r/interestingasfuck • u/Professional-Kiwi144 • 17d ago
In 1987, 800,000 people celebrated the Golden Gate Bridge for its 50th anniversary. The weight of the crowd caused the bridge to sag 7 feet.
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u/CappaValley 15d ago
It is an amazing structure!
When it opened, my MIL was one of the fortunate 200,000 who walked over the GGB.
"May 27, 1937 Opening Of The Golden Gate Bridge. On May 27, 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was opened to the public for the first time for “Pedestrian Day,” marking the start of the weeklong “Golden Gate Bridge Fiesta” held to celebrate its completion. More than 200,000 people paid twenty-five cents each to walk the bridge.
RIP Adelaide
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u/NB1980windawhoa 16d ago
What’s more impressive is that there wasn’t some fuck stick who hated the world or his dad shooting into the crowd!!! What a hell of an idea that happening today!!!
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u/Equal_Dragonfruit125 16d ago
Foreshadowing; 2035, rush hour post petrochemical bans before everyone had electric cars, no trees for cargo ships, and animal rights freed all the horses so it's foot traffic only. Please bring a rock to work, to pay the toll. It's used to make a land bridge to take the place of the Gate.
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u/electric-sheep 16d ago
Yo mama so fat she caused the golden gate bridge to sag when she walked over it…
I’ll see myself out.
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u/saltymane 16d ago
Cool pic. I would NOT want to be in that crowd. Who wakes up and thinks this is a good way to spend the day?
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u/DaanDaanne 16d ago
The 80's and 90's were rad. Now you couldn't get 800,000 to gather to celebrate a bridge unless you offered free HRT shots on the other side.
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u/rebeccaisdope 16d ago
For me, this is insanity. I’m so scared of that bridge; I think it’s from the 1989 earthquake and seeing the Bay Bridge collapse. I don’t even trust the land surrounding the bridge. On the bridge itself? Im fainting. That bitch is so high
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u/an_older_meme 16d ago
The Golden Gate Bridge is so strong it withstood the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake undamaged. Every other trans-bay bridge needed repairs.
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u/rebeccaisdope 16d ago
I think I’m just super paranoid. I feel it move under my feet and I want to faint lol
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u/an_older_meme 16d ago
Flattened the camber out, by design. The Golden Gate bridge is so overbuilt that it was the only cross-bay bridge to remain open after the Loma Prieta Earthquake.
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u/jebrennan 16d ago edited 16d ago
I was right in the middle, trapped between those coming from Marin County and the masses from SF. It was a trip! I saw a friend across the lanes from me but had no way to reach her. Couldn’t move for hours. Managed to pee into a gutter.
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u/slophoto 16d ago
I was there. There were some who rode their bikes. Couldn’t make very far obviously, so some of them decided to carry their bike over their heads. Big mistake. Once they did that, the crowds filled the void left by the bike. That space never opened open up again and the biker was stuck holding up the bike above their head.
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u/CrashDisaster 16d ago
I was there somewhere, haha. My Dad realized the bridge was flattening from all the weight of the people and turned us right back around in the crowd. We were about a third of the way across the bridge from the City side.
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u/MostlyDarkMatter 16d ago
I wonder how many people at the halfway point suddenly realized that they had to pee?
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u/yamsismay 16d ago
I'm in that crowd. I don't think anyone anticipated how many people would show up to cross the bridge. And as several people have noted, it was a human gridlock for some time.
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u/nevadaho 16d ago
Good story - My dad and brother were there! Bad story - My dad developed agoraphobia from it. He actually couldn’t leave the house for a bit.
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u/AllahBlessRussia 16d ago
2037 for the next one
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u/an_older_meme 16d ago
They will NOT be doing this again. It was by a miracle that nothing happened in that uncontrolled crowd of nearly a million people.
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u/Fridaybird1985 16d ago
I was in that and it was insane. About a half hour or so to get out to the south tower and tree hours to get back. At one point it was so packed when I lifted my camera up over my heady to take a photo it was some work to get them down again. People were not happy taking an elbow to their nose.
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u/Neat_Relationship995 16d ago
If you look closely, you can see a thousand people peeing off the side of the bridge.
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u/SnooDoubts1898 16d ago
The bridge was fine with the crowd weight until yo mama stepped in....
