“ The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland which crosses the Patapsco River has reportedly Collapsed within the last few minutes after being Struck by a Large Container Ship; a Mass Casualty Incident has been Declared with over a Dozen Cars and many Individuals said to be in the Water.”
Yeah I've encountered url parsing problems on hn before too -- it pays to always check your links. It forgot the . too, which made it think the url was over! You can use percent encoding in such cases -- . is %2E and ) is %29:
Ah, that's a possibility I didn't take into account. I thought they were being more forthcoming than other news outlets, but didn't consider that it might be a "regional" perk.
Judging by the footage with the bridge being over water and the temperature in Baltimore near freezing, I would guess no they are not. The outcome of this is going to be very unpleasant.
Unluckily it was at night, so an already disorienting situation is going to be harder and any already difficult rescue is going to be hampered further. It will be a miracle if any meaningful % of those who fell in the water survived.
I just watched the footage. It's pretty horrifying. The whole bridge collapsed in a few seconds. It's a pretty long drop down to the water. Anyone on that bridge ended up in the water with little/no warning.
That drop alone would injure/kill many. And immediately after people would be in cold water still locked in their vehicles. The water there was deep enough to be able to deal with loaded container ships. So, tens of meters at least. If you then factor in currents and the amount of time it takes to mount any form of rescue operation with divers, etc. it starts looking pretty grim indeed.
from what I can tell it didn't look like vehicles, it looked like road maintenance, so people outside and maybe a vehicle. only difference is not trapped in vehicle, everything else still dire
There's a slight benefit that a road crew will be dressed for nighttime outside weather, with reflective clothing, are all adults, and probably have some level of physical fitness.
> The water there was deep enough to be able to deal with loaded container ships. So, tens of meters at least.
There are only a handful of ships in the world with a draft of more than 20 meters. The ship involved in the collision has a (maximum) draft of 15 meters.
While this tweet is factual, be very careful with this account in general, is has turned from a good source to a very slanted and biased fake-news-accelerator.
It makes me wonder what goes through someone's head when one sees a mass casualty event like this, and your first instinct is to rush to Wikipedia to change the article to past tense ('was' a bridge).
Do you think that someone at the FBI, inspired by https://xkcd.com/2910/, will be checking the IP addresses of the Wikipedia editors who got there before the ambulances did?
"I can't do much else, may as well keep folks up to date" I guess.
If they're sitting on the shore with a fully stocked rescue boat delaying help to post their edits, aye I'd be peeved too. Otherwise, might as well keep info updated as it becomes known.
One of the beauties of the internet is that there's enough people willing to do the work to keep the rest of the world up to date with real-time information.
Adding actual information about the event will naturally take a little longer as it needs writing first - they probably fired off the pastTensify automation while writing the meat and potatoes of their edit.
It was somebody on their phone, not signed in, and all they did was change "is" to "was" in two places, leaving the single word edit summary "was". But thank you for imagining Wikipedians are so professional.
Two days later, I come back to find this downvoted a lot, even though I meant it literally. I've been a Wikipedia editor for some 10+ years, only a few of us use bots, we're not generally very sophisticated, so the assumptions amused me.
Ah. I think the wording plus the existing downvote when I read your reply made me not even consider it might be literal and not at all snarky.. I'd like to blame my British sarcasm-as-a-first-language upbringing, but really that one's on me.
For what it's worth I've popped an upvote on your comment and will go out of my way to double check snark is actually snark before replying to things in future.
Some people are clinical -just an item to update. For others it’s the old “first post” mentality. It’s basically personal mores whether something is too recent and tragic to update.
Yes, probably tile cache on different servers. I tried from some random TOR exit node and got a mixture of tiles showing parts of the "before" and parts of the "after": https://imgur.com/zLAdmUc
Makes sense, you want anyone following GPS to divert from the scene ASAP. Caching-wise, I see the updated bridge at zoom 15+ but the old intact bridge at zoom ≤14.
The lights on the ship were going off and on, and it appeared to be smoking before hitting the bridge. Does not look like they had much control at the time.
Clip here, beginning at 1m23s, shows a (sped-up) edit of the ship approaching the bridge, with lights going out, on, and out again immediately prior to impact:
Yeah the original cnbc article was talking about the Potomac which isn’t near Baltimore, so I wanted to make sure no one else was as confused as I had been.
The Potomac River is pretty shallow where the Key Bridge crosses between the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, and Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia. The largest facilities upstream of it are boathouses, where one may put in a canoe or perhaps a racing shell.
A course is set through the middle, side thrusters, rudders, and|or engines fail or falter, and current drifts the ship into the bridge pylon.
Ships in water tend to move and keep moving, engines and thrusters work to vector that motion into a desired direction - when things fail motion doesn't cease and courses aren't maintained.
The lights on the ship all go out about 5 minutes before impact. They come back on and appear to go out again as impact gets closer. It looks like the ship suffered a catastrophic failure that affected the controls.
The ship, most of its lights go out a minute of two before the collision, and it also seems to be emitting black smoke (from the funnels / engine exhaust?) as well.
The smoke was likely from the engines running at full reverse to avoid the collision. But the ship lost power (you can see its lights going out in the video) and thus the ability to steer.
DALI (IMO: 9697428) is a Container Ship and is sailing under the flag of Singapore. Her length overall (LOA) is 299.92 meters and her width is 48.2 meters [1].
Based on the track, it appears the ship changed course slightly and slowed as it approached the bridge [2].
That's clear in the livestream video too. It's like it was fairly on track then changed to head straight for the pylon. A lot of smoke starts coming out of the funnel at the same time as the course change, and the ship's lights go out before impact.
Thanks for the link to the track. That's the first thing that I've seen that showed that I guess it's regular for these ships to pass under the center of this bridge. Is that correct?
If so, what I'm still not understanding is why ships are allowed to make that passage all on their own without any backup like a tugboat and why the bridge doesn't have secondary protection of its pillars. Because with a track like that and lack of either of those things, a catastrophic collision seems inevitable.
Does anyone know why the ship would make a sudden hard right during a sequence of power failures?
+1 I recently watched the whole series again after I subscribed to HBOMax. I hadn't watched it since 2008, when I watched in SD using DVDs from my original Netflix subscription.
Aside from the new story details I caught and the general great acting, I was struck by how the series captured a the technology transition going on at the time. Payphones and typewriters shift to classic feature phones and PCs with CRTs. Then camera phones enter the picture.
Season 2 of The Wire is the single greatest work of television I've ever seen. It's as rich as a novel, as tragic as something out of Shakespeare. Seriously. If anyone hasn't seen The Wire, do yourself a favor and give it a watch.
It's always wild that Season 2 seems to be polarizing, it is very different but it's so compelling. Tragedy is really probably the most complete way to describe it.
But yeah the short scenes of "that's my f*ing town" and the "they used to make steel there, no?". I know the first one takes place right next to the bridge because they say they are at Fort Armistead. I assume the latter is in much the same place since I thought they are looking across the river at Sparrow's Point.
Also relevant to season 2. The US seriously lacks dredging capacity, because we only allow US built dredges to operate on our ports. Only 1-3 of the top 50 highest capacity dredges in the world qualify. Bloomberg Odd Lots has a great episode about this.
Yes, some things can be probably improved, but making a bridge really resistant to a crash with a big ship would likely make it astronomically expensive.
Maybe that at least not the whole bridge collapses, when something in the middle gets struck.
In Italy politicians promised to rebuild a fallen bridge, to repay the families, and to punish those responsible of the damage even before the funeral.
>Lyndon B Johnson is often reported to have said of Ford that “He can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” What he did say was “He can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” The US media deliberately misrepresented the remark in the interests of decency.
>walk and chew gum at the same time (third-person singular simple present walks and chews gum at the same time, present participle walking and chewing gum at the same time, simple past and past participle walked and chewed gum at the same time)
>(idiomatic, informal, chiefly in the negative) To do two normally trivial tasks at the same time; to exhibit basic competence or task-management skills.
>Usage notes: Used in negative phrases to indicate incompetence, e.g. "He couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time."
>1978, United States Federal Trade Commission, Statutes and Court Decisions, Federal Trade Commission:
The philosophy communicated to T.E.C. salesmen was to enroll any person who could "walk and chew gum at the same time".
Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States:
I'm reminded of the press howling about how President Clinton needed to resign because his legal issues cough blow job cough prevented him devoting full attention to the presidency. Which was amusing since anyone paying attention could see it wasn't slowing him down at all.
He went on to clobber Dole in the 96 election.
Story about LBJ, one time a society matron buttonholed Lady Bird and told her that she needed to get LBJ to stop saying manure so much. Lady Bird said I will not because you have no idea how hard it was to get him to say manure.
You can see the construction vehicles on the bridge on te right of the container ship, they are standing still and are running flashing lights. And they go down into the river ...
I saw a few Semi Trucks pass over it about a minute before the collision and collapse. There were construction vehicles on the bridge, with flashing lights.
Somehow I find it surprising how completely the bridge collapsed after the damage. I understand that a container ship collision is serious, but you could imagine a scenarios where the bridge slumps or buckles but doesn’t just disintegrate like that. It’s surprising that ships capable of doing this damage were probably regularly driving past it, and its safety as a thoroughfare depended entirely on those collisions not happening.
Does anyone know if modern construction standards would require more stability after a ship collision, or is this still how we build bridges?
The trick is to make sure the piers are not removed. For example, the new Tampa Bay Sunshine Skyway Bridge (rebuilt after a similar disaster):
> 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".
Collision with what? I'm pretty sure that with a sufficiently massive ship sailing fast enough, one could take down any bridge. Hence I'd think there are limits which ship may approach at a given speed. Was one of those limits perhaps exceeded?
Collision means nothing without magnitude of force.
A glancing blow is completely different from a direct hit. And the amount of Newtons behind the blow completely changes the outcomes. A small ship versus a loaded container ship is a completely different force.
I doubt many bridges would take a full speed, fully loaded container ship directly to one of their supports and survive it. Certainly the most celebrated bridges have a better chance of surviving but I doubt any second tier, lower traveled routes would.
Apparently this container ship was only half loaded to capacity. And it seems likely that a container ship would hit it given the vicinity of such container ships. I'm generally confused on this matter.
It hit the support completely dead on and stopped. All of that momentum and force went directly into the bridge. The pulse from that impact would have been enormous.
Why would you anticipate that a container ship would have to hit the bridge? What about the flip side to that... How many bridges have never been hit by a container ship or alternatively how many times have an almost fully loaded container ship come to a dead stop after hitting a bridge?
According to a quick search and reporting due to this event, apparently a quick number is a few dozen full collapses in the past 55 years, which doesn't seem to account for impacts and collisions that didn't result in full collapses. So that seems like a lot of bridges indeed, along with a lot of deaths and economic impact.
The reason why I would anticipate a container ship hitting that bridge is because of the video we've all seen. It's a huge ship that is going the slowest it can while still retaining control over the vehicle, unattended, through a tight spot, close to a bridge with zero protection from ship collisions, and all with a ship design that is apparently (according to other comments) effectively impossible to correctly maintain and keep running at all times. So I think the better question is, why wouldn't you anticipate a collision?
You cannot put the entire weight of the 70's safety culture to an engineer "showing off"
I bet there was a much more complex and nuanced analysis which included crossing ship dimensions, budget, time to completion, available technology, composition of the local seabed etc..
Designing a bridge is proper engineering and not that easy.
There's been at least 50 years, probably more like 60 or 70, of advances in the art (much less pedagogy) that those students have and the bridge engineer did not.
