A Notable Date In Civil Engineering

December 28, 1795:

Construction of Yonge Street, formerly recognized as the longest street in the world, begins in York, Upper Canada (present-day Toronto, Ontario).  Yonge Street was formerly a part of Highway 11, which led to claims that Yonge Street was the longest street in the world. Running from the shores of Lake Ontario, through central and northern Ontario to the Ontario-Minnesota border at Rainy River, together they were over 1,896 kilometres (1,178 mi) long. But Yonge Street could only be called the longest street in the world if "Highway 11" and "Yonge Street" were synonymous, which is not the case...The Guinness Book of World Records no longer lists Yonge Street as the longest street in the world, citing instead the Pan-American Highway as the world's longest "motorable road".

December 28, 1879:

 The Tay Bridge Disaster: The central part of the Tay Rail Bridge in Dundee, Scotland collapses as a train passes over it, killing 75. Investigators quickly determined many faults in design, materials, and processes that had contributed to the failure. Bouch claimed to have received faulty information regarding wind loading, but his later statements indicated that he may have made no allowance for wind load at all. Bouch had been advised that calculating wind loads was unnecessary for girders shorter than 200 feet (61 m), and had not followed this up for his new design with longer girders.
The section in the middle of the bridge, where the rail ran inside high girders (through trusses), rather than on top of lower ones (deck trusses), to allow a sea lane below high enough for the masts of ships, was potentially top heavy and very vulnerable to high winds. Neither Bouch nor the contractor appeared to have regularly visited the on-site foundry where iron from the previous half-built bridge was recycled. The cylindrical cast iron columns supporting the 13 longest spans of the bridge, each 245 ft (75 m) long, were of poor quality. Many had been cast horizontally, with the result that the walls were not of even thickness, and there was some evidence that imperfect castings were disguised from the (very inadequate) quality control inspections.
In particular, some of the lugs used as attachment points for the wrought iron bracing bars had been "burnt on" rather than cast with the columns. However, no evidence of the burnt-on lugs has survived, and the normal lugs were very weak. They were tested for the Inquiry by David Kirkaldy and proved to break at only about 20 long tons (20 t) rather than the expected load of 60 long tons (61 t). These lugs failed and destabilised the entire centre of the bridge during the storm.