100 years ago in Spokane: Engineer defends design of failed bridge

From our archives,

100 years ago

Hugh L. Cooper, the New York engineer who designed Spokane’s Division Street bridge, said he did not believe the bridge’s fatal collapse was caused by faulty design.

He believed that it was damaged in a flood in 1894 when a truss from a washed-out bridge upstream slammed against the Division Street structure.

Cooper said the truss “struck the specific bars that broke Saturday morning.” Those metal bars were subsequently rewelded, but they were irreparably weakened. He said he inspected those bars after the accident, and they still show “the marks of a heavy blow on the upstream side.”

Cooper was in Spokane by “rather strange coincidence” at the time of the bridge collapse. He was working at the site of one of his latest projects, a big power project on the Pend Oreille River below Metaline Falls.

Cooper, not surprisingly, said his design was “not in any way weak.” In fact, he said, when it collapsed it was carrying only about one-seventh the load necessary to break the metal bars.

A later investigation indicated that the 1894 flood was not the culprit. It was simply metal fatigue in the 23-year-old structure.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1945: U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton, 60, died in Heidelberg, Germany, 12 days after being seriously injured in a car accident.

1995: The city of Bethlehem passed from Israeli to Palestinian control.