Charles P. Vogel was proud of the Silver Bridge.
Vogel, resident engineer in charge of constructing the span's superstructure, was the first person to drive an automobile across the new bridge, built to connect Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Kanauga, Ohio. He drove across the span on May 2, 1928, two weeks before it was opened to traffic and nearly a month before its official dedication on May 30.
His feat -- which required timbers to be laid across several gaps in the bridge's uncompleted floor -- was celebrated with a photograph published in the Gallipolis Daily Tribune.
In the photo, Vogel, who worked for the J.E. Greiner Co., a Baltimore engineering firm, can be seen standing beside the car that he drove across the bridge. Seated on the car's front bumper is George Cumpston of the American Bridge Co., who was responsible for the steelwork in the bridge.
Vogel's grandchildren -- Steve Vogel of Decatur, Ga., and Marti Vogel of Charleston -- recall hearing the pride in their late grandfather's voice when he talked about the important role he played in constructing the Silver Bridge.
"But he also voiced a concern," says Marti Vogel. "Because the bridge was so unusual in its design he worried that it might not get the careful scrutiny and care he knew it would require."
That concern proved well placed.
At about 5 p.m. on Dec. 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge was crowded with rush hour traffic when it suddenly collapsed, taking with it dozens of cars and trucks and claiming the lives of 46 victims. It took only a few seconds for the bridge to fall like a row of dominoes.
The Silver Bridge -- so named because it was the first bridge in the area to be painted with shiny aluminum paint -- was built with an innovative eyebar-link suspension system rather than traditional wire-cable suspension. An exhaustive investigation into the collapse by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that one of the eyebars had failed, first developing a tiny hidden crack and ultimately fracturing.
An account of the tragedy on the West Virginia Department of Transportation's web site quotes the NTSB report as saying the minute crack "was inaccessible to visual inspection" and could not have been detected "by any... method... without disassembly of the eyebar joint" -- a practical impossibility.
Ironically, the Greiner Co. had submitted a proposal calling for construction of the Point Pleasant bridge with traditional wire-cable suspension.
Shortly after the bridge fell, the Associated Press quoted Edward J. Donnelly, a partner in the Greiner Co., as saying that the local private investors who built the bridge -- later sold to the state of West Virginia -- rejected the wire-cable proposal in favor of a cheaper alternative design offered by the American Bridge Co.
This was the eyebar design that was used. Donnelly said his company had constructed a bridge of similar design in Brazil but the Silver Bridge was the first of its type to be built in this country.
Even though its own design proposal had been turned down, the Greiner Co. approved the eyebar design and signed a contract to supervise construction of the bridge.
Charles P. Vogel, who lived in Huntington at the time, was employed by Greiner as resident engineer on three Ohio River bridges built and opened in a short span of years -- Huntington's Sixth Street Bridge in 1926, the U.S. Grant Bridge in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1927, and the Silver Bridge in 1928.
All three bridges are gone now. The Silver Bridge collapsed in 1967. Sixth Street Bridge, a steel truss design, was demolished in 1995. The Grant Bridge in Portsmouth was a wire-cable suspension span that was demolished in 2001.
"My grandfather was born in Baltimore and was educated in the schools there," Steve Vogel said. "He earned his engineering degree from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute." Before joining the Greiner Co., he was with the construction department of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for 15 years.
The Gallipolis Daily Tribune reported that when Vogel took over at the Silver Bridge construction site, he succeeded another Greiner employee, J.W. Richardson, who had been transferred to St. Marys, W.Va., where the company was overseeing construction of another Ohio River span being built from the same eyebar design as the Silver Bridge.
In the wake of the Silver Bridge collapse, the Hi Carpenter Bridge at St. Marys was temporarily closed as a precautionary measure. It was demolished in 1971 after engineers decided there was no way of telling if it suffered from the same fatal flaw as the Silver Bridge.
Steve Vogel recalls his grandfather later left the Greiner Co. and worked for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. He died in 1976 in Beckley, where his son, Phil Vogel, was a popular radio personality. Steve and Marti Vogel are the children of Phil Vogel and his wife Dorothy. Steve is an Atlanta area financial adviser. Mari, who once worked at The Herald-Dispatch and later the Charleston Daily Mail, moved to New Orleans, where she was a copy editor for the Times Picayune newspaper until she recently retired and moved back to Charleston.
James E. Casto was a reporter and editor with The Herald-Dispatch for more than 40 years before he retired in 2004. He is the author of more than a half dozen books on local and regional history.
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