The Tacoma Bridge… and Other Planning Disas ters By Scott Johns
Scott Johns is the sole member of Johns Law Firm PLLC with offices in Juno Beach and Stuart, Florida.
the bridge was constructed caused the windward side of the bridge to experience torsion, and the pattern of air flow under the bridge exacerbated the problem, generating “lift” underneath the bridge. (Think what would happen to an airplane if the end of the wing away from the plane were welded to a wall: the wing would try to lift and ultimately rip off of the wall.) In short, although the bridge may have “looked fine” when viewed in splendid isolation, the design of the bridge didn’t account for how aeroelastics (more basically, physics) would stress and eventually destroy the bridge once a sustained gust of wind came along. This article is meant to address a similar concept in estate plans: Things that may look or sound good conceptually on paper may collapse the moment you start stress-testing them with real-world applications.
Family Members Serving as Trustee, or “How to Ruin Thanksgiving Dinner” “Say not you know another entirely till you have divided an inheritance with him.” —Johann Kaspar Lavater We’ve all heard some iteration of the phrase “don’t mix business with pleasure” sometime in our lives. A more specific application of that sentiment, directed towards trusteeships, is this: Don’t select a trustee who risks damaging a positive personal relationship with a beneficiary by simply doing the trustee’s job. When discussing naming family members to serve as trustee of trusts for the benefit of other family members, we’re necessarily discussing the imposition of a business-type
Published in Probate & Property, Volume 36, No 4 © 2022 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.
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July/August 2022
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he Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a suspension bridge in Tacoma, Washington, that opened in the summer of 1940 and connected the city of Tacoma to the Kitsap peninsula. Barely four months after being opened to vehicle traffic, the bridge started “fluttering” violently during a sustained wind event and ultimately collapsed into Puget Sound. From the moment the bridge was placed into service, people noticed that the bridge would move and warp vertically during windy conditions, which is not something you want from a bridge. Without getting deep into the physics, the problem was that the manner in which
