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Bridge Collapse

Name: Bridge Collapse
Start: 1850-04-16
Location: Basse-Chaîne Bridge

When: 16 April 1850
Where: Basse-Chaîne Bridge
Part of: Angers Bridge collapse kills soldiers crossing

The Basse-Chaîne Bridge collapsed on 16 April 1850, killing 226 people crossing it.

The upstream anchoring cable broke in its concrete mooring, followed by the downstream cable. The right-bank end of the deck fell, creating a steep slope that threw soldiers into the river. The incident occurred despite orders to break step, as wind-induced resonance increased oscillation.

Sources

Angers Bridge Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-22

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.