The '70s were also a transitional period in bridge design where truss bridges were being phased out in favour of newer types of hybrid suspension bridge. Many of the iron and steel bridges of the 1890s through the 1970s were later replaced with suspension bridges or arch span bridges because they used less material and could be architecturally adapted to the area better. So some truss bridges were made as much for appearance as function in order to compete with the futuristic hybrid suspension bridges like the 1967 Ponte Morandi or the 1987 replacement Sunshine Skyway.
I would say the damage is about the same, The ship knocked down a pier and all spans connected to the pier went down. The difference is, on the baltimore bridge is that the spans are a lot longer. But all other spans(the ones nearly out of frame) are still standing.
Parts of the Francis Scott Key Bridge not connected to the hit pylon went down too. The beam structure above the road that supports the whole thing collapsed and took down other spans.
Maybe it's the extra momentum that took it over the edge, which if it were built in the 70s probably were designed with static loading in mind without the benefit of dynamical simulation?
And that structure probably existed because the bridge has fewer longer spans, probably since the seabed below the bridge is deeper (and needs to be deeper to support container ships passing below).
The Öresundsbron (connecting Sweden and Denmark) features both short segments but also with an overhand section in the middle for larger ships to pass through. (1) The great belt bridge (inside Denmark) is slightly higher but has the same kind of profile, one of the largest cruise ships barely making it under it is shown passing in the video below (2).
I think the simple truth is that we're vulnerable to these kinds of accidents unless we build far far sturdier bridges, but at these scales to allow passage of ships of these sizes the cost would just make many bridge projects prohibitably expensive.
The Øresundsbron is a bridge and a tunnel, and although it's not required most ships choose to cross over the tunnel rather than under the bridge.
I was curious about Zealand's other connection, the Great Belt Fixed Link:
> The West Bridge has been struck by sea traffic twice. While the link was still under construction on 14 September 1993, the ferry M/F Romsø drifted off course in bad weather and hit the West Bridge. At 19:17 on 3 March 2005, the 3,500-ton freighter MV Karen Danielsen crashed into the West Bridge 800 metres from Funen. All traffic across the bridge was halted, effectively cutting Denmark in two. The bridge was re-opened shortly after midnight, after the freighter was pulled free and inspectors had found no structural damage to the bridge.
> The East Bridge has so far been in the clear, although on 16 May 2001, the bridge was closed for 10 minutes as the Cambodian 27,000-ton bulk carrier Bella was heading straight for one of the anchorage structures. The ship was deflected by a swift response from the navy.
In Danish [2], but it looks like there's someone always monitoring the sea traffic, and able to close the bridge at very short notice — I assume with the red flashing lights which are used to close motorways in emergencies.
> The eastern end through the Great Belt is international water, and therefore even the largest ships must be able to sail under the bridge. The 254 meter high pylons are therefore dimensioned so that they should be able to withstand the approach of tankers of 250,000 tonnes dead weight (DWT) at a speed of 10 knots. Artificial islands protect the anchor blocks as well as the three outermost piers on the Zealand side and the two outermost ones on the Sprogø side.
Öresundsbron is claimed to be designed to be resistant against ships hitting it. They have placed artificial underwater reefs around the pylons. The pylons themselves can also take quite a beating.
That's great, but the topic is engineering things to survive serious damage, period. Not just long enough for people to escape before it succumbs. A failed structure is still a failed structure with all the socioeconomic trouble that entails.
If the design requirement for the twin towers was "be fire resistant enough to let most people out of the building", then I'd say they met that requirement, right?
If the design requirement for a bridge is "continue operating at normal capacity", then that is a very different requirement.
"Failed" isn't the binary you're trying to make it.
Yes, the towers failed to survive serious damage. But the 40,000 more deaths would have been "socioeconomic trouble", in spades. Even by your own chosen measure, the survival for an hour was a partial success.
Sure, precautions might not work as well as intended.
But my comment was in regards to having to build a really expensive bridge to make it crash resistant. I pointed out that you can instead build a cheap flimsy bridge and put the protection in the water around the pylons.
My impression is that the Baltimore bridge had no such extra protection (?) In that case, it's not really "the best design", right?
"Permanently" what? the harbor will be cleared, probably sooner than later, and there will be a new bridge/tunnel built in a few years. Like that's not permanent.
Wikipedia is missing the iconic photo of the two cars hanging over the edge of the Tasman bridge.
> "the only thing that stopped the car from tipping over the edge was the casing of the automatic transmission, which grinded and gripped into the surface of the bridge."
I like this quote. We have a medieval bridge near to our house (1000 years old perhaps), it's incredibly solidly built, but could you call it well-engineered?
It's a subtle distinction that I don't think many in the digital realm quite grasp either i.e. far too many over-engineered technical solutions for features and products that aren't even desired
If it is still standing after 1000 years, I would say yes. You cannot build a bridge out of stones with bad engineering - it would collapse under its own weight.
edit: does "well engineered" now means over engineered to some?
"If it is still standing after 1000 years, I would say yes" but what if they included far more material in areas where it wasn't needed, skimped on other areas and it fell down tomorrow? It's almost a philosophical question, and it's true that the bridge builders happened across a solid design by accident.
But I think the true definition of engineering has to encompass a level of efficiency through design, calculation and rationalization. In other words, echoing what the original commenter said, including only what is barely necessary.
If they wanted a cheap solution, they would have used wood. But wood does not last a 1000 years.
Personally I salute anyone, who can build something that lasts that long.
"including only what is barely necessary."
And "barely necessary" in solid engineering includes lots of safety margins. Not barely standing.
And yes, that includes not using more than you need, because the more material you use, the heavier your bridge is -> the greater are the forces on the structure itself even with no one passing over it.
There are some fun games out there on various plattforms, google "bridge builder"
Not a scientific simulation of course, but they do show the concept.
> and it's true that the bridge builders happened across a solid design by accident.
I think there is a great overlap between "holds for whatever scheme the prefecture will do to test it while I stand under" and "holds for a thousand years".
There is like a limit where fatigue stress stops being a thing in a cycle graph. Many failure modes is due to penny wise cost cutting.
I like to tell people that all engineering is about tradeoffs.
People who engineered bridges during Roman Empire had different tradeoffs to consider than people who were building bridges in 20th century.
Standing for a thousand years is rarely an ultimate goal when engineering a bridge although it is possible that Romans planned for longer timescales than us.
If we decided to build like Romans did, there would likely be very little infrastructure and many structures would simply be impossible to construct.
How much population did the Romans build for? How much weight were the Romans subjecting their structures to, and at what acceleration/deceleration?
Do you know the movements of the supply and demand curves of the materials required since Roman times?
These types of hypotheticals are a waste of time, and only serve to illustrate hubris, as if something as complicated as comparing Roman construction and resources to modern day construction and resources could be possible.
> Can't we really do better today, with all our advanced technology?
You implied a whole host of things with this statement, and considering the topic of this thread, also ramming a Roman bridge with a fully loaded modern day cargo ship.
The point is there are so many moving parameters, it is nonsensical to take 1 result of 1 technique from 1 point of time and use that as a basis for what one can expect at other points in time.
This is survivorship bias in action. They intended to build a bridge. That is all we can infer from the fact that a bridge exists. That they used available materials and the bridge was not abused by subsequent usage outside its design spec is not proof of any specific intention on the part of the builder. That exists only in your head. It's like assuming dinosaurs died in specific spots with the intent that their bones petrify and fossilize. You're reading too much into not enough facts.
Maybe, but lots of roman buildings endured the time in much better shape, than many buildings that were build after them. Have you seen some of them in front of you? I have and I am impressed. (I am in italy right now to go look at some more).
Also we know a bit more about the romans than just their bridges.
You can't use Roman techniques to build a bridge over a river that's a couple of kilometers wide that can carry heavy trucks, unless you're thinking of building a dam.
What is well engineered depends on the goals and the limitations of the state of the art at the time. I would say that a thousand year old bridge might count as well engineered if the goal was a bridge that had a low total lifetime cost.
Why are you throwing shade at civil structural engineering?
Do all bridges we build need to be able to withstand the force of an entire shipping container bridge hitting it at high speed? What planet should an engineer think that a shipping container has managed to veer off course so badly that they hit a bridge at full speed, fully loaded? That is a sad and significant outlier event.
I would guess none. No bridge span could survive complete loss of it's supporting abutment. Some bridges are engineered to survive partial loss. For example if the left side goes the right side will hold it up. But from the video the ship looks like it took out the entire supporting structure.
Why would slumping or buckling but not-quite-collapsing be a functionally better outcome than complete failure? In both cases, the sheer size of the physical changes is going to lead to forces that humans won't survive, so there's no benefit there. In both cases, the bridge is going to have to be completely demolished before rebuilding, so there's no benefit there.
A bridge that could stand the loss of a single support pier without any significant collapse would obviously be preferable -- but that's a big ask. I'm not a structural engineer, but I am aware of scaling laws [1] and it feels to me that those scaling laws are going to mean that increasing the margin of safety by x is going to increase costs by x^n. For a project like this one, where cost was apparently the deciding factor over a tunnel, that matters.
>Why would slumping or buckling but not-quite-collapsing be a functionally better outcome than complete failure?
Well for starters, there's a better chance of less (or ideally no) people forced to get their feet wet and go missing or die from drowning or hypothermia.
The specific point I'm making (in the sentence following the one you quoted) is that no, there is not a better chance of those things. If a bridge of this size is going to fail in any significant way, it is going to lead to loss of life.
The broader point is that attempts to blame the bridge designers here are misplaced. It really isn't reasonable to have hoped that they could design a structure that could cope with this kind of failure, within the cost constraints that they had. And cost constraints were a real thing for the designers of this particular bridge.
You could try to avoid collisions with barriers, or make the bridge fail differently (only a few spans), or make it tolerant to a single support failing. But you need a pretty beefy steel beam to survive a direct hit by... Uh... 200,000t(??) traveling even at a slow jogging pace. (And then it transfers the energy into the rest of the bridge, which will very much not like it).
I guess we can be happy failure like this is rare, and that the bridge was not busy: reports indicate 13 cars, and about 7 persons still missing. This could be so much worse.
The best way to think about measures is after we know the full chain of events that have lead to this.
Absolutely. 116851 long tons deadweight, which the Google info box says includes everything (busy now, so can't check in detail). That's 120,000,000 kg, so a little bit less than I guessed. Now looking at 10km/h or 6.2mi/h or 2.78m/s, that's enough to come up with a big E for E = 1/2 * m * v². The momentum p = m * v is also rather unpleasant. If the momentum was suddenly transferred into my 2,000 kg car (e.g. if the ship hit my car), I could do my work trip in about 1s, though that's only a few times times faster than the ISS (which travels at 7660 m/s).
[I'm very busy, so hopefully I didn't forget/add a few 0s by accident. Anyone feel free to correct me if I did.]
Right. I am not really thinking of designing pillars that are impossible to knock over. I am thinking of alternative bridge designs where a higher percentage of the total bridge stays up when one pillar is taken out.
On this bridge, the main section of the bridge is supported by four spaced pillars, making three main spans there. One of the middle two towers was hit, so this should affect two of the three spans. But it took down all three of them. A span that was supported on both sides by intact towers still came down. That is what I find most surprising here.
Most bridges nowadays (say last century) depend on a careful balance of forces that are transferred through a chain of members in tension and compression.
When any piece in the chain of those forces breaks, the entire structure loses ability to transfer forces and breaks.
This arrangement is what allows us to build these structures in the first place. There is careful calculations of forces and risks and allowance for margin for error and unexpected events. But, unfortunately, in many cases those do not include ramming things with a large container ship...
