Bridge Collapse Kills Seven Great Northern Railroad Workers
A temporary construction span on the Wenatchee River failed under the weight of a heavy train, plunging workers sixty feet into the water.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
One of the most appalling accidents in the history of Washington railroads occurred this morning at the point where the Great Northern crosses the Wenatchee River. The bridge over that stream collapsed while a construction train was crossing. Seven men were killed outright, five fatally injured, and six others so seriously hurt that some of them may die. The calamity came without a moment's warning. The west span was directly over the channel of the river, in which the water was about three feet deep. When the temporary structure was built across the river earlier in the season, piles were driven through gravel to support the heavy timbers. When the water rose, some of these piles were pushed out of line, and they twisted the upper timbers in such a manner that the whole structure became wobbly and much too frail to support the weight of a train. In falling, a single flatcar plunged through the chasm and fell bottom upward in water, throwing rails and a derrick in every direction. The other cars were precipitated to the riverbed on top of the men who had gone down with the first car.
“The calamity came without a moment's warning, and while the men were hard at work, unmindful of the danger of which they knew nothing.”
This disaster highlights the extreme danger inherent in the rapid, often reckless, expansion of the Pacific Northwest's rail infrastructure. Today, bridges are engineered with far stricter safety margins, though the tension between corporate speed-to-market and public safety remains a central theme in regional labor history.
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