Upon seeing my home bridge again, it occurred to me that there was probably an entire generation of fuddy-duddies who refused to use suspension bridges back when they were first built, saying things like "Look how thin those metal ropes are, they'll snap as soon as there's a traffic jam or a big storm. Give me a good stone bridge or iron trestle and I'll be fine. Or a ferry. What's wrong with a ferry?"
And indeed there was! In 1883 P.T. Barnum was hired to march his entire collection of 21 circus elephants across the then-new Brooklyn bridge to prove it was safe. No amount of engineers' hand-calculated finite element analysis of working load could compete with the PR value of 200,000 pounds of elephant for a load test.
This is similar to CERN having sheep on their LHC ground when we were there. The PR value of sheep living and grazing was higher than any PSA that the physicists could come up with about LHC’s radioactive safety.