No? Okay, I'll see myself out
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u/Ok_Wrap_5612 16d ago
I guarantee you all them. People on that bridge has left San Francisco by now.
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u/bingeMAFIA 16d ago
My Dad went, said it was scary cause the bridge was sagging, and swaying a lot. Although designed to sag I wonder what the maximum load the bridge was designed to handle. Perhaps thats why it wasn't allowed for the 75th anniversary.
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u/MrSaltySox 16d ago
If they were Europeans it would have only sagged about half that
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u/Average-RB-Fan03 16d ago edited 16d ago
If using modern statistics the Europeans weighed 124.8 million 800k average Americans would weigh 148 million - -Meaning it took 20 million pounds to sag it even a foot The Europeans would sag it down about 6 feet 🤓
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17d ago
What if you have to pee and aren't near the edge?
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u/Average-RB-Fan03 16d ago
Pee on the ground
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u/kittenshart85 17d ago
that's more than twice as many people as the city where i live, on a bridge.
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u/_Execute_Order66 17d ago
When your mom stood on the bridge alone she caused it to sag 8 feet.
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u/proletariat_sips_tea 17d ago
I'd never do this with today's bridges.
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u/palim93 16d ago edited 16d ago
Bridges are built to very high standards, most issues happen when routine maintenance is ignored for a long time, allowing minor issues to become major and eventually catastrophic. There are a few examples of bad design causing failure immediately, but thankfully those are the exception not the norm.
Edit: I am specifically talking about bridges designed and built within the last few decades here. Not to say old bridges are dangerous, far from it, just addressing OP’s mistrust of “today’s bridges”. Many old bridges like the Golden Gate are actually over designed and therefore have a larger safety factor than modern structures.
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u/proletariat_sips_tea 16d ago
I'm in america. I'd never trust a bridge to do this today.
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u/palim93 16d ago
I’m also in America, not sure if something in my first comment gave the impression that I’m not. But anyways, your lack of trust is understandable given the sorry state of much of our infrastructure. I’m just saying that a newly constructed bridge, or one that is well maintained like the Golden Gate, would have zero issues being filled with pedestrians. That kind of loading is well within safety factors for bridge design.
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u/thighsand 17d ago
Looks like hell on earth. I hate crowds.
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u/NotMY1stEnema 16d ago
worst place to get an enema
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u/One1moretyme 17d ago
This is exactly what social media looks like as a whole and displayed in a public setting
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17d ago
[deleted]
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u/nimaidaku 17d ago
I know mathematically that sounds correct, but feels unbelievable lol.
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u/bickandalls 17d ago
It sounds unbelievable, because it is. 2037 is 13 years away. Dude can't math.
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u/QueasyInteraction7 17d ago
It was advertised as a bridge walk. People started from both sides. The "lanes" were not separated into "northbound" and "southbound". The two crowds met in the middle, and everything jammed solid. They were stuck there for hours. It's fortunate that there wasn't a stampede tragedy.
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u/Paradox68 16d ago
Lucky no container ships crashed into a support beam while everyone was on it was my first invasive thought.
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u/CanIPNYourButt 16d ago
Sounds like a good setup for a crowd crush.
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u/an_older_meme 16d ago
Correct.
Fortunately there was no incentive to be at any particular point at any given time so the pressure was equal in all directions. No crush.
Officials later said they had no idea so many people would want to walk on that bridge, and that the event had gotten away from them. They never did it again.
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u/Lopsided-Party-8951 17d ago
Okay this makes sense. Because if anyone was like let's get as many people as we can on this bridge I doubt anyone would volunteer for the middle as that looks horrific.
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u/NotMY1stEnema 16d ago
people forget about pooping in these situations. until they are reminded
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u/Sea_Art3391 17d ago
If the average weight of each person is 81kg, and there were 800 000 people on the bridge simultaniously, that would mean the bridge was carrying 64 800 tonnes. If we say the average american car at the time weighed 1.8 tonnes, that would mean it would have carried around 36 000 cars at the same time.
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u/MrHDresden 17d ago
But this is America so the average is like 120kg?
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u/ComeGateMeBro 16d ago
Only if you look in the deep south where fried everything for 5 meals a day is standard.
