Accident
On 25 October 1960, there was thick fog and a strong tide; two barges carrying petroleum (the Arkendale H and the Wastdale H) overshot Sharpness Dock, were carried upstream and collided with one of the columns of the bridge. Two spans of the 22-span steel and cast iron bridge collapsed. Part of the structure hit the barges, setting fire to them. Five people died in the incident. In February 1961 a further span collapsed.
The Western Region of British Railways planned to reconstruct the bridge but after further damage to the bridge in 1961, it considered the bridge to be damaged beyond economic repair. Following the accident, schoolchildren who had used the bridge daily had to be taken to school on a 40-mile detour via Gloucester.
Read more about this topic: Severn Railway Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word accident:
“Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment,—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)