Thanks! So why are huge—ass container ships allowed to navigate underneath fragile public bridges with single points of failure? The not unlikely worst case is that the ship is out of control for some reason…
We notice these type of accidents because they’re so rare. 5k+ people die each year because of large trucks on the road, by comparison, boats and bridges are very safe — that’s why it’s allowed.
The Dutch ports of both Amsterdam and Rotterdam have no bridges at all. It's all tunnels. I think that's the best way to go; the least chance of conflict between road and water traffic.
Often in America the government waits for something to fail miserably before engaging in a high effort high cost activity that requires a lot of coordination and public buy-in.
But that's what you do with random events -- create policies to prevent them from happening, lowering the incidence rate and minimizing damage once it occurs. Which is exactly what government and laws are all about.
The amount of arm chair quarterbacking here is astounding. Reddit has a more nuanced conversation than HN right now.
A bridge got hit by a container ship at speed and folks here are talking about this like the bridge was not up to standard, or why there was a bridge there at all when they know nothing about the locale. I am not a structural engineer, but I am going to go ahead and guess that not much would still be standing from a direct hit from a container ship. And from observation bridges like this exist all over the world and don’t regularly get struck by container ships.
It was a freak accident.
If we want to point fingers or question things, perhaps if anything the question is why the container ship lost power repeatedly? Was this a known issue before leaving port?
> A bridge got hit by a container ship at speed and folks here are talking about this like the bridge was not up to standard, or why there was a bridge there at all when they know nothing about the locale.
You're right, I don't. But I do know there are other locales where they seem to explicitly avoid bridges crossing heavy ocean traffic.
German Wikipedia has an article on ship deflectors. What is says there is that ship collisions were viewed an an inevitable hazard until the 1980 collapse of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa. That was 45 years ago.
Not unlikely? Can you point us to all the other times this has happened? You must know of several given your knowledge of how obviously likely this is.
It's not especially common, but the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa Bay is a famous example. Similar circumstances - it collapsed after being hit by a ship.
When has "nothing will happen as long as we can carefully navigate our massive vessels around these critical pillars" ever been a trustable safety measure? Over the long term shit like this will happen if it the possibility that it happens is not excluded by other measures.
This is a public bridge 5 years in the making and who knows how long in planning, and people have been extremely lucky that it collapsed at 3am and not in the middle of the day. It doesn't matter at all how unlikely this is in a given time frame if the impact if it happens at any point in time is catastrophic.
Because the Port of Baltimore is a very major port, and not allowing ships under it really isn't an option.
Vertical clearance for ship traffic might have been the reason this kind of bridge was built in the first place. Otherwise, something lower and more causeway-like might have been sufficient.
Mostly to have a hazmat route around the city (HAZMAT trucks aren’t allowed in the tunnels) and because bridges are cheaper than tunnels. They needed a third crossing because the traffic warranted it.
Most highway tunnels (including the Coentunnel and Zeeburgertunnel on the A10 ring road around Amsterdam) are category C tunnels, which means some hazmat allowed depending on the nature of the materials, the quality of the containment, and the volume transported. Notable exceptions are the Schipholtunnel (category A, fewer restrictions) near the airport and the Arenatunnel (category E, severely restricted) under the stadium.
> Bids for construction of the proposed Outer Harbor Tunnel were opened in July 1970, but price proposals were substantially higher than the engineering estimates.[11] Officials drafted alternative plans, including a four-lane bridge, which was approved by the General Assembly in April 1971.[12][13]
Why does anyone use fragile asphalt (20 years) for busy roads when engineered concrete lasts 50 or more? Because the better option costs more.
This was a big point of contention when a local town announced it was replacing the failing asphalt on the section with the most traffic with slabs of concrete. [0] People complained about the price. Meanwhile, over a decade on, nearby asphalt laid with the same renewal project is already cracking while the busy main thoroughfare remains undisrupted by road work.
It's hard to persuade people that long-term investment is worthwhile.
On the news this morning a commentator made it sound like that rule was imposed after 9/11.
It makes sense to me that cargo would be restricted, and it's bizarre that it would be related to terrorism (an additional rule isn't going to prevent an attack...).
Tunnels are far more expensive - the 1.5 mile 4 lane Fort McHenry tunnel was like $750M vs. $140M for the 1.6 mile 4 lane Key bridge, although adjusted for inflation that’s probably more like $750M vs $320M.
The underlying problem here is that automobiles are inherently inefficient so you either get epic traffic jams or have to massively overbuild capacity, forcing the engineers to deliver as many lanes as they can for the budget.
Yes, but there’s a difference between what people will pay in advance to prevent one of many low probability catastrophic failures and what they’ll think was worthwhile for someone else to have paid to prevent the one which actually happened.
Those calculations are really hard: say they had built a tunnel, what are the odds of the same number of people dying in a fire after someone crashes into another car? Would we have needed to spend any money at all if more people had used railroad alternatives to driving and such an expensive bridge or tunnel was not justified on traffic grounds?
The Patapsco is much wider here than at the locations of the two tunnels. It would have been a much bigger and more expensive project to build a tunnel that long.
In addition to the Hazmat issue mentioned below, tunnels have a bad record when fires break out inside them. E.g. the Kaprun disaster [0] which killed 150 people, and the Gotthard Road Tunnel [1] fire, after which the use of large vehicles was constrained.
Vertical Clearance for bridges around ports is the method used around the world. Of course, also tunnels. But building tall bridges for access is very common.
>>Because the Port of Baltimore is a very major port, and not allowing ships under it really isn't an option.
It is now a very large port that is completely closed off from the sea.
And two sides of the city no longer linked
The damage from this accident is only beginning.
Even if loss of control of a large container ship was considered in the design of the city, port, and that particular bridge, ships were not even close to the order of magnitude of mass of today's ships.
And, it lost power at almost exactly the worst moment. What are the odds?
EXACTLY!! If it happens often, and they just restart because it's no big deal in the ocean, we wouldn't hear about it.
Of course, it seems that a high(er) frequency of failures should be taken into account for zones where it is critical, such as in port. I just saw a few days ago that a ship docking took out a couple of cargo cranes (sadly, badly injuring a crane operator); didn't seem like a power outage, more of a misjudged steering.
Have you looked at a map of Baltimore? They're very much linked, you just have to drive a little farther. The only issue will be that all the traffic this bridge previously carried now has to reroute to the bridge farther north, so now traffic will be much heavier.
Yes, of course; I made the comment after looking at a map.
The direct or short link is now broken. Everyone must now go around the entire harbor, on roads that will now have 40k more cars every day, instead of directly across it. I wasn't saying that some area was a disconnected island, but that many trips will become more costly or non-viable for years until the bridge is rebuilt.
Perhaps I should have said "no longer directly linked", but thanks for the picked nit.
It's not a nit-pick, you said "no longer linked". They are absolutely linked, you just have to drive around a few more kilometers. You said nothing about the traffic load, you wrote that it was absolutely impossible to cross! ("no longer linked")
Perhaps English is not your first language, or you are not recognizing the difference between casual conversation and formal scientific papers.
This is casual conversation. Writing quickly and colloquially, with the assumption that "no longer directly linked" or "no longer linked as they were 10min before" is inferred, certainly to anyone who has seen a map of the area. It should also be inferred from the sentence alone, as if the link had been to an island, then most writers would have made the much stronger point, saying "completely cutoff from the mainland" instead of the much weaker "no longer linked" (just because one link is broken does not imply that there are no others).
If you want to comment that "I was confused by your meaning and it could have been more clear if you said X" is a perfectly fair statement.
But deliberately taking absolutist definitions in a casual conversation where meanings can be implied / inferred, is an unfriendly, oppositional, if not hostile stance.
In any case, I apologize if you were offended that I didn't include all the qualifiers and assumed they would be apparent to the reader. Have a nice day.
English is my first language, but you obviously speak it much worse than most ESL people I know. I even used to live close to Baltimore, so I know the area. You said "no longer linked", not "no longer directly linked". There's a world of difference, and now you're trying to paint your comment as something it was not.
Yes, I've already acknowledged the ambiguity in the original sentence, and I apologize again to you for any confusion it caused you.
However, please learn that ambiguity in informal speech/writing is substantially different from errors in formal edited speech/writing, and different responses are appropriate.
In the context of formal writing (e.g., an academic or industry paper, book, etc.) we should expect almost all ambiguity to be edited out, and not allow for inferences in either direction; i.e., your complaint would be valid.
However, in casual speech/writing (e.g., SMS, social media comments, non-formal emails, etc.) it is common and not serious to leave IMPLIED components in the conversation. It is certainly acceptable to ask for clarification such as "did you mean to imply that some area was made entirely inaccessible by that event?". But it is inappropriate to accuse someone of being dead wrong by leaving out the implication.
The request for clarification should result in the speaker/writer saying "ya, I did mean to imply XYZ, not PDQ, thx for pointing that out." — mutually and efficiently finding the truth. The accusation, especially continued insistence on the accusation being the one true correct way, is the way to start an argument trying to establish dominance.
It might also be worth noting that your class of people — those familiar with the Baltimore area — should have been MOST able to recognize that "not directly" was the inferred meaning, since you know it's not linking an island to the mainland. That you chose the hostile "j'accuse — you are wrong!" form of discussion rather than the collaborative friendly "btw, you did not mean to imply that the bridge linked to an island" (and continued to insist on the hostile approach) tells us all that this is more about your emotional state and/or approach to human interactions than about the ambiguity itself.
If bridges and container ships indeed do not go together (something I don't necessarily agree with), you probably want to take away the public bridge and continue to let ships go by. This is economically speaking for the area. Car traffic is just not very efficient in the comparison between the two.
Edit: of course there are a ton of other solutions here as well. I am disagreeing with the parent that it is the cars which should get to stay and the container ships which have to move.
You can have smaller container ships. Or have the port outside the bridge. Or indeed replace the bridge with a tunnel, or a better bridge.
Amsterdam has no bridges at all crossing the IJ on the west side (where sea-going ships come from) and only a single bridge on the east side (though there's often talk of adding another). Everything is tunnels.
Rotterdam has bridges (including the famous Erasmusbrug), but only east of the port area. To the west, everything is tunnels. And the largest ships don't even come close to the city center, but dock at the Maasvlakte out at sea.
For both cities, ports have constantly moved closer to the sea.
You don't even need to run it as a tunnel the entire way through - Chesapeake Bay has vehicular traffic routed through a combination bridge/tunnel, using tunnels to span the two major shipping channels crossed by the complex.
>“There’s a lot of people staying [in those cities] and we want to be sure they’re not left with an excess of infrastructure that’s impossible to maintain,” he said. “So what do we do about it?”
I lived in the NOVA area for more than a decade and each visit to Baltimore (every few years) was more depressing. Of course, that's anecdotal but I'll stand by it.
Maybe they felt it was off-topic? Industry has been moving away since the 1950s. Today I read that container traffic has increased over the past couple of years.
It is hard not to feel a sense of tragedy if you know something about the place. It is written all over the city. The blocks and blocks of boarded up row houses speak for themselves. Now they are tearing them down. Maybe that is for the best, but it doesn't seem like a win.
I think the whole ship went dark for a moment. That may have had an impact on the rudder, and then some strong current and/or wind, pushing it sideways.
Was watching CNN around 6AM EDT, they had a reporter on scene who mentioned wind "whipping across" the harbor. This was in reference to the potential survivability of the freezing cold water, but it seems likely it could have been a factor in pushing the ship off course as well.
To be able to reach the port. You could argue that such bridges shouldn’t be built in front of ports, but the public also doesn’t like having to drive long detours, and the likelihood of an incident like this one is very low.
