The Truesdell bridge tragedy in Dixon, Ill., 150 years ago Thursday, remains the worst vehicular-bridge disaster in American history.
“You could look down and see their faces. They couldn’t get to the surface because all that iron was on top of them,” Wadsworth said. “It’s frightening to look down, but to look up and to see daylight, to be only 12 inches from air?”
But contemporary women’s fashion might also be to blame, Wadsworth theorizes. The 1870s ushered in a heavy, layered bustle at the rear of floor-length dresses supported underneath by a crinolette, a series of fabric-covered metal half-hoops.Advertisement Several bodies were recovered miles away. Lizzie Mackey, 17, was recovered at Sterling, 14 miles downstream. The youngest victims were sisters Alphea and Lucia Hendrix, ages 6 and 4, according to Patrick Gorman, another student of the tragedy who helped raise money in 2011 for a marker listing the names of the fatalities.Pratt was wracked by guilt, admitting he had detained the crowd longer than necessary to extol the benefits of “coming to Jesus.” But he was a hero that day.
A century-and-a-half later, Truesdell’s casualties keep it atop the worst failures of vehicular bridges in American history. The foundering of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River from Ohio to West Virginia in 1967 also claimed 46 lives but there were nine injuries compared with 56 in Dixon.The horrific 1981 collapse of a Kansas City hotel’s pedestrian walkways resulted in 114 deaths, the most of any crumbled span in U.S. history.
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