Just a Crack

Growing up in Seattle, I thought bridge collapses were a local legend. Everyone here knows about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge — Galloping Gertie, as it was called — the one that famously twisted and buckled in the wind just months after it opened in 1940. We learned about it in school. We watched that eerie black‑and‑white film of the deck waving like a ribbon until it finally tore itself apart and plunged into Puget Sound.

It was an engineering failure, plain and simple — a dramatic example of what happens when science meets hubris. For years, I assumed that was the bridge collapse, the one that taught us all the lessons we needed to learn.

It turns out, there was another. Far less famous, but in many ways, more haunting.

On December 15, 1967, in a small Ohio River town called Point Pleasant, people were doing what people everywhere do in mid‑December — running errands, driving home from work, picking up Christmas gifts. The Silver Bridge was packed that evening, linking Point Pleasant, West Virginia to Gallipolis, Ohio.

Then, right around five o’clock, something cracked. Witnesses heard what sounded like a gunshot, followed by a low, metallic groan. Within moments, the entire bridge — all 1,700 feet of it — folded in on itself and dropped into the icy river below.

Thirty‑one vehicles went down with it. Forty‑six people died.

The cause wasn’t wind, or weight, or even age. It was a single fracture in a single eyebar, one of the steel links in the bridge’s suspension chain. The crack was no wider than the thickness of a dime — about one‑tenth of an inch deep.

That microscopic flaw, invisible from the outside, had been slowly growing for nearly four decades. And because the bridge’s design had no redundancy — no backup system to share the load if something failed — that one hidden crack doomed the entire structure.

Engineers called it “stress corrosion cracking.” A small imperfection, exposed to time, weather, and pressure, expanded until the steel could no longer carry the weight. The bridge didn’t fail all at once. It failed over time, quietly, until the moment came when the stress exceeded its strength.

The Silver Bridge changed how America builds and inspects infrastructure. Engineers realized that redundancy isn’t optional — it’s essential. You can’t build a structure to last if its survival depends on everything going perfectly forever.

And that, to me, sounds a lot like personal finance.

A portfolio can be designed beautifully — diversified, balanced, well‑researched — and still carry an unseen vulnerability. It might be a single concentrated stock position that’s quietly grown too large. Or an assumption about steady income that hasn’t been revisited in years. Or an overreliance on one type of investment because it’s “always done well.”

At first, it’s just a hairline crack — barely noticeable, easy to ignore. Everything seems stable. But over time, pressure builds: markets shift, interest rates rise, expenses creep up. What once seemed sturdy can suddenly give way, all because of a tiny flaw that went unexamined.

That’s the challenge with both bridges and portfolios: failure rarely starts big. It starts small — with something hidden, overlooked, or assumed safe.

When I think about financial planning, I think about redundancy. The idea that no single piece of your financial life should carry the entire load. A healthy portfolio doesn’t depend on one stock, one asset class, one job, or one assumption holding up forever.

Redundancy is diversification. It’s cash reserves. It’s insurance. It’s rebalancing. It’s the quiet, unglamorous work that makes the whole system resilient — not because nothing will ever go wrong, but because something inevitably will, and the rest can carry the load when it does.

Engineers now refer to “fracture‑critical” designs — systems where the failure of one part can cause total collapse. They avoid them whenever possible. Yet many people unknowingly build their financial lives that way: one source of income, one big bet, one assumption about the future. All it takes is a small, invisible defect — an illness, a job change, a market downturn — and the structure gives out.

The lesson of the Silver Bridge isn’t just that steel fails. It’s that confidence can, too. The people driving across that bridge had no reason to doubt it. It had stood for nearly forty years. It looked fine. Until the moment it wasn’t.

When I talk with clients about financial planning, I’m not interested in perfection. I’m interested in durability — in building something that can absorb stress, withstand change, and keep standing even when one small part cracks.

Because no one can predict every failure. But we can design lives, plans, and portfolios that don’t depend on everything going perfectly. We can build redundancy into the system — and that makes all the difference between a setback and a collapse.

Every time I cross a bridge now, I think of both Galloping Gertie and the Silver Bridge. One failed because it was too flexible; the other because it wasn’t flexible enough. Both remind me that strength isn’t the same as resilience — and that sometimes the smallest flaw, left unaddressed, can bring down even the strongest design.

The same is true in finance. The strongest portfolios aren’t the ones that look indestructible. They’re the ones that can survive a crack.