The Day the Golden Gate Bridge Flattened (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Day the Golden Gate Bridge Flattened (2012)

mercurynews.com

30 pointsrichardhod8 comments

The day was clear, the crowds were large; the bridge was full with a festive feel. No one wanted to be the first to leave, Soon there was no retreat... As more bodies pushed in from either side an unpleasant realization spread there was no going back that day -- Golden Gate Bridge 50th Anniversary

I was there. I spent the night before in Sausalito, and we came from the north, reaching almost the middle before encountering the wall of people from the SF side.

It was damn scary. People continued to crush in from both directions, and the bridge swayed despite it not being particularly windy. People in midspan were yelling in both directions for people to turn around. The trampling deaths at the Who concert in Cincinnati were not yet forgotten.

Just when we felt in serious trouble, people finally got the hint that they weren't going to make it across, and they retreated.

The crowd control issues definitely sound like a good reason to not repeat this. Or at least not without making each side of the bridge one-way for pedestrian traffic and controlling the maximum number of people allowed on the bridge at each time.

The bridge’s advertised maximum downward deflection is 10.8 feet. Unless that’s an incredibly blatant lie, I don’t see how a deflection of 7 feet would almost break the bridge.

Edit: the article does go on to acknowledge that, after the point where I’d originally stopped reading out of exasperation with the typical BANG clickbait.

The bridge was designed with a maximum deflection of 16 feet vertically and 27 feet horizontally.

Post-9/11 world in 1987?

In 2012, when the article was written

>And bridge officials insist that the reason the bridge district isn’t permitting pedestrians to swarm over the Golden Gate for the 75th anniversary Sunday has nothing to do with the threat of collapse and everything to do with the threats of overcrowding and terrorism in a post-9/11 world.

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