Galloping Gertie

Lacey V. Murrow is something of a forgotten name today. While he does have a bridge named after him, that bridge is more commonly referred to as the Lake Washington Floating Bridge from Seattle to the east side of the lake. That bridge was twenty seven years old when it was officially named after Murrow in 1967. Murrow was in charge of the Washington Department of Transportation in 1940, while his brother Edward was off in London. Today Lacey is barely remembered.

The Lake Washington Floating Bridge was a daring bridge project in 1940, but it was not the only advanced bridge in the state to open that year. A few miles to the south a bridge was built from Tacoma at the east end to Gig Harbor on the west. Across the Tacoma Narrows.

The Narrows Bridge opened on July 1, 1940. Rather than use the heavy and expensive techniques of a girder bridge as would be needed for a train trestle, it was a suspension bridge. Such a bridge would be much lighter, less expensive, and easier to construct that a girder bridge. However, there were many things that were not understood at the time. While a girder bridge would have gaps through which wind could pass, the Narrows Bridge was constructed with solid sheets. I once read an engineering book that stated that one particular branch of technology made great advances from the Narrows Bridge: aeronautics. Before 1940, engineers knew that airplane wings worked, but they didn’t have a complete understanding as to why. They learned that from the bridge, which quickly earned the name “Galloping Gertie.”

On November 7, 1940, the wind was a bit heavier than the bridge had ever withstood before. There was a cameraman there to catch what happened.



I had seen these films on TV back in the 1960’s. Not having a color TV at the time, and knowing that the film was from 1940, I always thought the film was in black in white. I had seen it several times over the years, always in black and white. It was not until the late 1990s that I discovered that the film was in color – and it is fascinating.

Over the years I picked up a couple of interesting tales about that day in long-ago November.

It was a toll bridge, with the tollbooths on the east, or Tacoma side. Due to the lay of the land, the bridge could not really be seen from the booths. A State Patrolman saw what was happening from the Gig Harbor side, but he could not contact the Tacoma side to close off traffic from that side. He had to radio the Washington State Patrol office in Bremerton, who called the office in Seattle, who call the office in Tacoma, at which point the bridge was closed from the east side.

The other story is about radio coverage given to the event. Max Bice was the engineer for radio station KMO in Tacoma. He was also an amateur radio operator, or ham. KMO was affiliated with the Mutual Radio Network. Max knew this would be a story that the entire country would want to hear – but the station had no equipment to broadcast live from the scene. He installed a ham receiver at the studio and took a ham transmitter to the site. Max knew that it was against the law to broadcast amateur transmissions (you may remember this issue during the Granada situation in the 1980s), but he did not know what else to do. He called the FCC agent in charge in Seattle to see what could be done. The agent told Max, “If no one complains, I don’t know anything about it. If someone complains, I have to throw the book at you.”

No one ever complained, and the Mutual Network had live coverage of the event .

It took ten years before the bridge was rebuilt, this time incorporating the lessons of 1940.

And what about the Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge? In 1989 engineers started to constructed a twin bridge to carry more traffic on I-90 between Seattle and the east side. The new bridge opened and the old bridge was closed for much-needed repairs. On Thanksgiving Day, 1990, someone left a hatch open on one of the floating pontoons. For some reason, Thanksgiving Day in Seattle has a tendency to have some rough weather. The lake surface was choppy and water flooded the pontoon – causing the bridge to sink. After just over fifty years, the original Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge sunk into the waters of western Washington – just as Murrow’s other big project of 1940 had done.