20 Historic Infrastructure Mistakes That Still Cost Cities Today

Washington State hired engineer Leon Moisseiff to design the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge over Puget Sound. Moisseiff decided to use solid steel girders instead of open trusses to save money and make the bridge look sleeker, but the solid walls acted like sails and trapped the wind. Four months after opening, ordinary 42 mph winds triggered aeroelastic flutter, a self-feeding twisting vibration that snapped the main cables, and the bridge fell into the Sound. No people were killed, but a dog locked inside a car on the bridge sadly died.

Corporate treasurer Arthur Jell of United Industrial Alcohol directed the construction of a 50-foot steel molasses tank in the bustling North End of Boston. He didn’t consult an engineer once, and this proved to be a huge mistake. The steel walls were too thin, and the tank was never filled with water to test for leaks or structural weakness. Then, on a winter day in 1919, a sudden shift in temperature generated pressure inside, and the tank exploded. A wave of molasses crashed through the streets, killing 21 and injuring 150. The courts found serious flaws in both the steel and the tank’s construction, helping spur Massachusetts to require professional engineers to approve building plans.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, a private country club for wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists including Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, bought an old dam above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. To make room for a carriage road, the club lowered the top of the dam, reducing the amount of water it could safely hold. It also installed screens across the spillway to keep stocked fish from escaping, which restricted the flow of excess water. In 1889, heavy rains caused the lowered dam to overflow. The screens on the spillway prevented the water from escaping, and the dam failed, killing over 2,200 people when 20 million tons of water were released into the town below. The courts called it an act of God, and club members were not held financially liable.

William Mulholland, chief engineer of Los Angeles’s water department, designed the St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon without hiring an independent geologist to examine the site. One foundation abutment rested upon an ancient landslide, while the other was on rock containing an unstable layer of gypsum. Upon hearing of leaks, Mulholland came out to the dam personally and pronounced it safe. Hours later it collapsed, sending a wave downstream. An estimated 400 to 600 people died, and his career was ruined.

When Porfirio Díaz, the president of Mexico, was in power, a drainage canal was dug to carry away floodwaters from the lakebed. After the surface waters were removed, the expanding city began sucking groundwater out of the clay beneath it, which only made the clay denser. Within a few decades, central Mexico City subsided over 30 feet, and some sections still drop as much as 20 inches per year. Because the compressed clay cannot simply expand again, the damage is largely permanent. The sinking has even reversed the slope of the old drainage canal, forcing the city to pump water uphill to keep it moving.

Up until 1906, there was one private company that supplied San Francisco’s water. The 1906 earthquake broke hundreds of water mains, leaving firefighters without enough water to fight the fires. The fire raged for three days and caused way more destruction than the quake itself. To prevent this from ever happening again, San Francisco constructed a backup system of underground cisterns throughout the city, ensuring that firefighters wouldn’t be relying on one set of pipes.

From the Middle Ages into the 1700s, laborers mined limestone from beneath southern Paris to construct the city above. There was no central survey, and the miners left behind no support pillars or maps. Buildings and streets were built over the voids. A collapse on the Rue d’Enfer once swallowed houses, opening a wide hole in the street. To try to prevent such incidents, the architect Charles-Axel Guillaumot was commissioned by King Louis XVI to map and support the tunnels. The agency he founded has spent millions of dollars over the following centuries to create support pillars that keep the city from crumbling into its own mining voids.

Since Chicago had been constructed on low marshland by Lake Michigan, there were no raised streets. The roads became swampy mixes of mud and sewage. A cholera epidemic then claimed the lives of some 1,400 people, or about 2 percent of the population. City engineer Ellis S. Chesbrough promptly ordered the city’s downtown streets to be raised several feet. During the following 10 years, work crews used thousands of jackscrews to lift entire city blocks while laborers filled in the newly created space underneath them. Some buildings remained occupied during the process.

Beginning in the 1920s, a massive industrial zone named Porto Marghera was established in the lagoon behind Venice, Italy, requiring a steady supply of fresh water for its operations. Hundreds of wells were dug to extract groundwater, which allowed the surface to sink. For several decades, Venice sank several more inches beyond the natural rate. This led to more flooding, especially in St. Mark’s Square. The government of Italy eventually stopped the pumping and also constructed a flood barrier system to keep out the sea.

In 1941, the East Ohio Gas Company built a liquefied natural gas tank in a densely populated neighborhood in Cleveland, without the earthen containment walls typically surrounding these massive storage containers. A few years later, the company added more tanks, and one of the newer cylindrical tanks failed because its steel wall got too brittle in the extreme cold. More than one million gallons of gas leaked into the street and storm drains. When it vaporized and ignited, the resulting explosion and fire killed 130 people and devastated a square mile of the neighborhood.

