I saw this and thought, “Wow, that looks like the Walnut Street bridge, what a coincidence,” and then I scrolled down to see that it actually was.
This bridge is special here in Harrisburg. It was built way back in 1890 and is the oldest remaining of the eleven bridges that cross the Susquehanna river in greater Harrisburg. There is a sidewalk in addition to the open metalwork that makes up the bulk of the bridge, and there’s nothing quite as satisfying as riding across the surface on a bike. In spite of all of these facts, nothing is as interesting to any of us here as what happened nearly twenty-three years ago in January 1996.
Flooding is nothing new to us in Harrisburg. We’ve seen some pretty crazy and devastating shit happen here over the past couple of centuries. But that January was different. I was in seventh grade, and as a seventh grader there’s not much that’s better than getting days off of school. If I remember correctly, we had just over a week of days off because of how much snow was dumped on us during a crazy blizzard, followed not long after by a decent ice storm. My dad was out of town on business, much to the dismay of mine and my mother’s backs, and we spent almost all of our time trapped in the house putting together a really awesome Buried Blueprints cat puzzle (this series of puzzles is AMAZING) and reading.
It’s not hard to figure out what happened next if you’ve ever lived near a river. Precipitation falls, drains to creeks and streams, then onto the rivers before heading towards the ocean. Three feet of snow has to go somewhere. In this case, the Susquehanna had mostly frozen over, and the surface was a mass of ice floes. As the water levels rose, so did the ice. Most of the bridges were strong enough to handle the onslaught of the ice (you could hear it crunching as it hit the supports, it was kind of eerie, always is), but the Walnut Street bridge was not so lucky.
The ice floes built up so much strength that it completely destroyed three supports worth of the bridge. In a stroke of insanely dumb luck (for 1996, video cameras weren’t exactly in massive supply), someone had been filming when the ice hit the bridge and the video of the bridge being ripped off its supports and then continuing downriver before getting swallowed by the Market Street bridge is simply amazing to watch.
The video, of course, made its way to the local news media, and when the story aired that evening, it was absolutely riveting to watch, even as a dumb thirteen-year-old kid that hated most everything. I’m literally tearing up as I’m writing this paragraph because I can remember that feeling of seeing the bridge I had walked across countless times in my life up to that point destroyed in three short minutes.
Even now at thirty-five, it is single-handedly the craziest thing I have ever seen weather be responsible for, and I’ve seen some shit.
And because nothing speaks better than images, here’s the video.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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