It is worth observing that this bridge seems to have 2 pylons and one of them collapsed. The failure seems comprehensible after that - you can see in the video how the balances came apart, there is nothing to hold the left side up so it falls and then remainder of the bridge tried to rotate around the remaining pylon and failed.
It's no surprise that the entire bridge collapses after a pylon collapses. What surprises me is that the pylon collapses. I'd expect those to be extremely solid, with tons of padding. But with ships getting bigger and bigger, I guess there's a limit to what you can account for.
Ships are hundreds of thousands of tons in weight and the momentum acts as a force multiplier. Plus it hit the pylon dead center, which is the worst case scenario. It’s not terribly surprising.
I think there’s also an underlying expectation that any competent ship captain would at least be able to see that they’re on a collision course with the pylon well ahead of time and be able to compensate. Which obviously didn’t happen in this case.
Interestingly, a surprising number of ship-ship collisions occur due to an unnecessary last minute evasive-action manoeuvre between ships that weren't actually on a collision course in the first place. There's a whole section devoted to this in the outstanding book 'Normal Accidents' by Charles Perrow.
On a long enough timeline we all get rammed by a container ship.
I would be interested to know some calculations with factors like: expected bridge lifetime, chance of being rammed per year, cost of making supports strong enough plus an extra safety margin to survive maximum ramming force, cost of having major commercial shipping route unusable for an extended period.
Bridges only last for roughly 50 years. Considering such collisions are rare enough to make the news as a memorable event you can workout for yourself that the odds are quite low over a bridges lifespan.
They are designed to withstand smaller boat impacts because they occur relatively frequently, but cost vs benefit on rare events that are difficult to mitigate is quite different.
Sure, and there's 100's of thousands of replaced bridges that don't immediately spring to mind.
Though to be clear designed to last 50 years isn't the same as saying it will only last exactly 50 years, or that theirs nothing you can do to extend a bridges lifespan if it's replacement is running a little late.
If it is a famous bridge, it seems possible that they’ve done some special extra maintenance, replace more wear-and-tear bits that would normally fail. Eventually you probably get the tourist attraction of Theseus.
Depends on the bridge. Steel and concrete bridges can last for at least 100 years. But it depends on the environment, its expected use, the construction, design. Some famous major bridges failed early due to poor design or poor construction, but many still fail due to lack of maintenance.
The average age of a bridge in the USA is 43 years. But we also have an epidemic of unmaintained bridges.
No bridge made today is designed to last indefinitely. Many different forces will degrade the bridge over time, even with maintenance. Steel stresses weaken it over time. Concrete weathers over time due to salt, chemicals, water, wind, and the steel reinforcements tend to corrode eventually.
Stone bridges may last for an exceptionally long time, but their weight and expense makes them only useful in limited applications, typically as small rail overpasses. Ones that were designed for horse and buggy end up slowly failing as heavier trucks and cars in traffic weaken them.
The same fate lies for timber bridges. When well maintained they can last for 75 years, but it's expensive and requires certain skills. They were also mostly designed before heavier cars and trucks, and for less traffic. Most famous covered bridges today are being closed to traffic due to increased wear.
According to https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/, the federal government oversees more than 610,000 bridges in the USA. There are a lot of unmaintained small bridges. But I'd hope that the major ones get more attention.
FHWA provides up to $7 Billion in assistance in maintaining bridges. But it would take at least $125 Billion to begin dealing with the structurally deficient bridges in the USA, according to the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card[1].
Add to this the fact that many bridges in the US are privately owned, and it's the responsibility of the bridge owner to maintain them. But guess what's not profitable for a private enterprise? Maintaining bridges. Despite this, train derailments and property damage continue every year due to unmaintained bridge and train infrastructure.
The executive has proposed funding for repairs, but as usual, it's not enough[2]. So far they've gotten almost half that number of bridges repaired, and pledged another $300M,[3] which is still just a drop in the bucket of what's needed of the backlog; it doesn't address all the new maintenance that will be needed each year.
According to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, there are 167 million crossings on 42,400 bridges rated in poor condition. [4]
Personally I'm in favour of government maintaining stuff, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Bridge_Foundation has maintained most of London's bridges privately for nearly three quarters of a millennia so I wouldn't say it can't be done.
I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying we specifically fail to hold private industry accountable in the US. So we get things like poisonous runoff from agriculture and industrial production, insanely slow and outdated train lines, privately owned bridges that fail and cause injury, property damage and traffic jams, massive wildfires causing property damage and loss of life from unmaintained utility infrastructure, and worldwide banking crises, among other things.
Is it impossible for these things to stop happening? No, not at all. But it's probably not going to stop, in this country, because we let private industry get away with whatever they want. If this were the UK the story would be very different.
Fair. I can't claim to know how to make it work better in the US. We have also other private infrastructure in the UK that's not working so well (like the water companies, which are not providing enough sewage processing capacity and so allow the extra to overflow into rivers)
I mainly made that comment because it still blows my mind the the City Bridge Foundation has been going for 740 years
New York City has had two major recent new bridge replacements that probably about 20M people can name: the Mario Cuomo (formerly Tappan Zee) and the Kosciuszko bridge.
I’d argue the Bayonne Bridge raising kinda counts since it was almost a rebuild and more impressive in many ways since it stayed open the whole time.
Meanwhile in the San Francisco Bay Area they replaced the Bay Bridge…
The old Tappan Zee was basically a perfect encapsulation of "dumb midcentury infrastructure decisions."
1. Built to last only 50 years to save on materials (as the other commenter noted).
2. Built over literally the widest possible part of the Hudson because the governor got in a pissing contest with the Port Authority and wanted all the tolls to go to the state, which wouldn't have been the case had it been built like 2 miles south where the river is narrower.
3. Designed with zero redundancy, such that a "critical fracture could make the bridge fail completely because its supports couldn’t transfer the structure’s load to other supports." [0]
So yeah if we're being real, 50 years was quite optimistic.
The new Tappan Zee is apparently supposed to last 100 years, though given the incidents with substandard materials being used, as well as ever-increasing traffic, who knows.
That said, driving over a bridge 10 years past its planned EOL and being able to look down directly to the water through gaps in the concrete was always a nice feature though -- who needs coffee when you've got that to get your heart rate up!
Keeping in mind that mid-century Japan and Germany were in ruins and the possibility of nuclear annihilation of urban centers very much at the top of many people minds. 50 years may have seemed an optimistic survival rate of built structures at the time.
The eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which had previously been a cantilever bridge, which was damaged during the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, and shown to have quite obvious seismic deficiencies.
Its replacement is a self-anchored suspension bridge.
The original western span, actually a double suspension bridge, remains standing, as constructed in 1933, 91 years ago.
The Francis Scott Key bridge - the subject of this story - was finished in 1977, and took about 5 years, so... much of it was constructed in the last 50 years. ???
First span of the Blue Water Bridge (Port Huron to Sarnia) built 1938, doing just fine as far as I know. (Drove over it a couple of weekends ago.) Second span was 1997.
Most of the bridges I can think of in the state of Washington are much newer than that.
There are now two Tacoma Narrows Bridges. The oldest was built in 1950. The one that infamously collapsed was built in 1940. The newer bridge is from 2007. The West Seattle Bridge was closed due to damage in 2020 and reopened after repairs in 2022. It was originally built in the 1980’s after the previous bridge was hit by a ship. There are two floating bridges on I-90 east of Seattle. One of them sunk during reconstruction work in 1990 and was replaced. Theres also a new 520 floating bridge that opened in 2016. The Hood Canal Bridge (also a floating bridge) originally opened in 1961, sunk in 1979, was reopened in the 1980’s, and large parts of it were replaced in the 00’s.
The Ballard Bridge actually is over a century old! It was opened in 1917. However there was a lot of reconstruction done during the 1930’s. The Fremont Bridge is also from 1917. Both of these bridges span a ship canal that was built between 1911 and 1934. The Aurora Bridge was also built in the 1930’s.
If you don’t live somewhere with famous/major bridges it’s really easy. I doubt I could name ten bridges period that aren’t in my mid-sized city (and I can only give the correct name for two of the ones here, neither of which is famous). I can only identify maybe four by sight from outside my city—I can name a few that I couldn’t pick out of a lineup of photos.
There's a massive one being constructed right now - the Gordie Howe International Bridge. It'll be the second bridge (and fourth crossing) between Detroit and Windsor when it opens next year. Although maybe I only know of that one because I grew up in metro Detroit.
Depends on the "we" you're talking about, I guess.
In the DC/MD/VA area, almost all the bridges I can name are less than 100 years old. Woodrow Wilson, American Legion, Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, Key Bridge, Key Bridge, Nice Bridge, Memorial Bridge, Chain Bridge, 14th street bridges... Some of those were even built after 2000! Also the New River Gorge Bridge in WV is pretty famous and not even 50.
Well, actually, the Key Bridge (in DC) apparently turned 100 years old last year. And I guess the Long Bridge (though not a road bridge) is also over 100...
> but those bridges where also constructed by a far poorer nation
That's a must more interesting question when discussing the topic of infrastructure.
Sure we've created a lot more money in the last 50 years, but we've also lost a lot of domestic manufacturing. When it comes to something as vital as roads and bridges are we poorer when we have less paper money or when we are less independent in the manufacturing and maintenance of them?
Money is just a proxy for power, so “poorer” means not able to do something. Note that you are referring to “we” being poorer, and a country’s ability to do (or get) something is not the same as an individual within the country’s ability to do something.
Money is a side issue people are generally a lot more productive than we where 50 years ago and the US population is 50% larger. That means the government has a lot more resources to work with though how it spends them is another question.
I think people feel poorer because income inequality increased so much. New homes are huge because new home buyers are the upper end of the wealth curve. Same deal with cars etc. Stuff that targets everyone like normal sized TV's ends up being extremely cheap because revealed preferences show people buy cheap when it's an option.
>That means the government has a lot more resources to work with though how it spends them is another question.
it's not that clear-cut. regulations regarding construction are many times more strict, as well employment restrictions and safety code.
I mean, the things like the transcontinental railroad were built with what would largely be considered inhumanely treated human slaves by today standards -- that kind of 'advantageous hiring condition' thankfully no longer exists.
Stuff like that plus millions of other regulatory nuances that drive the cost of development to be many times more expensive than during the bad old 'wild west' make these kind of value analysis gapped by many years near impossible.
The transcontinental railroad was built without modern heavy equipment. Today fewer people can get a lot more work done even with humane working conditions and modern safety code. Which helps explain humane working conditions and modern safety code.
As to regulations, in 2023 an I-95 bridge failed after a gasoline tanker truck fire. They took 12 days to get a temporary replacement that got traffic flowing again. You occasionally see such projects where we need a fix now and then it happens. However, it was a temporary replacement and they needed an actual long term solution.
The difference between such rapid projects and more typical ones include time consuming steps to preventing dirt from settling and causing problems in the future etc. Regulations are filled with such tradeoffs, but that doesn't mean we're unable to move more quickly just that we can afford to do something else.
> Money is a side issue people are generally a lot more productive than we where 50 years ago and the US population is 50% larger
Production per capita may have gone up, but that's (a) likely measuring productivity in financial terms and (b) heavily correlated with an increase in natural resource consumption, especially fossil fuels.
If we want to consider ourselves richer because we are able and willing to use more natural resources today could lead down a dark (and very hot) road.
Fossil fuel consumption in the US is down way down especially on a per person basis because of improved efficiency and cheaper alternatives. There's more Americans today, but in many ways we are consuming fewer resources while still being better off.
Compare a modern jet with one from the 1974 and sure many passengers have less leg room but it's hauling both people and 3rd party cargo while still using far less than 1/2 the fuel per passenger mile. Such improvements really add up and include things like engineered lumber using fast growth pines.
