Bridges Facts

A chain-reaction crash on the Clark Memorial Bridge in Louisville sent a semi-truck dangling nearly 100 feet over the Ohio River with the driver trapped inside. Firefighter Bryce Carden, 29, was lowered by rope over the bridge edge, cut her free, harnessed her, and both were hoisted to safety. The whole rescue took 40 minutes.

P.T. Barnum led 21 elephants - including the famous Jumbo - across the Brooklyn Bridge to prove it was safe. Six days after it opened in 1883, a stampede rumor sparked a panic that left 12 people dead and shattered public confidence. The elephant parade fixed it. It worked.

London Bridge, the real one from the Thames, now stands in the Arizona desert. In 1968, developer Robert McCulloch bought it for $2.46 million. Workers numbered every exterior granite block, shipped them 10,000 miles through the Panama Canal, and rebuilt the bridge over a canal in Lake Havasu City. It reopened in 1971 and still draws tourists today.

Kate Shelley was a teenager when an 1881 storm collapsed a trestle near her Iowa home. A passenger train with 200 people aboard was still coming. She crawled across a flooded railroad bridge on her hands and knees, lantern blown out. She reached the depot in time to stop the train. Railroads gave her a lifetime pass and a Tiffany medal. Today, Union Pacific trains still cross the bridge that bears her name.

The Mackinac Bridge is Michigan's five-mile 'Mighty Mac.' Every day, only cars are allowed on it. Except one: every Labor Day, Michigan closes it to cars and opens it to walkers. The first walk, in 1958, drew just 68 people. For decades, two lanes stayed open to cars during the walk. Since 2017, all of them close, and walkers get the whole bridge to themselves. Now 40,000 to 65,000 show up every year, with a record 85,000 in one morning.

Duluth's Aerial Lift Bridge doesn't tilt or swing. Its whole 386-foot span shoots 126 feet straight up in a minute, opening 141 feet of clearance for 1,000-foot ships. Built as a transporter ferry in 1905, it became a lift bridge in 1929. Ships blast a long-short-short Captain's Salute; the bridge answers back. It still does this for almost 900 ships a year, carrying 35 million tons of cargo.

42 men, most of them Havasupai, carried a steel cable that weighed over a ton down the Grand Canyon on their shoulders in 1928. No road reached the Colorado River, so each 550-foot cable for the Black Bridge went down the South Kaibab Trail in a single-file line, a drop of about 4,750 feet, with about 50 pounds on every man.