Here is a link to another post with an article.
Lights on boat began to flicker before incident, suggesting some sort of power failure. Steering a full size car without power steering is possible, but spoiler, steering a huge container ship ain’t.
Someone commented that exhaust increased noticably as well, possibly because pilot put ship in reverse after losing power (with prop walk veering the ship into the support).
All just people talking on the Internet at present, but “asleep at the wheel” isn’t necessarily what happened.
Given how “easily” the bridge fell… Why aren’t ships that size required to 100% be escorted by tugs???
At the risk of sounding too Clarke and Dawe, it is very rare that a ship loses power and control, and somewhere it could hit something important, and hits that thing, and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces. It’s been there for 46 years, and the Port of Baltimore currently sees an average of 53 ships in and out per month, so about 3.5 big ships under the bridge per day. That’s a lot of passages over the years without incident.
and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces.
I mean, it just got hit with a hundred thousand ton hammer. That’ll do a pretty good number on most structures, I imagine.
no, this is you speaking my language. we do ‘risk assessments’ and yeah I guess it’s a case of severity*likelihood, where risk is never zero.
but, no matter what, when the risks ‘line up’ into a failure mode, holy shit is that failure catastrophic. crazy terrible regardless.
Cause then we would have to hire more people to tug all those ships in and it would be less efficient.
Not very profit margin of you to suggest that.
What’s the profit margin of the port with the river blocked? And of the city with a major road cut?