Look at the most popular car 50 years ago and you'll see the Ford Pinto. It's slow, unsafe, tiny, time consuming to maintain, fuel inefficient, and missing modern amenities but it was affordable. Inflation adjusted it's roughly the cost of a Mitsubishi Mirage which while better in just about every way is a rough equivalent the reason people are buying crossovers rather than the Mirage today is because people just have more wealth in real terms.
When you say it is "down way down", how much is that exactly?
The data I found only goes back to 1965 [1], but from the absolute peak in the 70s to today we've reduced per capita use by around 30%. Over the last 20 years we've reduced it by around 15%, going back 10 years and the reduction is only around 5%. Time scale matters a lot here, as does a definition of what "way downdowm" would mean in real % reductions.
I totally agree we've made use of oil more efficient in things like engine efficiency. We've also found more uses for oil byproducts, which can be good or bad depending on your opinion (and again, on your time scale). If we've improved fuel efficiency by 50% and at best reduced fossil fuel per capita by 30%, we've squandered some of those gains by using more oil for other things.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is really up to opinion, goals one has in mind, and how one weighs the trade offs.
That's a common topic here, yes, though honestly I rarely hear about a bridge collapse. I don't actually remember the last time I saw news of a bridge or overpass collapse that wasn't causes by damage like this.
Makes me want to find the data now. I don't actually known if our bridges are too old, poorly maintained and falling apart early, or if the whole topic is just herd mentality and politics.
Among the more spectacular recent US bridge failures was the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, which failed during rush hour with bumper-to-bumper traffic with a loss of 13 lives on 1 August 2007: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge>
There's a list of many more failures at Wikpedia, though international in scope:
Opened in 1781, still in service and perfectly safe. Of course, there are no container ships nearby. But I reckon you could sail a container ship under it, given enough water; and to damage the bridge supports, the container ship would need climbing equipment.
1781 isn't many years after the Declaration of Independence.
If there was enough water for the 48m beam, 24m airdraft container ship that just collapsed the Baltimore bridge to attempt to navigate under the 30m span, 16m high Iron Bridge I don't think the bridge would stand a chance...
Heh! OK, so I'm wrong about being able to sail a container ship under the Iron Bridge.
It didn't take motor traffic, because when it was built, there was no motor traffic. But the claim I replied to was about all bridges. But it used to take vehicle traffic: the WP article says "In 1934 it was designated a scheduled monument and closed to vehicular traffic."
And all bridges do last roughly 50 years. Look at all bridges and figure out the average, median, or mode lifespan is reasonably close to 50 years +/- depends on where you draw the lines.
A tiny fraction reach 500 and so far none that we know of have hit 5,000 though there’s a few possibilities.
> if tomorrow we decided to build a new bridge next to every old bridge, average lifespan would half.
The only way building a bunch of new bridges changes lifespan is if we changed how they where built.
Figuring out lifespan rather than age is at best an approximation after looking at the bridges that didn't survive and the condition of bridges that do, but the uncertainty is low.
That's also a much smaller scale. 22 ft long, 13 ft high, and carries only foot traffic or maybe horses. Much less is demanded of that structure than of a river-spanning mile-long truck-carrying bridge.
An obsolete or worn-out bridge is likely to be replaced by another, and in such cases, a risk analysis which potentially comes to different conclusions depending on how often such a replacement occurs is missing the point.
I’m a huge “it’s capitalism’s fault” person, but this one feels mostly inevitable. Bridges are wonders of engineering that require this delicate balance, and I don’t think “just build em the old way” is an option. It’s not just price, it’s strength (for non-container-ship events…), span, height, construction time, etc. Obviously I’m in no place to evaluate the specifics of this bridge, and as someone from the SF Bay Area I know allll about corporate corruption fucking up expensive brand new bridges, but I feel like you’re yelling at the moon a bit here. Apologies if I misunderstood though!
well, "economically viable" doesn't necessarily mean scraping the bottom.
For example the great pyramids of giza are very solidly built. You certainly don't expect that level of build for every commercial or residential building out there.
Now, on the other end of the spectrum you can have buildings that can collapse on minor earthquakes.
Yes, and it looks like it did take out an entire section. So it isn't like the ship just 'nicked' it and bent a few members. An entire support was taken out.
Many homes also incorporate lightweight trusses that can fail in a similar fashion. They pose a unique risk for firefighters, which is why New York went so far as to require warnings be posted outside such structures: https://www.finehomebuilding.com/2015/01/28/new-york-now-req...
Check out Brick Immortar (it’s a pun) on YouTube for some in depth videos on past container ship collisions with bridges and how newer bridges are engineered.
The Mathews Bridge in Jacksonville was clipped by a container ship a few years back and did not collapse. Despite being almost 75 years old, they fixed it up and it opened back up after a year or two. The difference is that the boat did not hit a pylon.
There is this often in HN featured article about bridge engineer analysing bridge collapses in film [1]. It’s about suspension bridges though but the takeaway for me was that when they go they go completely.
At least in the links with the video now you can see that the container ship directly hits one of the two main (and in the central area only) pillars completely collapsing it.
No matter(1) the engineering there is no pretty much way to not lose the whole large middle area and left area leading to the destroyed pillar in that situation.
Such a collapse crates so much force (tension vibrations etc.) so that the collapse of the section right of the right pillar is not unreasonable.
The only question is if the impact should have made the pillar collapse.
But a loaded container ship is ... absurdly massive I mean they are like multiple high raise building (but not sky scrapers) standing squished together side by side. So the force it can apply is huge and if cargo moving in it there will be force applied to whatever it crashes into even after the initial impact.
And looking at the waves caused by impact with the base it was at least 8m high I think (depending on the container ship). So that wasn't a "slow moving" impact. And even slow moving impacts with container ships can tear apart a solid jetty.
So while the US has issues with infrastructure maintenance idk. if anything but building a many pillar bridge would have made any difference. And building a many pillar bridge might not be very viable depending on the under water landscape and water use under the main area.
EDIT: Looking at pictures with daylight where you can try to estimate the high of the ship using containers I would say the waves where handwavingly 4 containers high so ~9.5m and it also looks like the ship might have embedded half of the pillars fundament into/under itself (but it's a bit hard to tell to the angle of the picture). I think if that's the case probably the huge majority of bridge pillars of past and presence would have collapsed.
It certainly does not seem reasonable to design a bridge pillar to withstand a direct impact from a massive cargo ship.
But I guess I thought that maybe there was... typically some kind of earthen buffer around the pillar to prevent such an impact?
That's probably impractical too, I guess.
I guess I just didn't realize ~$1bn bridges were one fluky ship accident away from total collapse at any given time. I think maybe I prefer my previous state of ignorance, to be quite honest....
I think this would be even harder. Whilst the ship has a lot of kinetic energy that needs to get dissipated, it also has a huge momentum that needs to be partly overcome to redirect it. You’d also need a material with enough structural strength to turn the ship. Materials that can crumple or deform (like huge concrete blocks or earthworks) are great at dissipating energy, but they aren’t great at deflecting things.
> But any preventive measure will have limits as what and how serious an impact it can deal with.
The recent grounding of a large container ship in Baltimore's harbor channel demonstrates that a sufficiently massive berm will stop any ship. What's needed is the will to do something about low-probability but catastrophic events (though large-ship collisions, groundings and fortuitously harmless steering failures are frequent enough that this should not have been dismissed as a low-probability event.)
In this case, the nearby towers supporting transmission lines across the channel seem to be better-protected against ship collisions than the piers of the bridge.
Starting from xoa's calculations above, assuming you can pack a berm with well-compacted soil enough that it can absorb 1,000 joules per cubic meter, you'd need a buffer of something like 10 meters surrounding each piling with 3 meters of depth to keep it safe from this kind of impact. That's 10 meters in every direction from the center of the support -- let's assume the support has a thickness of 0 meters for the sake of the math, and acknowledging that the gaps between structural supports on the bridge is approximately 30 meters -- the only way to protect it with earth is to make the bridge impassable by water. Of course, this would protect it from ship strikes.
You needn't stop the ship completely with the berm: just taking up enough energy that the bridge lives for 20 minutes after the impact would be useful.
Even if it takes 10 meters to get the job done (in practice, ships will not be coming at the piers perpendicularly to the channel), that is far from rendering the channel impassable.
Secondly, I believe riprap would be preferred to compacted soil (though compacted soil did a pretty good job stopping the Ever Given three years ago.)
Thirdly (and rendering the above moot), what's been done around the replacement Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa bay (mentioned in other posts here) shows that protection is, in fact, practical.
In view of these considerations, I'm not even going to check if, for example, xoa considered the energy absorbed by the ship (Update: in fairness, I did take a look at what xoa wrote, and I see that it is you who has introduced the figure of 1000 J/M^3.)
For an introduction to a serious engineering approach to this problem, look here:
There are other issues with my work, namely that the central span is over 300m in width, not 30, as I had wrongly discovered, ergo the channel is passable even with my extremely half-baked solution.
That said, the dolphin-bulwarks around the Tampa Skyway are interesting. I've sailed through similar and not known their purpose other than to observe that local waterfowl like to line up at them ahead of tidal shifts to catch the fish as they're encouraged by the currents through them.
I have to say, you guys are all calculating things without any sort of deference to the nature of the soil underneath any of these piers or abutments. Also, you're both off on your other points as well. Sunshine Skyway has in no way been tested, and there are ways to "reinforce" earthen works so that they can handle more force so that you don't necessarily need 10 m.
You guys are doing amateur engineering. Firstly we don't even know what happened here yet. Secondly we don't know the nature of the problem we'd have to solve in protecting any span that would have been at that position. (How deep is the water? How far down to bedrock? Geological nature of the soil? etc etc etc)
It seems almost impossible for us as humans to just give the professionals some time and space to work so we can see what happened. I get that. I even engage in it at times. But you guys are stating things with certainty and almost indignation? Come on fellas.
Just say your peace and admit it's just a wild ass guess that's likely to be wrong in the end like the rest of our comments.
FWIW, I think there are even more errors in my figures. That said, I wasn't trying to bunk or debunk, as much as the grandparent's comment intrigued me enough to wonder "What if earthen barrier?" -- how much earth would that take. My guess was that it would be prohibitive, and that 116,000 tonnes traveling 8.5 knots is just too much to stop. Earth obviously can, as whomever alluded to the Ever Given points out, but a lot would be required. How much? I don't know, but I was just trying to get an idea.
You're right that it's amateur. This isn't remotely what I do. To your point though, I don't have that much confidence that the Skyway bulwarks would do -- I'm sure they're more than adequate in preventing strikes from my 40' sailboat. Probably much more than that. My gut tells me they are inadequate to stop the momentum of 100k tonnes at speed, but if they did SOMEthing, perhaps that would be enough to differentiate between bridge damage and bridge collapse. I can't find any details on how it's reinforced, with what, or how deeply those reinforcements are buried, so this too is wild speculation... but I wonder if it isn't somewhat security theater. My wife is already scared of bridges, and we're Marylanders who frequent that bridge and the (much longer) bay bridge -- putting something down there to calm her nerves enough that she isn't panicking for the duration of every crossing is almost certainly worthwhile, but doesn't leave the nerds much to ponder.
You should look at the deisgn of old stone bridges. Their side facing up ( so towards the floods and ice) is like a wedge pointed upwards. So it's not like he bridge needs a buffer to fully stop all the forward energy. It can lift the object out of the water and maroon it there.
