Eery Sounds of Verrazzano-Narrow Bridge
Sway and Creak
Put your earphones on and listen to the otherwordly and eery sounds of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in NY, as the expansion joints creak and shift while swaying in high winds. 💨
It's beautifully scary.
Suspension bridges aren't rigid and can move significantly in high winds.
This seems similar to the Tacoma-Narrows bridge that swayed like this and ultimately collapsed due to the aeroelastic or torsional flutter. That footage has been used as a case study in almost every engineering class in history since the 1940s.
I posted about the Tacoma Narrows last year, and I will leave a link to this post in the comments.
What you see here is a similar phenomenon, except that modern bridge designers have learned from past mistakes, and the movement here is perfectly acceptable and within design tolerances.
A rigid bridge would be a problem. This is not. In the same way even large bends on an aeroplane wing ✈️ are perfectly normal behaviour (even if disconcerting)
The 'Narrows' part of their names are a coincidence. Tacoma Narrows refers to the narrow passage in Puget Sound, while Verrazzano-Narrows refers to the narrow strait at the entrance to New York Harbor, between Brooklyn and Staten Island in New York City.
🎥 Peter Buccheri
📸 Unsplash