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.
which is a prime example of a why a bridge built in a shipping lane should be built to stricter standards that would prevent a total fucking collapse from a errant ship.
For sure, and furthermore the city should have some sort of tugboats capable of stopping a rogue ship if it had time to give out a mayday. Just attach a line to the back of the hull when it enters the channel and give throttle in the opposite direction to halt it.
EDIT: People downvoting like “snort small ship not pull big ship, so dumb”
“Bridges should be built to resist entirely predictable accidents”
Lemmy: “angry, incoherent screaming”
There was a live-stream where you can scrub to the minute where the bridge is gone (1:28:43 by the time-stamp inside of the video, not the YT timestamp). The Ship apparently lost all the lights 2-3 times shortly before impact. Maybe it was a problem with that. We also noticed a lot of hacking activities in the last weeks. Maybe it was that.
A guy at work showed me the footage on his phone. Whatever shit news site he was pulling from had the headline, “DEI focus by The transportation department under Pete buttigiege results in bridge collapse”.
They didn’t even wait half a day to start lying.
Here’s a quick take on the crash. Informed and conspiracy free, based upon the video:
- Ship power cut off and the pilot panicked and threw engines into reverse (as seen by engine exhaust)
- ‘Prop walk’, which happen when you operate a propeller in reverse, turned the ship starboard into the bridge support
Some speculation in there about the state of mind of the pilot in trying to explain their actions. Hopefully the NTSB report will shed more light on things. The state of the steering particularly.
The bridge is just gone now, one tap and the whole thing fell like dominos!
Just to illustrate the point, this is no “tap”. A cargo ship like that hitting something is about the same momentum as 14 loaded Boeing 787s hitting something at 800 km/h, simultaneously.
Those constructions rely on all parts being where they are, otherwise the whole thing collapses. You’d need a different kind of bridge for the single stretches to be independent.
It’s bad enough that the transportation infrastructure is falling apart across the country due to poor maintenance. But when the bridge was built in the 1970s, I don’t think container ships that big even existed. It’s the same problem with old roads and modern cars or old airports and modern jets.
I hope that whatever replaces the Key Bridge is designed to fail in segments and take a good beating before it does.
It would seem most construction projects rely on a boat not ramming into it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Skyway_Bridge
The southbound span (opened in 1971) of the original bridge was destroyed on the morning of May 9, 1980, when the 606 ft (185 m) freighter MV Summit Venture collided with a support column during a sudden squall, causing the catastrophic failure of over 1,200 ft (370 m) of the span.
Governor Bob Graham’s idea to build a “signature” cable-stayed bridge with a span that would be 50% wider than that of the old Skyway Bridge won out over other proposals. In addition to a wider shipping lane, the channel would be marked by a 1⁄4 mi (400 m)-long series of large concrete barriers, and the support piers would be protected by massive concrete “dolphins”.
Florida apparently isn’t relying on that anymore.
This has been a plainly difficult production.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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