When Florida's Sunshine Skyway bridge was partly collapsed by a similar incident in 1980, the replacement bridge was built with a series of "structural dolphins" and concrete barriers to protect against ship strikes. You can see them in the image linked below:
I would also add those barriers seem to depend on the ship staying intact during collision. Given the immense inertia involved on the bigger ships I could just as easily see a scenario where the barrier ends up ripping through the lower hull while the rest of the ship continues forward.
> easily see a scenario where the barrier ends up ripping through the lower hull while the rest of the ship continues forward
I don’t think that is likely? My intuition is that in order to stay seaworthy ships are constructed with more integrity than that.
I don’t have any hard evidence though, just that I have looked at many ship collision/allision aftermath photos and what you describe is not a failure mode I have seen so far.
In smaller channels and similar it's not that uncommon to have crash barriers. For example in many Berlin channels and rivers.
And while I'm not quite sure what it is for the bridge had concrete pillars orthogonal in front of the pillars (this picture shows them well, to be clear I do NOT mean the power line isles: https://www.upi.com/News_Photos/view/upi/7191ba50f17c5a68307...). They would have stopped the ship if it would have went orthogonal to the bridge (i.e. if they mistook where the pillar where in a otherwise normal situation). Through not sure if that was the purpose of them.
The MV Dali (IMO#9697428) is a little over 95000 GT, or ballpark-ish probably around 114000 tons loaded (and it seems to have been loaded, which would make sense on departure). If it was going even 5kn (2.6 m/s) that'd be about 300 million newton-seconds, or about 3.3 times the momentum of a large jumbo jet like a 747 shortly at cruising speed (around 560 mph). It'd still have the same momentum as said jet if it was going just 1.5kn. The ship of course is enormously more stoutly built and the force is going to be transmitted far more directly into whatever it hits vs into explosions driving mass elsewhere.
I've read that both on water and in space for that matter enormously massive objects moving very slowly messes with human perception and "common sense", it "feels like" something moving along smoothly and slowly should be stoppable or come to a stop. Enormous momentum and forces can be terrifying things.
> enormously massive objects moving very slowly messes with human perception and "common sense"
Yes, hence warnings to amateur boat users (e.g. on a canal boat) not to try to stop a collision with the bank using your arms or legs.
[Edit] Boats can also do things that are unintuitive if you are used to driving a car. E.g. turning round the centre of gravity when you steer rather than following the front wheels.
There are similar warnings for sailing vessels, but because the standing rigging of the ship is usually kept in high enough tension that putting your hands on a pilon to stop a collision might leave your hands vulnerable to being cut off by a mainsail's shrouds.
I had a summer job once, filling trains with sugar. They weighed about 15kkg per wagon (usually 5-10 wagons per train IIRC).
One time the pulling cart broke down and we had to switch it for another, but when we took it off the rails we forgot about the "shoe" that is supposed to go between the rail and one of the wheels so it can't move downhill (it was like 1degree of slope so barely recognizable as a slope).
It started moving extremely slowly, and all of us except one tried to hold back the force of the train, which of course was imossible and dangerous. The one who did not try to push it very quickly found the "shoe" and put in place. Initially it did not seem to help at all, the train just continued moving at the same pace, tearing up asphalt with the shoe. It finally came to a stop after about 3-5m(?) which takes a fair bit of time with such low speed, and felt like forever given the situation.
The train tracks headed out into an open road, so it could have been so much worse if it were not for the only person thinking clearly in the situation (he was one of the more experienced in our group).
Also want to highlight this for another reason. At slow speeds rail and boats suffer from far less “moving” friction than road vehicles. So once off there is very little slowing them down vs cars and trucks that suffer from high rolling friction.
Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering recently did a great demo of this. He was able to pull his car in neutral and an empty train car on rails with roughly the same force.
Mostly the same as it would work on a car with a brake shoe applied to the steel wheel.
The only major difference is that they often use a safety air brake system shared across an entire consist (train) that requires “charged” pressure (above atmosphere) to disengage the brake (although I think they have moved to an electronic system that now monitors air pressure in each car individually).
I think it's actually in an earlier video, and he wasn't able to actually pull the train car due to track irregularity -- but according to calculations he should have been able to if there was a safe way to give it a bit of a nudge.
> all of us except one tried to hold back the force of the train
This reminds me of a vivid memory I have. I’d just finished a shift cooking, and out back of our restaurant there were railroad tracks. I had a beer and smoke out there with my shift mate, and a train was rolling by. I thought it would be fun to practice jumping on the train. So I do a few passes jogging alongside it, hopping on and off. Then my buddy, standing still, reached out and grabs a rung of a ladder on one of the cars. It immediately picked him up, but he gripped harder due to being startled. He got ragdolled through the air about 10 feet from where he was initially standing.
Kids, don’t play with trains (trespassing issues aside).
A friend of mine was on the light rail here downtown when it stopped unexpectedly. He was confused and walked outside only to see the train had hit a fire truck and pushed it nearly a block before it stopped. He had no idea there was even a collision inside the train.
Trains are very scary stuff even when moving at a crawl.
A 110,000 ton ship collision is something the human brain is just not going to understand intuitively.
I don't know what sort of speed ships travel in harbors (though I know that they are faster than they appear.) In this case, it was an ebb tide (though within an hour of the low) which might have added something to the ship's speed.
According to https://gcaptain.com/ship-lost-control-before-hitting-baltim... they were going 7.6kn so your figures are “optimistic” by a factor of two. I really don’t know how much an engineer could have done to stop 600M N/s - that’s just an enormous amount of energy.
Crazy! Going by the higher 7.6 kn figure mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that'd be closer to 450 million N s.
For another comparison, Wikipedia gives an estimate of "Apollo 11 launched from Earth to orbit" at 495 million N s [1]. So this is a momentum that's order-of-magnitude comparable to space launches.
You don't need to build the bridge to an absurd strength, but it may have been insufficiently marked as a navigational hazard. Something like a few well-lit pillars 500 feet upstream in the water would have given the ship plenty of warning to change course, since a vessel travelling at 5 knots takes about a minute to go 500 feet. The total bridge length is on the order of 10,000 feet, so widening the safe area around the pillars to 500 feet would not be a significant impediment to navigation.
I've seen close-up video where you can see the ship losing electrical power twice for not-insubstantial times as it approaches the column. I suspect that was a much larger factor in the collision than anything the crew may or may not have done. Warning time doesn't mean shit if you can't steer.
I heard through the grape vine they were able to halt traffic across the bridge at the last minute. Only people actually on it when it fell were construction workers who were filling potholes at the time.
seems like they should have turned left and tried to go under the middle section there instead of cranking all the way around right. I imagine they were under task saturation with the power outages though.
I think we should restrain ourselves from armchair judgements when basically no one here is a harbor pilot, let alone someone informed with what was happening in the moment in this event.
What happened will be meticulously reconstructed and everyone involved in this is going to have their lives put under a microscope for years worth of legal battles. I don't think we should rush to judgement or second guess from a position of ignorance.
I mean, yes, everybody is pointing out about the mass of the container ship, but that's actually to the point of the above question and my question. Because the ship's size and weight are obvious. Were ships this size regularly passing by or under this bridge such that this scenario was effectively bound to happen given a ship failure and/or pilot error? That's my question. I'm not familiar with port activities, so it seems weird to have basically no secondary protection for that bridge with container ships of that size operating so close that they can hit it mere minutes after some failure.
Watching this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJNRRdha1Xk) shows that the ship was incredibly close to the bridge in the first place, even prior to the supposed failure. It's a bit bewildering to me, with my current knowledge, that this scenario wasn't envisioned prior.
That was my thought. The supports look like toothpicks relative to the ships that routinely pass through. I don't know enough about the forces involved here, but I'd like to think when they rebuild, they will add some sort of deflection capabilities around the supports that ships must past in between.
But again, I don't know what that would take to deflect a massive ship like this. In hindsight, the bridge looks terribly exposed given the persistent risk of ships passing through.
I did hear one expert on the news say that a better, low-tech defense some bridges have is sacrificial piers in front of the actual ones. I don't know if this bridge had none, or if they didn't get the job done.
> It’s surprising that ships capable of doing this damage were probably regularly driving past it, and its safety as a thoroughfare depended entirely on those collisions not happening.
There are cities with skyscrapers near airports, which depend on the airplanes not hitting the skyscrapers.
I don’t drive boats or around water much but I’ve seen “bumpers” on bridge pylons before that make a collision more of a glancing blow and guide the boat to the side. I guess there wasn’t any installed on this bridge? Also, someone on Imgur pointed out that when this bridge was built boats that large weren’t a risk. That may or may not be true but sounds plausible.
Panamax specifications (320 m length, 32 m width) have been in effect since the opening of the canal in 1914. Some ships were already larger than that back then. The Titanic was about that size.
The ship that knocked down the bridge could weigh ("DWT") up to 115 000 tons.
Some ships from the 1960s and 1970s:
Universe Ireland: Launched in 1968, it had a DWT of over 300 000 tons.
Esso Atlantic (1977): DWT of over 500 000 tons.
But these were tankers. You're right that container ships were not as big back then.
One of the larger container ships when the bridge was built in 1977 was MV Hamburg Express. It was 280 meters long, 32 meters wide, and had a DWT of 50 000 tons.
Do you really think a 280 meter long ship weighing 50 000 tons would not have knocked down the bridge in exactly the same way?
Ironically there are power lines running in parallel that have much more substantial protection, here you can see the powerline protection and the tiny bumpers...
Fenders and such. A major problem is this bridge was designed and built in an era where ships were substantially smaller (3000 TEU) than they are today (20000 TEU).
The ship that brought down the bridge had a capacity of 10 000 TEU. It's max weight (DWT) was 115 000 tons.
There were container ships with a DWT of 50 000 tons when the bridge was built.
There were also tankers with 10x that (500 000 tons), so large and heavy ships shouldn't be a Pikachu-face surprise to the bridge designers. If nothing else, the trend in increasing ship sizes was clear to anyone looking at it.
Do you think the bridge steel pylons would have resisted a 50 000 tons ship plowing into them?
In 2013, a tanker ship hit the Bay Bridge (Oakland <--> SF) but didn't do much damage. In 2007, another tanker (Cosco Busan) hit the same bridge dumping oil into the bay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upfjxfl2nRM. We have a new bridge there now because that one was also damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
When the Golden Gate needs replacement, the Marin NIMBY's that didn't extend BART to the north bay are going to be sad (more likely, their children will be).
This brings back to memory 911 conspiracy theories.
Many revolved around the unlikelihood that a building would collapse the way the towers collapsed just due to knocking out a few floors at the top. But the truth is all these mega structures are quite fragile and can instantly collapse in unintuitive ways.
One factor that a lot of people in this discussion are missing is that buildings are primarily built to resist vertical forces, because gravity is by far the largest force any building (or bridge) ever experiences.
Having a large force strike perpendicular to gravity is just not something it's designed for at all. All it ever has to handle in the form of force from that direction is wind, and that's absolutely nothing compared to a fully laden container ship hitting it.
That bridge looks like its almost entirely made of just trusses. It's hard to imagine how one might expect it not to collapse when everything holding it together is so thin.
Ironically, simply bulking up the ground around the piers would have had the ship run aground; at 8 knots the ship would have slowed to a stop within several yards, and suffered minor damage, maybe would have required being tugged back into clear waters. Running aground puts the majority of impact into a downward force absorbed by the earth. It's hard to build a bridge pier that will withstand 200,000 tons of direct impact, no matter how slowly that's moving.
That's what makes sense to me. Ships are designed to minimize drag going through the water. But the friction of the entire hull scraping across the bottom should be MUCH larger and thus able to exert lots more stopping force.
