Here is a short piece I wrote about it at my place of former employment.
It's not 6 a.m. yet, and I'm getting the boys ready to get on the school bus in a little bit (it comes at 6:05 to 6:10 a.m.).
The photo is something I just now took of a postcard on my dining room table. The postcard comes from the Point Pleasant River Museum.
More later today, after work. Stay tuned.
3 comments:
Many old beautiful steel bridges have been replaced on the Allegheny River in Western Pennsylvania. The bridges are usually replaced with a nondescript concrete affair with no overhead truss. I always hate to see them go, but when you consider something like the Silver Bridge, what can one say. It is especially frightening when one considers the cause of the Silver Bridge collapse was due to a small defect in one link snapping from embrittlement in very cold temperatures.
The Hulton Bridge in Oakmont Pennsylvania, is to be replaced. It was built 108 years ago. Last spring I found Carnegie Steel imprints on the beams. I love that old bridge, but it is a time bomb. When sitting in traffic on the bridge, you can feel the bridge undulating under the load when a heavy truck goes in the opposite lane. Thoughts of the Silver Bridge often come to mind.
http://navfin.blogspot.com/2011/05/high-water-at-hulton-bridge.html
Yeah, I remember reading that when it was first published and thinking that you were sure right about the number of people who said they had just crossed that bridge.
I was living in Coolville at the time it dropped, working at the Kaiser plant in Belpre, and really, my wife and I along with our baby girl actually had crossed it twice the previous weekend. We always came down Ohio 7 to Kanauga, crossed over at Pt. Pleasant and then on to Huntington and Lincoln County to her folks and mine. Then the trip was reversed going home.
The collapse forced us to begin crossing on the Pomeroy/Mason bridge and going through Lakin to Pt. Pleasant. That route was so good (except for that God-awful bridge - and the Shadle Bridge, too) that we either used it or just came on down Rout 7 all the way to Chesapeake from then on. Even after the new bridge was built, we did not use it until after we left the area in 1970.
On a vacation trip back home, I decided to go see friends at the old plant in Belpre and used it. Not impressed, I didn't use it again for probably twenty years (sometime in the mid-1990's). And recently I have been using just WV2 to go north to Ravenswood and then I77 to Parkersburg. I like the Bartow-Jones pretty well.
But for shaky bridges, the old Martha Bridge between Barboursville and Route 10 out Heath Creek Road was the winner. We had to walk across that beauty when I went to Barboursville Junior and Senior High Schools in the Fifties. What a joy at twenty degrees and sleeting!!!
Yeah, I remember reading that when it was first published and thinking that you were sure right about the number of people who said they had just crossed that bridge.
I was living in Coolville at the time it dropped, working at the Kaiser plant in Belpre, and really, my wife and I along with our baby girl actually had crossed it twice the previous weekend. We always came down Ohio 7 to Kanauga, crossed over at Pt. Pleasant and then on to Huntington and Lincoln County to her folks and mine. Then the trip was reversed going home.
The collapse forced us to begin crossing on the Pomeroy/Mason bridge and going through Lakin to Pt. Pleasant. That route was so good (except for that God-awful bridge - and the Shadle Bridge, too) that we either used it or just came on down Rout 7 all the way to Chesapeake from then on. Even after the new bridge was built, we did not use it until after we left the area in 1970.
On a vacation trip back home, I decided to go see friends at the old plant in Belpre and used it. Not impressed, I didn't use it again for probably twenty years (sometime in the mid-1990's). And recently I have been using just WV2 to go north to Ravenswood and then I77 to Parkersburg. I like the Bartow-Jones pretty well.
But for shaky bridges, the old Martha Bridge between Barboursville and Route 10 out Heath Creek Road was the winner. We had to walk across that beauty when I went to Barboursville Junior and Senior High Schools in the Fifties. What a joy at twenty degrees and sleeting!!!
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