A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water.
At about 1.30am, a vessel crashed into the bridge, catching fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the water below, according to a video posted on X.
“All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge. Traffic is being detoured,” the Maryland Transportation Authority posted on X.
Matthew West, a petty officer first class for the coastguard in Baltimore, told the New York Times that the coastguard received a report of an impact at 1.27am ET. West said the Dali, a 948ft (29 metres) Singapore-flagged cargo ship, had hit the bridge, which is part of Interstate 695.
All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge
All lanes no longer in existence on I-695 Key Bridge.
Seven people likely dead so far. What a horrible, terrifying way to go.
I’ve heard it was construction workers filling pot holes.
The bridge at crest is around 185 ft off the water, and footage shows the collapse took about 6 seconds where the cars were.
Imagine doing a mind numbing job in the dead of night and then all of a sudden the floor starts dipping below you. The street lights go out a second or two later, and not long after you’re falling for close to 2 seconds. Then either crashing hard into the concrete below you that just parted the water, having a flood of water hit you shortly after. or just jetting directly into freezing cold water.
How the fuck did this happen?
You’re making your regular commute, a bit annoyed with the sudden traffic backup, and then you’re suddenly falling with no warning, then struggling to not drown in your car.
It’s insane how everything can go from normal to terrifying. I hope those who lived through this have help coping, and am sorry for the victims and their families. It’s so tragic.
Nah, I’d say that it’s probably fast and even if you’re alive and conscious after you hit the water, you’re gonna drown pretty quickly. Probably one of the better ways to go.
Dying generally isn’t all that pleasant.
I used to think drowning was the worst until I heard two accounts of people who drowned and were resuscitated. They said it was terribly peaceful. I’m good with it now.
I technically drowned when I was 12 and being an idiot ‘riding’ waterfalls. I got sucked into a big crack in a rock and when my friends finally got me out I was clinically dead, and all of my fingernails were ripped in half from trying to claw my way out. All I can remember is abject fear, and then the burning as my lungs gave up.
I would rather die by almost any other means.
Didn’t die but passed out and had water in my lungs, didn’t do same as you but went in the rapids in a river swimming during the summer as a kid, large amount of rain and a tree fell. Got sucked up under it and was trapped between the branches and the river gravel. Burning lungs and my face feeling like it was being drug across a cheese grater is the only thing I remember. Horrifying way to go.
The investigation report is going to be interesting. While bridges can only take so much punishment, they are usually designed to survive some collisions with their pylons. I wonder what the state of the bridge was, prior to the collapse. If it’s anything like the rest of the infrastructure in the US, it was probably not good. Though, this may also be a case that the designers in the 70’s planned for a collision with a cargo vessel of the times, which were tiny bath tub boats compared to the super container ships we have now. The Dali was built in 2015 she is a 300m ship capable of carrying 116851 tons. That’s a lot of mass for the pylon and it’s barriers to stop.
I’m pretty sure no bridge is designed to survive a collision with a large cargo ship, even a brand new one. It would balloon the cost so much nobody would be willing to pay it.
New bridges are built with protections such as pylons to prevent ships from even getting close to bumping into the bridge after the sunshine skyway bridge collapse of 1980.
In this case I’m not sure it would have mattered. This wasn’t a bump or a glancing blow. There’s not much which will deflect or absorb that much energy head on.
I suspect there’ll be a lot of places taking a good long look at their current chunks of concrete they put around bridge supports and wondering how they’d stand up to the monstrous ships that are now the norm.
This kind of incident may not happen often but it does happen.
I imagine a lot of places may wonder about this and then kick that can down the road until someone does actually collide with their bridge.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/inspection/
I think you can look up certain characteristics such as this here, I’ve done it before and exported data into Excel when I was looking into something else. If this isn’t the specific site I apologize, I’m on mobile, but it is publicly available.
Edit: these links may be better:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/element.cfm
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/national-bridge-inventory-system-nbi
https://infobridge.fhwa.dot.gov/Data
https://geodata.bts.gov/datasets/5e58970e89934e818f38772859addf43_0/explore
This is the absolute dumbest shit I’ve seen in a while. And it’s said so confidently, kind of amazing.
This structure was hit head on by a laden container ship. Container ships weigh between 50,000 and 200,000 tons depending on size and cargo. There is not a structure capable of being created by man which could sustain that amount of force, head on, and retain its structural integrity.
Buncha armchair idiots think they know more about bridge construction than civil engineers. Gods, this place is just more and more like Reddit by the minute.
I live not five minutes away from the Key bridge and the sound of this woke me up last night. My GF takes this bridge to work every day. Driving through the city now for her every morning is going to be fucking awful.
