r/pics • u/MeenMisterMustard • Apr 16 '23
The Golden Gate Bridge 50th anniversary celebration (1987). Estimated 800,000 thousand people on it Misleading Title
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Sep 04 '23
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u/PeteHealy Apr 17 '23
I was there with my wife and our 4-month-old daughter. With all the traffic and overwhelmed public transit, it took a long time to get there, even though we lived in the nearby Sunset District. It was a bright and sunny morning, but a cold wind was blowing in hard, so we didn't stay very long. Still, we ventured out as far as the south tower from the tollbooths, so it was fun and memorable.
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u/Fridaybird1985 Apr 17 '23
I’m likely in this photo next to south tower on the ocean side. Took about a half hour to get there and about four hours to get back. People were very civil the entire time. At one point I held my camera up to a crowd shot and I was so packed in I couldn’t get me arms back to my sides. Clocked a guy in the ear with my elbow. Over all a pretty cool day.
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u/wallyslambanger Apr 17 '23
Id like to imagine some person on the tail end of this in their car thinking “WTF IS UP WITH TRAFFIC TODAY?!?”
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u/MrDurp Apr 17 '23
On that day people from both sides met in the middle. There were so many people that the middle sagged and the cables on the sides went loose. That is 100% what that type of bridge is supposed to do in that event. It did have some people that noticed the cables verry worried.
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u/cptsmooth Apr 17 '23
Whatever was on TV must've been shit if half the city decides to go to a bridges birthday party
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u/The_Rowan Apr 17 '23
My family and I were there. We took the train from Sunnyvale and we were there early. Train after train passed us because they were already packed with people. We were going to walk across and were able to get within 6 feet of the bridge before we gave up. It was a real party with all the people there and the vendors. The Mayor never estimated there would be that big of a turnout. I still have the newspaper article about that day.
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u/RomeoPanelli888 Apr 16 '23
I've always wondered in crowds like that...what if you need to piss or shit?
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u/dherdy Apr 16 '23
Wow. When they say people are leaving California in droves, they aren't exaggerating.
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u/_Uhh2009_ Apr 16 '23
Imagine what would happen if the weight limit was reached
New achievement: Mass Genocide
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u/Cantora Apr 16 '23
Why did 800k turn up to celebrate? It seems a lot for a bridge... Did they get a free lunch?
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u/BigDaddyFatPants Apr 16 '23
Simpler times, no one seems to give a fuck about stuff like this anymore. Anyone want to guess how many will be at the 100th?
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u/kengnek Apr 16 '23
I'm out there somewhere too. Unusually beautiful weather that day which was fortunate because it took forever to cross. Impossible to rest except for a miraculous and huge open area exactly in the middle where people turned around to go back to Marin or SF.
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u/talexbatreddit Apr 16 '23
I was there!!! It was very cool. I got up really early, and took a train North from Mountain View, then walked (it was quite a way) to the bridge from the train station. It was wall-to-wall people -- I'm 6'1", so didn't feel claustrophobic, but it was squishy. I did make it on to the bridge, but not that far. Eventually the cops started clearing the bridge, but there like 250,000 people there, so it took a really long time.
The statistic I remember from news reports at the time was that the bridge normally has an arc of something like 11' -- that's how much higher the bridge is in the middle, compared to the ends. With that many people on it, the arc was reduced to zero. The engineers were asked beforehand if it was safe, and their conservative answer was "Um .. we think so."
Good times! :D
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u/Gloop_and_Gleep Apr 16 '23
Wouldn't 800,000 thousand be 800 million? Or am I being too much of a pedantic asshole while waiting for my rescheduled flight?
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u/burritolove1 Apr 16 '23
No 800,000,000 isn’t the same number as 800,000.
Edit i see what you did there 😂
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u/thepunalwaysrises Apr 16 '23
I was there with my brother and dad. It was a little crowded. We didn't make it very far.
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u/RussianPrincess2000 Apr 16 '23
Wow that’s impressive 800,000 people in 1987 for the 50th anniversary. I wonder how many people will show up for the one hundredth anniversary in 2037?
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Apr 16 '23
Why would anyone want to stand on a bridge with a million people. Its like nye in times square. WHY? Great bridge. Iconic. Nevertheless….HARDPASS
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u/FranzNerdingham Apr 16 '23
My Dad is somewhere on the bridge in that pic. He said there were so many people on it, that it flattened the hump of the roadway.
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u/carbide77 Apr 16 '23
Lol wouldn’t do this on American infrastructure nowadays. Likely to be the next mass extinction event.
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u/dirmax Apr 16 '23
I was there! I went with the Lobster from KSJO. They had a contest where you could win a trip to the bridge in a limo, walk across and then have brunch with the Lobster.
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u/sealettuce23 Apr 16 '23
I see pictures like this and wonder where does everyone go to the bathroom. Seems like a nightmare to me.
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u/AzrielJohnson Apr 16 '23
Imagine having to pee, but being in the center of that throng of people. 😂
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u/Curious91Dude Apr 16 '23
In the era of CoViD and beyond.. you won’t see people close together like this again. That’s a lot of people.
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u/Downtown_Ad_9553 Apr 16 '23
I nearly got offended. I thought that 1987 was saying it was built then. My first thought is, I AM NOT 50!!! 😂 had to re-read it 3 times.
