage of classic disasters that look like they could have been caused by kaiju.


Honeymoon Bridge or The Upper Steel Arch Bridge (also known as Fallsview Bridge), Niagara Falls, Ontario, collapsed after an ice storm on 27 January 1938 due to huge ice pressure against the abutments.


(via Niagara Falls Public Library)

Tacoma Narrows Bridge or "Galoppin' Gertie", between Tacoma and Kitsap Peninsula, Washington. It was collapsed in under 40 mph (64 km/h) wind conditions only four months after its opening, on November 7, 1940. The only casualty was a dog who had been left in a stalled car by its owner.

The collapse was recorded on 16mm Kodachrome film by Barney Elliott, a local camera shop owner and can be seen after 3:15 here:

Part of the second longest floating bridge on Earth named Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge (I-90 Bridge) across Lake Washington from Seattle to Mercer Island, Washington, sinking after the Thanksgiving Day floods on November 25, 1990.

The workers noticed on November 24 that the day was about to sink but on the next day more than one-third of the bridge (2,790 ft or 850m) was sank.


Three sections of a truss bridge named Walnut Street Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania carried away by flood and ice floes on January 22, 1996.

Collapse of the I-580 East Connector, on the east end of San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, 29 April 2007. A tank truck carrying 8,600 gallons (32,500 liters) of gasoline overturned and the starting fire weakened the steel structure.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma.)

The eight-lane, steel truss arch I-35W Mississipi River Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Built in 1964, collapsed on August 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145 more.


(via Mike Wills and Kevin Rofidal/United States Coast Guard)

A more than 100-year-old footbridge in Camerton, Cumbria, United Kingdom, washed away during the floods of November 19-20 2009

(via BBC)

A flood-destroyed bridge in Poland, May 2013

Bonus: An iconic scene from the Buster Keaton movie The General (1927) where a real locomotive plunges into the Row River, Oregon. It cost more than $42000 (now that's more than half a million!) in the age where you could buy a brand new car for less than $300.

Most of the train is now gone, but Lloyd Williams of the Cottage Grove Historical Society told reporter Meghan Kalkstein in 2007 that bits of track and steel can still be seen in the river when the water level is low. – according to Offbeat Oregon History.


(via Cottage Grove Historical Society)