With five men dead, twelve injured, and neighborhoods cut off from gas and electricity, the collapse of the Division Street bridge in 1915 remains one of Spokane's worst disasters. In the wake of the tragedy, city planners began to place bridge safety at a higher priority.

It was a typical winter morning on December 18, 1915, as two streetcars began to cross the Spokane river via the Division Street bridge. When the cars met on the middle of the bridge, steel girders ripped from the bank. One streetcar hung up on the tangle of twisted metal beams, but the other plunged all the way into the icy Spokane River below. Sparking wires and twisted beams made rescue difficult, and five people drowned. Seventeen passengers scrambled and escaped the wreckage.

As conductor Murrow I. Davis later recalled, “In the darkness there was nothing we could do … all of us who made it were lucky to have come out alive.”

Initially, the city of Spokane was reluctant to accept responsibility for the bridge malfunction, with bridge designer Hugh L. Cooper claiming “I do not believe the design was in any way weak.” He instead attributed damages to natural causes and floods. However, a study by a civil engineer from Portland revealed the quality of the steel used for the bridge to be “inferior for the time.”

The scandal dominated local headlines for months, and the public came to agree that a concrete bridge should be the replacement. An editorial in the Spokesman-Review declared, “steel bridges are in the past … we are in the age of concrete.”

By 1917, just two years after the collapse, construction of the new Division Street bridge was completed. Supported by three large arches and over six hundred feet of concrete, the improved bridge served the city until its expansion in 1992 due to increasing traffic.

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In 1954, Spokane made international news when the entire city staged a drill for a nuclear attack

On a rainy spring morning in Spokane, the wailing cries of air raid sirens rang across downtown. Operation Walkout had begun, as thousands of employees and residents evacuated the downtown district on foot. They gathered at points where busses were to transport citizens away from the city to the shelter of the surrounding hills.

As the citizens fled, mock air attacks on the city were performed by military fighter planes. One bomber dropping a slew of pamphlets warning of the dangers of the hydrogen bomb. The Pentagon and city leaders considered the event to be a major success, as it was highly organized and publicized, with over 10,000 participants all cooperating effectively.

Though the goals of Operation Walkout had been met, this demonstration of readiness for a nuclear war was highly staged. The evacuation plan assumed that a substantial forewarning of an attack would take place, when, in reality, the warning for Spokanites could consist of only a few minutes. Additionally, the long-lasting effects of a nuclear fallout would cover most of the Spokane region, making life unsustainable regardless of attack survival. With these shortcomings in mind, later plans for survival shifted toward public fallout shelters where citizens could remain protected for an extended period of time.

Stockpiles of food and supplies were gathered and stored underground, with the largest and most successful public fallout shelter lying underneath the Bon Marché department store building. Though most public shelters could accommodate a few thousand evacuees, the Bon Marché topped them all, claiming to have enough supplies to host over 12,000 citizens.

The public fallout shelters of the 1960s provided a sense of security and hope for the people of Spokane. However, federal funding quickly began to decline due to the Vietnam conflict and the growth of détente in the 1970s. As a result, public shelters began to revert back to storage areas while stockpiles were redistributed to the Spokanites, including the massive stores of the Bon Marché fallout shelter. Today, only small remnants of these historic shelters remain under a choice few of Spokane’s downtown businesses.

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