News - Local News

POSTED: Sunday, Feb. 08, 2009

Anniversary of bridge sinking looms large for retired professor

Feb. 13 this year happens to be Friday the 13th.

It's also the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the Hood Canal floating bridge.

Not many people would have that anniversary fixed in their brain, but Billy Hartz does.

And while some people might presume a link between the sinking and a patch of bad luck, Hartz doesn't buy it.

Six months after the sinking, a state report said storm winds up to 120 mph, pulsing waves atop a high tide, and the movement of some anchors all proved too much for the bridge, so down it went.

Hartz says the storm was strong, but not that strong. In his own study issued a few months after the sinking, he concluded the bridge sank because too much water entered some pontoons, likely through open hatches, and because cable tendons designed to strengthen the bridge had frayed and corroded. In other words, poor maintenance was to blame.

"There was no way the (storm) stress was high enough to sink it," Hartz said. "All of this gets into higher politics, which I really hate."

A Bellingham resident the past six years, Hartz knows the bridge like few other people. A professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of Washington, he's a recognized expert on floating bridges, offshore drilling platforms and other structures.

Hartz served on the faculty at UW from 1955 until he retired, with emeritus status, in 1983. He studied the Hood Canal bridge as it was being built, after it opened in 1961, and after the western half sank that blustery Tuesday in 1979.

After the sinking, Hartz's students presented him with a custom T-shirt that said: "Gurglin' Gertie, World's Longest Underwater Bridge, Hood Canal, Washington."

While in Seattle, Hartz regularly bicycled to and from campus. Now 82, he suffers from a bad back, and walks gingerly through his small house crowded with stacks of books and lined with shelves packed with magazines, reports and family photos.

Mother Nature must be grateful that he's still well enough to fill the many bird feeders on his porch and in his front yard, and to offer peanuts to the bevy of trusting squirrels that snatch the treat from his outstretched fingers.

Hartz's expertise extends beyond big structures and small critters. In the 1980s, a toy company bought the rights to manufacture one of his several inventions, the Billy Board. Hartz created the device while trying to develop something to help people learn to snow ski.

The round, pivoting device resembles the twist board popularized by TV exercise star Jack LaLanne, but the Billy Board can be adjusted to spin with different degrees of tilt. Hartz's hoped-for windfall from the device didn't pan out, but it won praise from teachers and health experts and is still available for sale.

With his bushy eyebrows and full beard, Hartz bears a passing resemblance to the great Italian inventor Leonard da Vinci.

In 1986, a Seattle newspaper writer called Hart a "local Leonardo da Vinci of transit systems" for Hartz's proposed Terrafoil system for moving people quickly and cheaply in cities. Passenger would ride in bus-size compartments atop two thin struts propelled by wheeled, electric engines on a narrow underground track. No full-scale version has ever been built.

Jean Godden, a former Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist who lives part-time on Lummi Island, remembers Hartz well, even though it's been 23 years since she wrote about his Billy Board. She still has the board she bought from Hartz.

"He had a lot of credibility," Godden said. "Everyone thought of him as very much of a Renaissance man."