Also, if the ground is sloped, it will act like a ramp, lifting the ship out of the water. The loss of buoyancy means its weight will push downward on the ground below it. An increased normal force means more friction, thus more stopping ability.
Simply bulking up the ground around the piers with loose fill or monolithic concrete would have had the ship run aground; at 9mph (the recorded impact speed) the ship would have slowed to a stop within several yards, and suffered minor damage, maybe would have required being tugged back into clear waters. Running aground puts the majority of impact into a downward force absorbed by the earth. It's hard to build a bridge pier that will withstand 200,000 tons of direct impact, no matter how slowly that's moving.
separate but pertinent question: what was the mv dali's air draft? (FSK bridge's clearance is 185'/56m) was the container ship going to fit under the bridge, i.e., perhaps the incident was an aborted attempt to crossing under the bridge?
separate but pertinent question: what was the mv dali's air draft? (FSK bridge's clearance is 185'/56m) ...perhaps the incident was an aborted attempt to crossing under the bridge?
Anyone know about backup steering power on these vessels? I know they typically keep emergency generators, but does this provide adequate steering power?
Is there a reason we don't force ships above a certain side to always approach a bridge like this perpendicular in the main channels? Seems like a trivial thing to implement immediately and makes this never happen again.
If you watch it in slow motion and how it breaks apart, you won't really find it surprising how things snap and bend considering how big the container ship is compared to the bridge. It makes a lot of sense.
Oh, this makes me feel bad for Baltimore. Only bad news seem to come out of this town. Its reputation -- both domestically and internationally -- is mostly informed by The Wire, Freddie Gray/BLM, a dysfunctional city government, the 2019 ransomeware attack, the spoiled batch of J&J Covid vaccine... and now this. It's a real shame. It's a good place.
We’ve also got cherry blossoms, some good ramen and a few good breweries. Shocking lack of excellent Mexican food, however. And some world-class hospitals and universities. Don’t take TV shows so seriously.
Please do yourselves a favor if you haven't already and check out the tacos at Taqueria el Sabor del Parque on the south side of Patterson Park. Also while you're in the area, grab a kilo of tortillas from El Taquito Mexicano in Fells.
Could this be cyber attack? On the video the ship goes normally straight under the bridge, then does sharp turn right and for 20s or so goes directly into the pier.
The ship loses power before the turn. The power loss could of course have been the result of a cyber attack, but a mundane mechanical failure seems more likely.
Not that it matters to anyone else, but having driven across that bridge dozens of times with my kids, this is just shocking. It’s one of the main corridors in the area. Thank god it happened in the middle of the night, though that’ll be no consolation to the families of those who may have died.
I don't think that's quite right. People in Dundalk will suffer a fair bit, as will folks in Glen Burnie and Annapolis, but most people are going from DC to Delaware, and go north rather than over the Key bridge.
I think this is most harmful for commuters.
Blocking the Baltimore harbor is brutal although I suspect the passage will be cleared as quickly as possible.
I think 30-35k cars a day cross that bridge. Being local to the area, is is going to make traffic in the entire metro area much worse, and it is already awful.
Or roughly a 3 second headway per vehicle. Given four traffic lanes (two in each direction), that would be a vehicle every twelve seconds per lane, which seems far more reasonable. That's spread out over the day, so peak-hour traffic would be much higher.
Peak capacity for a highway lane is just shy 2,000 vehicles/hour:
Which would put the Key Bridge's maximum capacity at about 192,000 vehicles/day.
For comparison, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge saw about 42.7 million paid toll crossings. As these are metered only in the westbound direction, actual crossings are likely double that, or 85.4 million/year, or about 230,000/day.
(The bridge sees 1/3 the total traffic of all California state-owned bridges.)
Local to the area. This was devastating news to wake up to. I don't know what's wrong with me but seeing this and knowing there were casualties made me cry.
I worked next door to the church that was shot up in Charleston and felt similarly moved despite not knowing them, never having been inside the building, and not having even been a Christian at the time.
It is a bit strange at some level - not having any true connection beyond proximity but you should probably worry if you _don’t_ at least feel a little something.
Nothing wrong with crying. I cry sometimes. Heck, if I spend too much time thinking about the 343 firefighters who died on 9/11, it will still bring a tear to my eye even after all these years. It's just part of the human condition. Cherish it.
Do you happen to know how they stopped traffic? Are there warning lights at the ends of the bridge? I have seen bridges of this sort but they are fairly rare.
I'm wondering if that's how they stopped almost all of the traffic. Flip a switch, most people stop, a couple of assholes blow through the caution and FAFO.
Based on comments elsewhere two police cars were able to block traffic with mere seconds before the impact. There was a construction crew on the bridge repairing potholes so the police may have already been nearby related to that.
That was my exact thought.
Thankfully, I woke up to messages that my family members were safe and sound.
I hope they find everyone but at this point it seems unlikely.
Older bridges no, but newer bridges should absolutely. The Bay Bridge was struck in 2007 and came away mostly unscathed due to earlier efforts to prevent catastrophic damage in that scenario;
In my defense, the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge is older and carries more 4x more traffic than the "other" Bay bridge! But yeah, given that the Chesapeake one is just down the road from the bridge that collapsed, I get the confusion.
In a Bridge of Theseus sort of way. The entire Eastern span is very new, a lot of the approaches have been rearranged, and major components of the Western span has been replaced over the years. But I guess none of this affects the age of the bridge, at least in Wikipedia’s estimation :)
The container ship "unluckily" maneuvered between the protective barriers. About 4 more protective barriers would have stopped this collapse.
------
No bridge survives being struck by a container ship. That's why barriers are erected around critical points. There already were barriers, they just weren't complete coverage for some reason. (EDIT: Maybe the older 1970s era design of this particular bridge wouldn't allow more protection to be placed. Obviously this situation calls for a full investigation / lessons learned kind of thing, as part of the new bridge building process)
A lot of bridges have their pilings set on mini islands, terrifically reinforced piles of stone and concrete that extend for quite some distance around the actual support. I don't know why some are built without that, it always weirds me out seeing the spindly legs going straight into the water, and this is why.
Edit to add: Check out Fort Carroll, precisely such an artificial island just a few hundred yards away in the very same harbor. It was built in the 1840's as a military position to defend the harbor, and has fallen into disuse. Now just imagine if the bridge sat on a couple of those, instead of the foundations it had. Ship would've barely dented the wall.
Civil engineering is very complex and doesn’t go off of feelings. I’m sure the type of soil and rock that the bridge is built on inform such decisions.
I would and furthermore I think there is a massive bias at play - if the exact same disaster happened in China there would be jokes about bridges made of Chinesium.
There is an expectation that a disaster happening in the west in a result of unforeseeable act of god, but in China it will be a result of corruption or shoddy workmanship.
Whereas in reality maintenance standard in the west have fallen but in the east they improved.
So now this bias protects responsible decision makers from legal consequences - no one went to prison for grenfell disaster, postmaster scandal or the Boeing debacle.
> Whereas in reality maintenance standard in the west have fallen
In the context of this incident, are you saying that we _previously_ used to go around retrofitting our 50-year-old bridges with more modern defenses, and then at some point since then we stopped doing this? Obviously if we're talking about new construction, it stands to reason that standards have only _increased_, but this was an old bridge built to old standards. So which standards have "fallen" to result in this disaster specifically?
> 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition. Unfortunately, 178 million trips are taken across these structurally deficient bridges every day
Growing up my grandmothers house was on the watet across the Bay from Baltimore. This bridge was literally in the backdrop of my childhood. Scary stuff.
Yeah. I was out of town hiking in Wyoming at the time and was told it was the 35E bridge by a passing hiker who relayed the news to me. My mom drove the 35E bridge twice a day. I couldn’t hike out and call home fast enough. I didn’t know anyone who was on the bridge when it fell but I do know many who missed being on it by minutes. Scary stuff.
I remember standing not far from edge of that shortly after it happened (https://www.flickr.com/groups/35w-bridge-disaster/), and still get a little panicky when I'm in slow traffic on a bridge. This event will affect the city, the port, and its people for a long time.
According to current reports, the Maryland Transportation Authority Police responded to the ship’s “mayday” and stopped traffic in the minutes before the catastrophe, but 6 construction workers are still unaccounted for.
They keep reporting this, and maybe it was because the video was sped up, but it looked like there was still traffic going across until very close to the collision
The last car crossing that I can see clears the span about 1:28:06; the bridge collapses about 1:28:48. That's about 40 seconds of gap between the traffic and the collapse.
I haven't timed how frequently cars are coming, but it seems to be about every 30 seconds or so, which--combined with the time it takes to cross the bridge--is evidence that a bridge closure was effected just before the bridge collapse.
The optimist's gambler's fallacy says luck is a constant attribute of an individual, and if someone gets lucky they are more likely to have a high luck stat and thus be more lucky in the future. The pessimist's gambler's fallacy says luck is a consumable resource, and if someone gets lucky they consume their luck and are thus less likely to be lucky in the future.
Honestly, that would probably fuck me up for a little while, knowing I was less than a minute away from probably being dead. I hope they're okay, mentally.
There's a pretty good spanish film named Intacto that has something like this as it's premise: people who survive disasters have "luck" that can be captured/transferred by other people by playing games like russian roulette.
If the police were able to close the bridge just in time, that's a pretty spectacular response. There were only ~5 minutes between the ship loosing power initially and the impact. The police saved lives, and it's only a shame that the construction crew wasn't evacuated in time.
* There was a request to close the bridge when the ship lost power, which went over police dispatch about a minute before the bridge collapse (the bridge collapse is reported at timestamp 1:09 in the audio).
* Someone was able to hold the outer loop traffic at ~0:20 in the audio, as they reported they were already driving along at the time.
* Inner loop traffic is reported stopped at ~0:56 in the audio. I suspect there may already have been a police car there because of the construction on the bridge.
* Between 0:20 and 0:56, the conversation is about pulling the workcrew off the bridge. The police officer blocking inner loop traffic, after reporting stopping traffic, is indicating that he's waiting for a second unit to arrive before going onto the bridge to collect them.
* At 1:09, the bridge is reported collapsed, and multiple officers confirm. There is a question as to which traffic is stopped--the people blocking inner loop traffic are unable to confirm outer loop stoppage, but the person holding outer loop informs them of the stoppage at the end of the recording.
So traffic seems to have been stopped for about 10-50 seconds before the bridge collapse, depending on the exact length of time between someone stopping traffic and radioing in that they did so. From what I can tell, it sounds like outer loop traffic was stopped in time solely by sheer coincidence, while the inner loop traffic may have been existing police presence (for the construction zone) changing posture to a full closure.
Do you know what inner loop and outer loop traffic means here? Are they different sides/directions of the bridge?
And it is tragic how close the police were to evacuating the work crews. I interpret that the officer blocking one entry intended to go on to the bridge but was waiting for another cruiser to block the bridge before he left. A few more minutes and the bridge might have collapsed with no casualties. Though at least an officer attempting a rescue wasn't hurt.
The bridge is part of I-695, which is a beltway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_695_(Maryland). Inner loop refers to the inner lanes (traveling clockwise), outer loop the outer lanes (traveling counterclockwise).
Further clarification: because it is a loop, you can't use cardinal directions ("East bound I695" for instance) to indicate which lane you are talking about.