I watched it on the news last night all the way from Australia and I said ‘man they just fucked that whole cities traffic up for a long time’.
Yeah, IIRC it is the route for hazmat trucks. Gonna fuck with a lot of businesses down the line for a bit too.
As an aside, they used to have a rave down in the park under the west side of the bridge a decade or so ago, and it was always awesome being on the beach stage looking at that bridge at night and as the sun would come up.
The construction workers that died is fucking awful. The traffic situation won’t be great, but at least she’s alive with a job to go to.
Most people would take that as a given. He was just pointing out the effect on his own personal life.
It would be pretty annoying if everyone shared their own effect but had to precede it with a standard “I know it’s more awful for those with lives lost, but this affects me because…”
I’m just glad it happened in the dead of night and that the ship sent a mayday several minutes before it happened. State Police were apparently able to close the bridge and clear most of the traffic (it’s 1.6 miles/ 2.6 kilometers long) off of it before it collapsed. It’s sad that there were still construction workers and some cars still left on it, though.
Crazy. Even with the mayday I’m amazed they could get police in position fast enough.
Maryland has the MTA police (tunnel rats) who are in charge of the toll roads (originally just the tunnels but it’s expanded) so I’m sure there there MTA cops lurking about. Thank God they jumped to action.
According to WP, it was still pretty quick. They had about two or three minutes from loss of power to collision. That had the pilot assess the situation, call a mayday and request the bridge be closed, dispatch to order the cops to act, and them to act. Then it had to take time for the bridge to clear.
One cop said on the radio that as soon as he got the traffic shut off, he was going to go evacuate the bridge workers, which obviously they didn’t have time to do, but that was still quick. I would not have expected that to have happened so rapidly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_collapse
Dali left the Port of Baltimore at 12:44 a.m. EDT (04:44 UTC) on March 26, 2024,[24] bound for Colombo, Sri Lanka.[25] Two local pilots were piloting the ship.[10] At 1:26 a.m.,[26] the ship suffered a “complete blackout” and began to drift out of the shipping channel (a backup generator did not power the propulsion system).[13] The ship dropped its anchors as part of its emergency procedures.[3] At about 1:26 a.m., a mayday call was made from the ship,[26] notifying the Maryland Department of Transportation that control of the vessel had been lost and that a collision with the bridge was possible, citing loss of propulsion.[1] One of the pilots requested that traffic be stopped from crossing the bridge immediately.[3][27][28][29] The ship’s lights went out and came on again some moments later; the lights then went off again and powered back on immediately before impact as renewed smoke spewed from its funnel.[10][30] Following the pilot’s request, Maryland Transportation Authority Police dispatch requested officers to stop traffic in both directions at 1:27:53 a.m. Northbound traffic was stopped at the south side after 20 seconds. Southbound traffic was stopped at the north side at 1:28:58 a.m., with less than 30 seconds before collapse.[31]
At 1:28 a.m.,[32] the ship struck a support column of the bridge, beneath its metal truss and at the south-west end of its largest span, at 8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph).[11] AIS data shows the ship traveling at a speed of 8.7 knots (16.1 km/h; 10.0 mph) at 1:25 a.m. before departing the channel and slowing to 6.8 knots (12.6 km/h; 7.8 mph) by the time of the collision two minutes later.[30][33]
I’m so confused why a mayday wasn’t sent out earlier though. Like they had to have known collision was imminent.
And weren’t there local authorities on board that were guiding them through the waterway?
They lost power, dropped anchor, and called a mayday. By the sound of it the pilot probably did everything perfect. But whatever caused the power loss and engine failure is gonna be looked at very closely.
I think new procedures for having tugs hooked up until ships are entirely clear of port may be on their way - even if they’re mostly just escorts unless the ship’s engines fail.
There’s gonna be a lot of pointing fingers and yelling, but hopefully in the end things will be safer than they are today. From the sound of it we got really lucky on the “lives lost” side of things.
I’m so confused why a mayday wasn’t sent out earlier though. Like they had to have known collision was imminent.
Prolly something like:
“Aww nah, theres no need m8, I’m sure we’ll figure something out”
I’ve heard the same thing with another issue
It’s sad that there were still construction workers and some cars still left on it, though.
Hopefully police told the people to evacuate their vehicles
Unfortunately, it would’ve simply been faster for them to drive to either end of the bridge. The Maryland Department of Transportation had already closed the bridge. The only traffic left on the bridge was the traffic that got through before the closure, but everything happened so fast I don’t think they had time to get off the bridge.
One article I read said that the mayday call, the bridge closure, the collision, and the collapse all happened in the span of about two minutes.
