A photo posted earlier this week on the History & Genealogy of Cooperstown, Pennsylvania’s Facebook page has garnered a bit of attention.
The photo is of the 1969 Good Friday bridge collapse in Cooperstown. The caption reads “Oren Hicks of Cooperstown was driving over the Cooperstown bridge when it collapsed.”
An April 5, 1969, article in the Standard-Speaker newspaper in Hazelton said “the 65-foot steel bridge collapsed under the weight of a tractor-trailer loaded with lumber, the second such incident in western Pennsylvania this week.” It continued, “The bridge and truck dropped into the two-foot water of Sugar Creek, but the driver … crawled from the cab of the truck and escaped uninjured.”
“It was like hitting an air pocket in an airplane,” said Hicks, an employee of Overmoyer Lumber of Cooperstown. He said the steel bridge, paved with blacktop, collapsed when the truck was in the middle of the span.
