The Big Dig – Ashtabula Train Disaster Site

[00:00.000] On August 27, 2013, a team of scientists, historians, and archaeologists arrived at the Ashtabula Bridge Disaster Rec Site in an attempt to locate a piece of the Ashtabula Bridge to be sent back to Case Western Reserve University for study. They were also looking for large wreck items buried deep in the ground that have avoided [00:32.160] metal detectors for years. Three years ago, Fritz Kunzel and David Tobias spotted what was believed to be a large cast-iron angle block buried in the river's rocky sediment. However, it was too heavy to be removed and carried out by hand, so it was covered up and left to recover another day. Unfortunately, heavy rains, powerful river currents, and flash floods moved the object, and it has not been seen or detected since. [01:08.720] The goal was to find and recover the cast-iron angle block for further study. It was the angle block in the second panel of the upper court that was said to have failed and caused the Ashtabula Bridge to collapse. Will the American Society of Civil Engineers report of 1877 agree with modern science? The wreck site is a one-mile walk through the woods. Once they arrived, Dr. Don Stearman from the University of Toledo and his two graduate students began measuring and laying out a search grid. [01:41.800] This kind of magnetometer uses subatomic particles, the spin of the subatomic particles, as its signal. They apply a magnetic field to line them all up like soldiers, then they take off the field and they begin to precess like a top, and they precess at a frequency proportional to the magnetic field. The remarkable thing about this instrument, it measures the entire magnetic field of the earth to six significant figures, and if you tried green measurements, that's a lot of precision. [02:19.640] The reason we use a magnetometer in this type of application is that we're looking for something magnetic. Iron is magnetic, it distorts the earth's field, so when we get close to something magnetic, we start to see its distortion of the earth's field, and it gives us what you see when you take a bar magnet into a classroom, a little light and some force, and so we'll measure the highs and the lows, and then we can determine that there's a buried object here to sometimes within a couple of feet once we make our contour map. [02:56.200] Two people that have been recovering and cataloging artifacts from this site for the past 41 years are railroad historians David Tobias and Fritz Kunzel. Together, these two men have been saving and preserving the history and memory of the disaster for future generations. Their collections contain buckets full of thousands of recovered artifacts that need to be sorted, identified, cataloged, and preserved. Well, my part of the story is when I was younger, we used to sneak out from the home and come down here and play in the golf, and then at some point I found an old pocket knife, and [03:32.680] I brought it home, and somehow somebody told me about the Ashtabule Bridge disaster, and from that point on I pretty much was hooked. The first time I came down here was back in 2001, I was with a friend, and we were under the West Arch and he found a broken coupling pin, and I found a piece of broken rail, and then shortly afterwards I picked up a copy of the Bliss and Tragedy book, and I was just totally, I thought it was fantastic, it was a great book, and I saw David's chapter in it, and I thought, boy, we've got something in common, and I've got to talk to this guy, and I thought, there's got to be stuff down here yet, and so I've been coming down here [04:09.560] never since, and I can't get away from the place. Once the survey grid was marked, Professor Steerman began walking the area with his magnetometer. After he collects his data into the magnetometer's computer, he will take this information back to the university to give us a magnetic map of the area with targets of interest to dig. In the meantime, Professor Steerman marked areas of interest with flags so we could dig with a backhoe while the weather was cooperating. [04:44.880] For our dig, the river was the lowest it's been all season and was the only time we would be able to get a backhoe in the area before the fall rains start. Professor Steerman felt he had found at least one target and several other small targets for us to dig. If he did find the missing angle block, it will take a backhoe to remove it. The first hole we dug was the large target Professor Steerman marked. After digging a five-foot hole, we found nothing, and we were all confused. [05:24.760] Professor Steerman and his team already left for the long drive back to Toledo, so there was nothing left for us to do but fill back in the hole and move to our next targets. After digging nine targets, we came up empty-handed. Now there was nothing left to do but wait for the survey results from the computer. Well we came down here and did a lot of digging, but unfortunately we didn't find anything. But we did give it the good old college try. [06:01.680] So I'm a little bit disappointed, but that's how it goes sometimes. Two days later, Professor Steerman's map arrived via email. As I studied the map, I quickly realized we had marked and dug the wrong areas. None of the areas we dug matched the survey map's magnetic targets. One target in particular was very large. Could this be the missing bridge piece? I quickly contacted the other team members, and a week later we returned to the site. This time we were armed with Professor Steerman's map. [06:37.320] However, a huge storm hit the week before, and it was unsafe to take the backhoe to the wreck site. This time we had to dig by hand. The first area we attempted was the largest target on the map. [07:01.480] The metal detectors hit a target, and it's registering iron. The target is not what we had hoped for. Unfortunately it was a large piece of iron slag. The waste of a blacksmith's foundry from the time the bridge was being constructed. [07:36.920] Fritz tried to break it open, just to make sure there was nothing inside. No such luck, which confirms it's solid slag iron. Next we began digging other areas under the bridge, but this time we hit a lucky streak. Each hole we dug, artifacts were recovered. Track bolt. [08:11.280] Look at the iron strand, it's really old, it's been here for a while. It's got the iron strands in it, and it's still got part of a lock washer on it. That could be the other part of the bolt, but here it looks like it might be the same [08:50.600] size. It can't be really tough, it's a hex. I can see a piece of rust right there, oh that's a bolt, okay I saw some of this, that's a bolt like that first one found. [09:24.880] I wish we could identify it, it's not a track bolt, so it might be a switch. It's like that other one we found, it's got the strand-y look to it, here we go, the nasty rusty piece of iron. [09:56.480] It's a two bolt fish plate from the, we held the rail together, it probably came off the bridge and how long it was reported so that the rail on the bridge had two bolts of fish plate, so that's an interesting piece. In an area where the Columbia steam engine had fallen and laid that terrible knife, frisk [10:35.200] hit a large target and started to dig. It's interesting, that's a Lincoln fin face plate from a drawfish, pretty much chunk of iron. If it broke, if it broke out here there would have been another piece like the bottom, it would have been fastened in here, it came over, then this hole right here, the coupling would have went down in, but that's pretty, a big find. [11:36.960] We're going to try David's top Lincoln and see how it fits in that, the drawhead hole, and the depth of the bend that are from the links pulling back and forth and over here is the use. We're going to check out this coupling fin and see how it fits with this old, the trough [12:15.080] at the base plate, and of course it fits right in the hole at a particular height, so that would have been the style it was used in there. The hole is actually big down, you can see how it's worn from, you know, slack action because it's rained over the years, it just opened itself out in there, and that's how it went like that, of course it fits in the bottom part. Barbara Hamilton, vice president of the Jefferson Historical Society, suddenly caught the artifact [12:51.880] finding bug along with her husband Bill, so they started digging as well. It was a great day, we had recovered a number of artifacts that had been lost for 136 years, however we didn't find the missing bridge angle block yet, is it still there, or did metal salagers find it before we could? The search continues.