Episode 2 of 3
Structural Failure Analysis
- When
- 1877
- Where
- Ashtabula River bridge
Engineers identified angle block lug failure and brittle cast iron as causes of the collapse.
Civil engineer Charles MacDonald inspected the bridge plans in 1877. Later, Björn Åkesson identified three proximate causes: failure of an angle block lug due to fatigue, thrust stress from improperly fitting chords, and brittle cast iron angle blocks caused by low temperatures.
Sources
- Ashtabula River railroad disaster Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-05
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.