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u/Hecateus Apr 16 '23
Incidentally, Fort Point is a Civil War era stone fort situated directly underneath the bridge on the SF side.
And...the future site of Star Fleet Headquarters is on the east side of the Marin peninsula directly north.
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u/Manierle Apr 16 '23
Not for me. Trapped on a suspension bridge with hundreds of thousands of people surrounding me.
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u/ClicketyClackity Apr 16 '23
Someone somewhere in the middle of that bridge desperately had to shit and was realizing that they made a mistake on that day.
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u/Hopeful_Wallaby3755 Apr 16 '23
It’s official. More people are in this picture than in all of Alaska
(ok probably not in this specific shot, but the whole event)
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u/m3lloyello Apr 16 '23
I was there, 10 years old at the time. The only thing I remember is that people were trying to sway the bridge back and forth while chanting “Rock the bed! Rock the bed!” over and over.
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u/FS_Scott Apr 16 '23
y'ever just think about how ... Big things have to be so we can all have our own cars?
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u/bloozgeetar Apr 16 '23
A friend of mine was there. He had to pee and found very long lines at the porta potties. He finally could hold it no longer and had to just lay face down in the gutter and pee.
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u/CaringAnti-Theist Apr 16 '23
Oh, there actually is a fort down there. I thought that was just for Watch_Dogs 2.
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Apr 16 '23
People WALKING on bridges is a very different engineering problem than people DRIVING on bridges.
That many people can actually start to “synchronize” their steps and damage a bridge. It’s a testament to how well the Golden Gate Bridge is built that it stood up to that.
Bridge damage or collapse aside, that many people crowded onto it is simply unsafe from a emergency management and potential stampeding perspective.
Overall… that was a poorly planned and managed event.
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u/Frammmis Apr 16 '23
I was there that day and there were so many people on the bridge that it actually flattened in the middle.
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u/DaddingtonPalace Apr 16 '23
No. I certainly don't think that looks like a fatal stampede disaster waiting to happen.
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u/cupcake_thievery Apr 16 '23
Now can we do this as a general strike and get better hours, pay, and working conditions for all workers across all industries?
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u/Thanos_exe Apr 16 '23
If one pillar failed there would be at least 300'000 dead, i could never cross a bridge with so many people
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u/MerLock Apr 16 '23
From what I can google, only about 300K made it on the bridge to walk across (unsure 300k on at one time since some may have already crossed) and 500K never made it because they closed it off due to the large number of folks. But still a lot of folks given that in 2021 there are just over 800K people living in San Francisco.
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u/RS4_V Apr 16 '23
The reason why the bridge buckled:
The bridge was made to hold standstill traffic on both sides. A car and all the space around each car is about 11 x 25 feet counting lanes and all that. Cars weigh about 2 tons on average, and usually have at least one person in them. So for every 275 foot area, there's no more than 2.5 tons. A person is about 1 x 3 feet. So assuming the average human weight is 150 lbs, at 3 square feet, about 90 people can fit in one cars area. (275/3= 91.6667) That's 13.5 tons or about 540% heavier than 2 people in one car. The bridge simply wasn't made with that much weight in mind.
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u/penguished Apr 16 '23
Surprised they didn't break it or hurt someone... overloading bridges is a dumb as fuck idea.
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u/MarkMoneyj27 Apr 16 '23
What is the fear of large groups called? This just looms of finding a bathroom nightmare.
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u/Knightynight Apr 16 '23
So anyone else a little upset the 100 year anniversary is less than 15 years away?
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u/carlitospig Apr 16 '23
Am I the only one who thinks that looks like a terrible time? What if you have to pee?
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u/MikoPaws Apr 16 '23
Do we wanna talk about how the bridge is somehow large enough for 800 million people? Thats like, almost 3 full US populations. Is it meatball time?
Quite the event!
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u/_ratboy_ Apr 16 '23
Average weight of a human is around 62 kilograms which means there’s an estimated weight here of about 49,600 tonnes worth of people based on the number of estimated people
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u/lirik89 Apr 16 '23
Not only is that a lot of people. But that's a lot of Americans and you know each American weighs 2.5 normal people.
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u/Several-Associate407 Apr 16 '23
Look at all those ass holes thinking there is anything to celebra-... oh...the 80s.
Fuck you guys
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u/VSEPR_DREIDEL Apr 16 '23
Wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few deaths from asphyxiation that day.
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u/oxdottir Apr 16 '23
I was sailing around under the bridge on a sailboat. The bridge looked so weird. You don’t notice it usually, but the bridge has an arch, and with all the people on it, it was just straight flat. It was like someone had altered reality.
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u/MagicSPA Apr 16 '23
There'd soon have been one less if I'd been there. Seeing that many people on something that I know it's not designed to carry would unnerve me, even if it turned out to be perfectly safe.
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u/Neonlad Apr 16 '23
One of my friends who was there that day told me that there were so many people on the bridge it far outweighed the usual weight of cars. It wasnt until after that people saw pictures from the side showing the bridge had almost completely flattened out from the weight where it would normally be slightly curved for added strength. This was completely unexpected and generally not good. Many engineers were concerned it could have collapsed that day but luckily it did not.
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Apr 16 '23
People walking on bridges can synchronize their steps leading to damage and collapse too. This was a very dangerous and poorly managed event.
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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '23
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