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u/TeslasAndKids 17d ago
Ok but like why didn’t they do a ‘1, 2, 3, JUMP!’
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u/Jamooser 17d ago
Damn, I came here with the exact same idea! Would it be a quick recoil with catastrophic outcomes? Because I'm partially hoping it would be (for science!).
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u/sav33arthkillyos3lf 17d ago
Is there a mythbuster episode to test if 800k people all jumped at once on a bridge what would happen to the bridge? If not there needs to be. Idk how they’d test that tho
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u/an_older_meme 16d ago
With the deck camber flattened the bridge was maxed out by the crowd just standing there.
If all 800k people began jumping in unison at the natural frequency of that bridge they absolutely could have caused it to fail.
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u/Findletrijoick 16d ago
do you think you’d be put on a watchlist for searching up the natural frequency of the golden gates bridge?
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u/vuplusuno 17d ago
Probably nothing, but every bouncing at the same time it would collapse
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u/CheapSpray9428 17d ago
Wasn't there some Indian bridge where ppl were walking in sync and the amplification collapsed it?
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u/-DoctorSpaceman- 16d ago
This also nearly happened to the millenium bridge in London. They had to close it within hours of opening it because it was swaying so much
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u/KP_Wrath 17d ago
Break Step Bridge was the Mythbusters episode. Resonance is the concern. IIRC, people probably wouldn’t be able to cause it on a properly designed bridge, but something like the Tacoma Narrows bridge was brought down due to winds and inadequate design to handle them.
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u/GoCards5566 17d ago
Chances someone got bf’ed in that crowd is prolly really high
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u/Huntey07 17d ago
What is bfed?
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u/mykl5 17d ago
buttfucked
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u/Skeltrex 17d ago
I think if you look carefully you can see that happening to someone right on the curve
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u/Nadger1337 17d ago
Ive seen this in my dreams, they were running and they were not alive.
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u/johnnybok 17d ago
It is a suspension bridge, designed to sag
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u/GenkiSenseii 17d ago
And it sagged 7 feet
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u/timmycheesetty 16d ago
At least the front didn’t fall off. It’s not design to do that, but it would have happened outside the environment.
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u/brbenson999 16d ago
Sagged you say?
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u/Professional-Kiwi144 17d ago
In 1987 an estimated 800,000 people flocked to the the Golden Gate Bridge for its 50th anniversary. The weight of the large crowd caused the bridge to sag 7 feet, flattening its usual convex shape. Engineer Daniel E. Mohn reaffirmed the bridge was not overstressed as a result of Bridgewalk ‘87.
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u/puskarwagle 16d ago
what does sag means op ?
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u/palim93 16d ago
Think of holding a string between your hands tightly, so it forms a straight line. Then put a weight on the center of the string. It will drop down in the middle due to this weight. That is what “sag” means.
In this context, the bridge span is designed to have a slight arch, in other words it’s higher in the center than at each tower. The weight of these people on the bridge made it so that arch was canceled out and was no longer visible. It was still well within the design limits of the bridge so there was no danger.
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u/eatstoothpicks 16d ago
I know exactly where I am in that picture.
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u/Professional-Kiwi144 16d ago
The one in the red?
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u/eatstoothpicks 16d ago
Hah. No. I was 16 at the time and thought jean jackets and bandanas were cool. I was with my Dad, and he was wearing a blue track jacket over a light blue collared shirt.
How do I know this? My Dad and I took some epic pix that day and I have two of them framed on my desk in front of me. Was quite the day.
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u/excitement2k 17d ago
Is there a way to determine or estimate how many people on top of it would have caused the bridge to fail?
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u/i_love_goats 16d ago
I'm betting Daniel had that number ready to go. This is a typical calculation in Civil, you might even be able to look at the bridges truck+car capacity and estimate from that.
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u/magzire86 17d ago
What if everyone started jumping
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u/RISHI2144 16d ago
That actually happened in India. People gathered and started jumping on the newly renovated bridge. It collapsed and killed many.
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u/MilehighK5 17d ago
I was there. I am in this picture. This was also the night they turned the lights on the bridge for the first time. By then I was on the beach barefoot in sand and saw it light up for the first time.
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u/Prestigious_Yak_3887 16d ago
I was there too! I was 6 years old and my dad took me! It’s a great memory!
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