Baltimore bridge

[WhoaJayShettybambalam]

Is anyone watching the news? It’s awful. Those poor people on the bridge.

I read about a suspected power cut too. The ship would have had harbour pilots on board who know the harbour well, so something like a total loss of power would make sense, as the ship would then be drifting.

with a structure like this bridge you would hope/expect that at least part of it would hold up.

car traffic but also shipping will be impacted for a long time.

@shockeditellyou wow! Well done!

But it was designed for a shipping route, where a collision was always possible at some point.
According to dh (retired civil engineer) either there was a serious fault in the design, or else ‘economies’ were taken with the construction. Possibly both.

Twitter is full of conspiracy theories about what happened. People really are bizarre.

There are numerous examples of bridges collapsing because of ships colliding with their supports. They will be designed to deal with some level of risk, but the construction will weigh up the probability of a direct head on collision (low) against the cost of over engineering a structure to survive a direct head on collision by a fully laden container ship (high) and here you are.

Plus, the collision caused a huge explosion on the ship. Even if the bridge had withstood the collision, it could not have withstood the consequent explosion.

You can see the lights fail on the ship, shortly before impact. Presumably steering was lost at the same time. It seems to have been incredibly bad luck that this happened so close to the bridge.

I am not sure if you can ever really design for that type of event - at least not while keeping costs and construction within real-world limits.

I've been watching it on YouTube, on Agenda Free TV. It does seem to me like a very tragic accident. Of course people are going to come up with wild theories but most of those aren't logical at all. At least it didn't happen at a busy time of travel, there is that. Shocking watching it just collapse.

For instance, the first Sunshine Skyway Bridge across Tampa Bay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunshineSkywayy_Bridge

It's featured in this series on Wondrium, if anyone is interested in this sort of thing (the other series this guy has made are also excellent)

www.wondrium.com/epic-engineering-failures-and-the-lessons-they-teach

It collapsed like Meccano, so shocking.

8 knots, apparently (just watched the live news conference), and confirmed fully laden.

Edited to say 8 knots = 4.12 m/s.

So around 165kg TNT.

It's horrendous 😭😭😭 but that bridge shouldn't have collapsed so easily. This happens a lot with vehicles driving into bridges. I have never known one to collapse like that.

There's another video on twitter that shows from a different angle, power failure in the ship and huge amounts of smoke, apparently crew alerted bridge so they had time to close it to most of the traffic. I didn't realise it was over a mile long!

https://x.com/bharatmaurya66/status/1772558620044980564?s=46&t=kZnUOjuTT_49pwUc-MlZy4g

It's horrific. What a tragedy.

I don't think it collapsed easily at all. It's impossible to tell the scale of the bridge and the size of the ship from the night time videos. Have a look at some pictures from google in daylight for scale. It's absolutely enormous, and so is the ship.

I doubt many bridges of that sort of span could survive collision with a pier by a vast, laden tanker at 8 knots.

Poor souls on the bridge.

Also a retired civil engineer I did some work on container ships docking and how well existing docks would cope, quite a few years ago now. Bloody scary just watching them come in, it's like a tower block coming in to dock. A huge shock when they hit the dock and that was coming in really slowly and hitting sideways, I don't know what would resist one coming in fast and straight on.

So construction started in 1972 and the bridge was opened in 1977.

In one news article it says the bridge collapse was caused by construction errors:

[[https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/us-news/2024/03/26/baltimore-bridge-collapses-after-ship-collision/

It's a miracle it only collapsed in the early hours of this morning and not later on when more traffic and people would be crossing the bridge/on the river.

There is a difference between a road vehicle hitting a bridge and a ship of this size!

Ride into a wall on a pushbike. Then ride into the same wall in an HGV at max speed. Do you think you’ll see a difference?

This ship was the equivalent of hundreds of HGVs hitting the bridge and then exploding.

It doesn't say that at all. The bridge they refer to as having collapsed through structural errors is a different bridge.

Actually you're correct, and I am wrong.

From what I have heard today, it's possible the bridge could have been stronger - modern bridges are built to higher standards. BUT quite probably no bridge could survive a collision like that.

More worrying are the reports that the same ship crashed into a pier a couple of years ago and took that out (I can't remember where they said it was and haven't heard this mentioned since). It sounds like it's possible the ship had faults..

Shocking accident, the bridge crumpled like Lego.. in a way it wouldve been so much worse if it had been rush hour, not that that helps those poor buggers still lost of course!

I heard a structural engineer on radio 4 explaining that 50 years ago when the bridge was built, ships werent the size of those these days.. so such a huge collision wasnt compensated for structurally.

It's a terrible terrible tragedy but it could have been so much worse if they hadn't managed to close the bridge moments before the ship hit. It sounds like there could have been many more people on the bridge even at that time of night.