Perhaps the most iconic image from Legend is the ravaged Brooklyn bridge, its middle span destroyed by a bomb to quarantine New York in one of the film's crucial action sequences. "The middle span is gone up to the towers, and from the towers on, you can still see the suspension cables, the vertical cables and the deck [from the towers to the shores]. That's a bit odd," says Dr. Michel Bruneau, Director of the Multi-Disciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research and a professor of structural engineering at SUNY Buffalo, because of the way suspension bridges are designed.

The cables are run from the shore to the first tower, then to the second tower, and then to the opposite shore; vertical cables hang from the main cable and are attached to the bridge deck at various intervals to support it. In reality, taking out the cables in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge would cause all the spans to collapse, not just the middle; only the towers would remain standing. And even if the cables were somehow fixed to the top of the towers -- which they're not -- and the bridge was bombed, "it would pull the tower significantly laterally, and I don't think the tower could stand those sorts of forces," Bruneau says. "I suppose a writer could imagine a scenario where the cable was welded there, or got jammed or stuck there by debris, but that's science fiction."

First published

on December 14, 2007

at the Popular Mechanics website.

Written by Erin McCarthy.

Posted by Vladimir Fri, 12/21/2007 - 19:48

 

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