The Kinzua Bridge — What a Tornado Left Behind

On the afternoon of July twenty-first, two thousand three, a tornado moved through the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania and hit the Kinzua Bridge. The bridge had been completed in eighteen eighty-two, a wrought-iron railroad viaduct spanning the Kinzua Creek valley at a height of three hundred one feet. When it was finished, it was the highest railroad bridge in the world. It held that title for two years, before the taller Garabit Viaduct was completed in France. For most of the following century it stood as a monument to what the railroad era's engineers had been capable of, about two thousand fifty feet long, framing the valley in iron from above.

The tornado knocked down eleven of the bridge's twenty towers in about five seconds. The wreckage was photographed and studied. Engineers examining the collapsed towers found something they had not expected: the original bolts holding the towers together were still intact. The iron had not corroded. The engineering had not failed. The wind had simply exceeded what any nineteenth-century designer could have anticipated.

The Pennsylvania state government decided not to rebuild the bridge exactly as it was. Instead, they stabilized the four towers that remained standing and left the fallen sections where they lay, visible from the valley floor below. Inside the hollow of one fallen tower, visitors can now see the original bolts and rivets, the ironwork intact after a hundred and twenty years, lying in the creek bed where the tornado put it. The walkway on the remaining span ends in a glass observation deck suspended over the valley where the bridge used to continue.

The decision to leave the wreckage rather than remove it has become, in retrospect, the more interesting choice. The bridge that fell is more visible now than it was when it was standing.