that is what visitors can do. they can see different plaques that explain where the chinese community used to live and what happened during the expulsion. i think when people come into the park they walk away with an understanding that this is a city with a complex history. it is not just this pretty little town next to the water. it has a complicated immigrant history like a lot of other talent in the american west. it is important to understand you look at us elected,, which is overwhelmingly white, it is not that way by accident. whether we are talking about the displacement of indigenous peoples from the region, for the expulsion of the chinese, they are talking about the redlining the african-american community where they can only live in certain parts of the city, there is a reason the city looks the way it does. this story is an important part of that. we are traveling over the

tacoma narrows bridge. the original collapsed in 1946 month after completion. michael sullivan will share that story with us. >> the area we are standing and now is in the southern section of puget sound, the washington state and pacific northwest's great inland water. one the transcontinental railroad came there was talk about one day being able to span puget sound. an undertakingt anybody was prepared to do. during the depression federal programs like the building of the grand coulee dam, they were big job creating public works projects happening in the pacific northwest. mid-1930's, there began to be talk about creating a bridge over puget sound to reach from tacoma to the peninsula.

the tacoma near was bridge was opened on july 1 in 1940. after two years of construction. the tacoma narrows is also a bit of a wind tunnel. people working on the deck began to notice movement. an almost like airplane winds, lift in the bridge. unlike just horizontal movement, began to feel a vertical lift in the bridge. especially in the center span. there was those suspension bridge or anything like this anywhere and out to the world in the pacific northwest. there was an unfamiliarity with just how big thing like this was supposed to behave. people excited about it, there is a certain musical gracefulness about a bridge like this.

people just wanted to think it was not anything wrong. that it was normal. once they got all the concrete down an additional weight was added it would all go away. as we went out of summer and began to get into fall and the winds picked up, the prevailing wind out of the southwest which blows almost directly across the bridge deck, they began to notice there was an undulation in the deck. soldiers are coming up from the military base for the novelty of riding the bridge. they would put their feet over the railing and stand on the outside of the bridge and lean out as far as they could. the center deck of the bridge with the rising, not just inches, but feet. to a point where the undulation cars, theere that two

headlights of the vehicle coming at you with disappear under the rolling hill of the deck. peopleservative something was horribly wrong from the very beginning. for a community that was proud of their new bridge, for the many people that participated in building the bridge, it was unthinkable this was wrong. but the engineers began to work on the idea of some stiffening of the bridge. they thought the railings on the side could be converted into certain deep i-beams and i went and rigidity to the bridge. structuralse minor additions, modifications were implemented or were about to be lamented as we got through october of 1940.

by early november of 1940, really only four months or 4.5 months after the bridge in completed, the weather began to shift into the winter patterns. that really was the bellwether of what was about to happen. on the morning of november 7, the winds kick up to about 40 miles per hour. they were fiercely directed right at the side of the bridge, as if the wave w -- way wind comes over the wing of an airplane. instead of a normal undulation of the bridge, the deck began to twist and turn. everybody noticed immediately that had been watching the bridge that was behavior people had not noticed before. early in the morning of the seventh there were hundreds, if not thousands of people that come out on both sides of the

bridge to be able to watch what was happening and watch this behavior. the bridge keepers -- it was a toll bridge. the bridge keepers decided they would close the bridge. this was wrong. it was not safe anymore. just not an action that should happen with an inanimate object of this size. one last car was coming across the bridge, even though the access to the bridge and shut off. there was one less car coming across the bridge. a man coming from his summer home on the peninsula heading towards tacoma. he had a cocker spaniel with him in the car. by the time he got to the most severely moving part of the bridge, he could not control the automobile. the car's long, screeched around and ended up diagonally across

both lanes on the bridge. he jumped out and ran and got off the bridge. then for the next 30 or 40 minutes the bridge when it is movement that no one had seen before. all the crowds on both sides all sort of closed in to watch. i think everyone started to suspect the impossible was about to happen and the bridge was going to give it up and fail. with no one really on the bridge, strangely enough a university professor who had worked on trying to solve the puzzle -- there was enough time for people to be able to get out there. a university of washington professor ran out on the bridge trying to get the dog out of the car.

there is great footage of him. it looks like a steven spielberg movie. today you watch the footage and you cannot even imagine that somebody would run out on the --dge with this caring tearing deck. the dog was too terrified to the give up and kind of strolled back. he was not done a couple of times by the movement of the bridge. finally got off the bridge. in the few moments it followed the deck rotore away from the hangers. witnesses said it sounded like gunshots. ts. jewels, these big bol the cable goes through the deck and then there is a big old on the bottom to keep it from pulling out. begin to pop in the cables began the snap under the force.

the light standards on the bridge are just cutting and swirling across rapidly. and ing on the cables just a moment the connection between two sections of the bridge deck fail. there is a violent twist and care of the deck -- tear of the deck. huge sections all begin to fail. most of the center span of the bridge underneath the big suspension cables falls away, drops away from the bridge and plunges into puget sound. one is killed in the incident. no one is even hurt. they demolished as much as they can in november of 1940. as they began to think about really having to reengineer the the clouds of war

close in for the second world war. by that time they realized there was no time in the war effort they would be a leak at the bridge rebuilt. and in pearl harbor happens. the shipyards become critical strategic things and the focus shifts away from public works towers and this deal on the bridge is actually removed and brought into the war effort, recycled and turned into bullets and tanks in whatever -- sections of the bridge of this deal are used on the alaska highway to build a highway up to alaska during the second world war because of the lend lease program, and the ties with the northwest in alaska. gertienants of galloping sit in the channel through the war and then it is only after

the war they began to reconstruct another suspension bridge. second tacoma narrows bridge is completed. that is the bridge we see in the distance. this deal bridge, this deal towers in the distance -- steel towers in the distance. i doubt there is a textbook or reference book written about bridge engineering that does not include to, in the index because of the to, narrows bridge. -- tacoma narrows bridge. it's impossible to imagine engineering students all over the world have seen the film of galloping gertie's collapse. it is one of those absolutely spellbinding moments in engineering history, one of those disasters of utter failures of design that is completely captured on film.

it is amazing. it is still jaw-dropping to see a huge endeavor like this, a physical object move with this much dance almost with this much movement that are out of the parameters of the original design. our comcast cable partners work with the expanded cities to her staff when we travel to tacoma, washington. american singer and actor being crosby was warned in 1903. learn more about tacoma, a weekend on american history tv. >> washington's importance in the suffrage movement comes from the fact that we were the first aid in the 20th century