Today at uni, they showed us a video in one of the lectures of a suspension bridge in the 1940's which collapsed due to harmonic vibration or something.

IIRC it opened 1st of june? 1940 and collapsed 6 days later.

Bloody awesome video. For about an hour the whole bridge, cement, steel and all was flexing like it was made of rubber.

You can see people try and walk across it while it was flexing, and someone even tried to drive his car across.  By flexing I mean its like getting a piece of paper and pushing the ends a bit together.  After we saw it, half the class thought it was impossible to have made the bridge out of concrete and steel.

Ive looked through Kazaa and cant find it.  Anyone got the vid?

I thinke there is more than one bridge.  The Tacoma Narrows (sp?) bridge colapsed.  Poor dog.  The owner of the car fled his car, and left his dog to fall to its death when it collapsed.

cee.carleton.ca/Exhibits/Tacoma_Narrows/TacomaNarrowsBridge.mpg

I've seen the video. It is amazing. Try Google.

The Tacoma bridge disaster, yes.  My dad told me about it while we drove over its replacement.

IIRC the dog wouldn't get out of the car....somebody actually went out to try to get it. I believe it is the guy you see walking off the bridge in the film. Story goes, the dog would snap at him when he tried to get it out of the car.

My guess it was a terrier of some sort.

It is called flutter in aerodynamics. Once something reaches a point that it gives or yields to the air the object bends until the pressure on it drops, then the object's natural elasticisy bends it back to its natural shape. The air again begins to work on it bending it "out of the way" again. The natural elasticity of the object causes the action to worsen with each cycle. I have had an in flight aerodynamic flutter and I cannot adequately describe the panic. Planerench out.