PORTLAND, Ore. — Tuesday's dramatic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore made headlines around the country and sparked discussions about previous major bridge disasters in other states, as well as questions about whether other major river crossings could be similarly vulnerable and whether there are lessons other states can learn from the incident.
One viewer wrote to KGW asking if the city of Portland has ever had an incident where a major bridge collapsed or was damaged to a similar degree.
THE QUESTION
Has Portland ever had a major bridge collapse?
THE SOURCES
THE ANSWER
No, Portland has never had a major bridge collapse. In fact, Oregon overall has never had a bridge collapse on anything approaching the scale of the Baltimore incident.
WHAT WE FOUND
Downtown Portland is well known for its lineup of bridges across the Willamette River, which range in age from just about a decade to more than a century old.
The St. Johns, Fremont, Broadway, Marquam, Tilikum Crossing and Ross Island bridges are all the first bridges to be built in their respective locations, while the modern Wapato, Steel, Burnside, Morrison, Hawthorne and Sellwood bridges are all replacements for earlier crossings — or in a couple cases a replacement for a replacement.
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Some of the earlier bridges had become highly worn out by the time they were replaced, but none of them ever failed or collapsed, and the replacements were all planned in advance.
The same goes for Oregon overall, according to Oregon Department of Transportation spokesman Don Hamilton.
"We've had some ships hit some bridges here in Oregon, but nothing of the magnitude of what happened there in Maryland," Hamilton said earlier this week. "We've had only minor structural problems on the bridges here in Oregon."
Washington, on the other hand, has seen five major bridge collapses and failures over the years, although none of them were caused by impacts from boats.
The most famous is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster in 1940, which was caused by a design flaw that allowed the bridge to twist and flex too much in high winds. There was also the 1915 Division Street Bridge collapse in Spokane, which killed five people when the bridge failed under the weight of two streetcars.
Half of the floating Hood Canal Bridge sank during a storm in 1979, and the original Lacey V. Murrow floating bridge across Lake Washington sank during another storm in 1990. Most recently, part of a bridge carrying Interstate 5 over the Skagit River collapsed in 2013 when a truck on the freeway struck part of the truss above the roadway.
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