In the early 19th century, the Collect Pond in Lower Manhattan was drained and filled over, but the groundwater springs were not diverted, nor was any drainage added under the fill. The result was that the area remained a soggy marsh, causing the foundations of the new buildings to crack and tilt, and residents began to leave. What was left became the notorious Five Points neighborhood. It took decades of major sanitation work to clean up the area.

While building a dam above Williamsburg, Massachusetts, factory owners hired a local builder, Lucius Stowe, rather than an engineer. Stowe laid the dam’s stone core in mud mortar on loose gravel, not bedrock, and the dam leaked for years without repair before it finally burst, sending a wave through four towns below and killing 139 people. Massachusetts soon passed the first dam inspection law in the country.

When engineer Edward Hatton designed a dam for the Bayless Pulp and Paper Company in Austin, Pennsylvania, he specified that it be anchored to the bedrock with steel bolts. But the company’s managers ignored the bolts, pouring the concrete right over the smooth rock to save money. Within months, the dam was already bending and sliding under the weight of the water, and the owners added a decorative top piece instead of shoring up the foundation. It eventually slid forward and collapsed, destroying 200 houses and killing 78 people.

Mayor John Bransford in 1909 ordered Salt Lake City to bury City Creek, a stream that flows down from the Wasatch Range, inside a concrete underground culvert, in order to eliminate minor flooding and to open up more property for development. However, the massive pipe was never intended to carry large amounts of solid material. Decades later, the spring snow melted at a rapid pace. Tons of mud, giant boulders, and trees were forced down the canyon, clogging the culvert and forcing the water to burst through manholes to the surface. Salt Lake City workers quickly constructed sandbags along State Street, creating a temporary flood channel that funneled the water into the Great Salt Lake.

In the late 19th century, as St. Louis began expanding west, factories and residences pumped untreated sewage into the River des Peres. The 18-mile natural waterway became an open sewer that frequently overflowed its banks. A voter-approved bond allowed engineer W.W. Horner to pave, straighten, and enclose the riverbed into concrete channels. Today, sections of the River des Peres flow below ground, and the lower reaches still exist as open, concrete-walled canals.

The city engineer of Seattle, Reginald H. Thomson, ordered the workers to use high-pressure water to blast Denny Hill apart. Dozens of city blocks were leveled as millions of cubic yards of loose soil were dumped into Elliott Bay to extend the waterfront. That uncompacted fill had been sinking unevenly for years. Marine worms had eaten through the wooden pilings on which the buildings stood, and a later earthquake exposed how vulnerable the fill and buildings had become. Together, these problems made it necessary to build a new seawall, at great expense.

London’s population exploded and flush toilets spread, so the old cesspools overflowed. The city government responded by putting natural waterways such as the River Fleet into brick sewers, which carried raw sewage into the tidal Thames. One very warm summer, the smell was so bad it created an event known as the Great Stink that brought Parliament to a halt. The engineer Joseph Bazalgette designed a network of intercepting sewers throughout London. Since this combined system took in both stormwater and sewage, London is now spending billions to build a massive tunnel to complete Bazalgette’s project.

While many major American cities had already begun phasing out lead pipes by the 1920s, Chicago hadn’t. The plumbers’ union Local 130 lobbied hard to keep a city code that required lead service lines to connect households to the water main, a code Chicago kept in place until the federal ban decades later. Consequently, Chicago currently has more lead service lines buried in the ground than any other US city, with replacement costs estimated in the billions.

Owens Lake in eastern California once had a water depth that supported steamship navigation. After Los Angeles Aqueduct engineer William Mulholland diverted the Owens River away from the lake, it shrank and essentially disappeared within about a decade and a half. The exposed lakebed is coated in arsenic and other heavy metals. When it dried out, windstorms turned it into North America’s largest source of fine particle pollution. Los Angeles has spent billions of dollars since then to flood, plant, and gravel the lakebed, trying to hold back the toxic dust.

In the Back Bay, builders filled in Boston’s tidal mudflats and drove untreated wooden piles into the mud to support new brick rowhouses. Wood remains solid indefinitely when submerged, deprived of oxygen. But 20th- century tunnels, construction, and droughts lowered the water table, allowing air to dry out and rot the tops of the piles. Today, it costs more than $100,000 just to shore up the foundation of one rowhouse.

This content was created with the help of AI.