There is a semi-truck that enters from the right just before the crash at https://youtu.be/N39w6aQFKSQ?t=299 (4m59s). And some more vehicles that follow after. Doesn't seem like they stopped "all" traffic as is claimed.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] thread“ The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland which crosses the Patapsco River has reportedly Collapsed within the last few minutes after being Struck by a Large Container Ship; a Mass Casualty Incident has been Declared with over a Dozen Cars and many Individuals said to be in the Water.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/26/major-bridge-in-baltimore-co...
https://twitter.com/TheMDTA/status/1772524001815920876
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Bridge_(Washington,_D.C.) (hn breaks the trailing parenthesis in the link)
Edit: they removed the photo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Bridge_(Washington,_D.C%...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/us/ship-hits-baltimore-ke...
That's gonna be expensive.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/mar/26/baltimo...
Of course it’s still tragic and awful.
That drop alone would injure/kill many. And immediately after people would be in cold water still locked in their vehicles. The water there was deep enough to be able to deal with loaded container ships. So, tens of meters at least. If you then factor in currents and the amount of time it takes to mount any form of rescue operation with divers, etc. it starts looking pretty grim indeed.
I hope rescue workers pull off a minor miracle.
There are only a handful of ships in the world with a draft of more than 20 meters. The ship involved in the collision has a (maximum) draft of 15 meters.
They probably will be getting more traffic than any single major news paper.
A lot of people, potentially scared and confused, and going to be reading that article and making decisions based on it.
Keeping the information good and complete sounds to me like a deep kindness.
If they're sitting on the shore with a fully stocked rescue boat delaying help to post their edits, aye I'd be peeved too. Otherwise, might as well keep info updated as it becomes known.
One of the beauties of the internet is that there's enough people willing to do the work to keep the rest of the world up to date with real-time information.
Chances are changing tenses was just a single command anyway, `./pastTensify.sh "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_(Balt..."` or whatever the Wikipedia bot command equivalent would be.
Adding actual information about the event will naturally take a little longer as it needs writing first - they probably fired off the pastTensify automation while writing the meat and potatoes of their edit.
Not sure I understand the snarky turn at the end there but I imagine I'm just lacking whatever context you have! No problem :)
For what it's worth I've popped an upvote on your comment and will go out of my way to double check snark is actually snark before replying to things in future.
Sorry for the misfiring assumption!
What was going through your head at that time?
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/39.2144/-76.5279
[1] https://imgur.com/LymzwMU
It looked like this to me.
https://nl1.outband.net/image/fsk_bridge_down.jpg
The API shows the data was modified to mark the bridge as collapsed.
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/149163336#map=15/39....
> Bridge collapse after being stuck by container ship - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/maryland-b...
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/149162713#map=18/39....
> Tag bridge as destroyed and ruins
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/149168397#map=14/39....
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=15/39.2182/-76.512...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83a7h3kkgPg
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Cs6PrRiIHEw&t=1m23s>
<https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/#urls-and-email-a...>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32745065>
https://github.com/rytsikau/ee.Yrewind/
Ships in water tend to move and keep moving, engines and thrusters work to vector that motion into a desired direction - when things fail motion doesn't cease and courses aren't maintained.
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!
Here’s an image of its path
The pilot is a former captain with a lot of local experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_pilot
[Edit: The association of Maryland Pilots even has the bridge on their homepage https://www.mdpilots.com/]
Did the pilot screw up? Was the pilot ignore? Did the captain take over? Was there a technical fault that disabled steering?
There could be a lot of possible reasons for this incident.
Based on the track, it appears the ship changed course slightly and slowed as it approached the bridge [2].
[1] https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:28...
[2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:2810451/zoo...
If so, what I'm still not understanding is why ships are allowed to make that passage all on their own without any backup like a tugboat and why the bridge doesn't have secondary protection of its pillars. Because with a track like that and lack of either of those things, a catastrophic collision seems inevitable.
Does anyone know why the ship would make a sudden hard right during a sequence of power failures?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebb_Tide_(The_Wire)
Aside from the new story details I caught and the general great acting, I was struck by how the series captured a the technology transition going on at the time. Payphones and typewriters shift to classic feature phones and PCs with CRTs. Then camera phones enter the picture.
But yeah the short scenes of "that's my f*ing town" and the "they used to make steel there, no?". I know the first one takes place right next to the bridge because they say they are at Fort Armistead. I assume the latter is in much the same place since I thought they are looking across the river at Sparrow's Point.
Aside from great acting and direction, of course.
https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/the-1906-dredging-law-that-ma...
Then I would start planning the shiny new thing.
Maybe that at least not the whole bridge collapses, when something in the middle gets struck.
Last thing was not perfect.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/presidents/gerald-r-ford-...
>Lyndon B Johnson is often reported to have said of Ford that “He can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” What he did say was “He can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” The US media deliberately misrepresented the remark in the interests of decency.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk_and_chew_gum_at_the_same...
>walk and chew gum at the same time (third-person singular simple present walks and chews gum at the same time, present participle walking and chewing gum at the same time, simple past and past participle walked and chewed gum at the same time)
>(idiomatic, informal, chiefly in the negative) To do two normally trivial tasks at the same time; to exhibit basic competence or task-management skills.
>Usage notes: Used in negative phrases to indicate incompetence, e.g. "He couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time."
>1978, United States Federal Trade Commission, Statutes and Court Decisions, Federal Trade Commission: The philosophy communicated to T.E.C. salesmen was to enroll any person who could "walk and chew gum at the same time".
Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bvxZgCryUE
Ford on the Phone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEIpAIqzbTg
He went on to clobber Dole in the 96 election.
Story about LBJ, one time a society matron buttonholed Lady Bird and told her that she needed to get LBJ to stop saying manure so much. Lady Bird said I will not because you have no idea how hard it was to get him to say manure.
I'll be the first president to do it in that time period.
We'll build the bridge, we'll complete the bridge, and then we'll say: "let's do more", and we'll do a lot more.
There has never been anything like it, this great bridge of ours.
edit:
The guardian clip says vehicles were on the bridge.
Does anyone know if modern construction standards would require more stability after a ship collision, or is this still how we build bridges?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_(Balt...
> 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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Skyway_Bridge#/media/...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sunshine+Skyway+Bridge/@27...
A glancing blow is completely different from a direct hit. And the amount of Newtons behind the blow completely changes the outcomes. A small ship versus a loaded container ship is a completely different force.
I doubt many bridges would take a full speed, fully loaded container ship directly to one of their supports and survive it. Certainly the most celebrated bridges have a better chance of surviving but I doubt any second tier, lower traveled routes would.
Why would you anticipate that a container ship would have to hit the bridge? What about the flip side to that... How many bridges have never been hit by a container ship or alternatively how many times have an almost fully loaded container ship come to a dead stop after hitting a bridge?
The reason why I would anticipate a container ship hitting that bridge is because of the video we've all seen. It's a huge ship that is going the slowest it can while still retaining control over the vehicle, unattended, through a tight spot, close to a bridge with zero protection from ship collisions, and all with a ship design that is apparently (according to other comments) effectively impossible to correctly maintain and keep running at all times. So I think the better question is, why wouldn't you anticipate a collision?
Most modern bridges are hyperstatic: if you remove one support, it still stands.
Or at least isostatic: you remove one support or one span, and nothing happens to the nearest ones.
This bridge was ill conceived: you remove one support or span, and it brings down everything like a chain that pulls down everything it's linked to.
It's bad because the "engineer" just wanted to show off.
I bet there was a much more complex and nuanced analysis which included crossing ship dimensions, budget, time to completion, available technology, composition of the local seabed etc..
Designing a bridge is proper engineering and not that easy.
...in other words.
You do need need the truss at all. If the truss fails (in any of the three spans), it brings down two adjacents spans.
It's just a show off.
The Öresundsbron (connecting Sweden and Denmark) features both short segments but also with an overhand section in the middle for larger ships to pass through. (1) The great belt bridge (inside Denmark) is slightly higher but has the same kind of profile, one of the largest cruise ships barely making it under it is shown passing in the video below (2).
I think the simple truth is that we're vulnerable to these kinds of accidents unless we build far far sturdier bridges, but at these scales to allow passage of ships of these sizes the cost would just make many bridge projects prohibitably expensive.
1: https://www.norden.org/sites/default/files/styles/content_si...
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=j1Cs0C8LkeU
I was curious about Zealand's other connection, the Great Belt Fixed Link:
> The West Bridge has been struck by sea traffic twice. While the link was still under construction on 14 September 1993, the ferry M/F Romsø drifted off course in bad weather and hit the West Bridge. At 19:17 on 3 March 2005, the 3,500-ton freighter MV Karen Danielsen crashed into the West Bridge 800 metres from Funen. All traffic across the bridge was halted, effectively cutting Denmark in two. The bridge was re-opened shortly after midnight, after the freighter was pulled free and inspectors had found no structural damage to the bridge.
> The East Bridge has so far been in the clear, although on 16 May 2001, the bridge was closed for 10 minutes as the Cambodian 27,000-ton bulk carrier Bella was heading straight for one of the anchorage structures. The ship was deflected by a swift response from the navy.
In Danish [2], but it looks like there's someone always monitoring the sea traffic, and able to close the bridge at very short notice — I assume with the red flashing lights which are used to close motorways in emergencies.
> The eastern end through the Great Belt is international water, and therefore even the largest ships must be able to sail under the bridge. The 254 meter high pylons are therefore dimensioned so that they should be able to withstand the approach of tankers of 250,000 tonnes dead weight (DWT) at a speed of 10 knots. Artificial islands protect the anchor blocks as well as the three outermost piers on the Zealand side and the two outermost ones on the Sprogø side.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Belt_Bridge
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090116051425/http://ing.dk/art...
[0] They expected fuel leaking to cause a devastating fire, but not that the fire would weaken the structure enough to cause the cascade failure that brought the towers down. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930227&slug...
The towers failed, in the end, but withstanding the initial hit mattered a lot.
If the design requirement for the twin towers was "be fire resistant enough to let most people out of the building", then I'd say they met that requirement, right?
If the design requirement for a bridge is "continue operating at normal capacity", then that is a very different requirement.
Yes, the towers failed to survive serious damage. But the 40,000 more deaths would have been "socioeconomic trouble", in spades. Even by your own chosen measure, the survival for an hour was a partial success.
But my comment was in regards to having to build a really expensive bridge to make it crash resistant. I pointed out that you can instead build a cheap flimsy bridge and put the protection in the water around the pylons.
My impression is that the Baltimore bridge had no such extra protection (?) In that case, it's not really "the best design", right?
> "the only thing that stopped the car from tipping over the edge was the casing of the automatic transmission, which grinded and gripped into the surface of the bridge."
https://www.carsguide.com.au/oversteer/this-hq-monaros-auto-...
Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to barely make it stand.
It's a subtle distinction that I don't think many in the digital realm quite grasp either i.e. far too many over-engineered technical solutions for features and products that aren't even desired
If it is still standing after 1000 years, I would say yes. You cannot build a bridge out of stones with bad engineering - it would collapse under its own weight.
edit: does "well engineered" now means over engineered to some?
But I think the true definition of engineering has to encompass a level of efficiency through design, calculation and rationalization. In other words, echoing what the original commenter said, including only what is barely necessary.
Or by experience and learning from other sucessful bridges? Stone bridges were not new in the year 1000.
There is a roman bridge that was allmost completely surviving all this time, till it was blown up in WW2:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Pietra_(Verona)
If they wanted a cheap solution, they would have used wood. But wood does not last a 1000 years.
Personally I salute anyone, who can build something that lasts that long.
"including only what is barely necessary."
And "barely necessary" in solid engineering includes lots of safety margins. Not barely standing.
And yes, that includes not using more than you need, because the more material you use, the heavier your bridge is -> the greater are the forces on the structure itself even with no one passing over it.
There are some fun games out there on various plattforms, google "bridge builder"
Not a scientific simulation of course, but they do show the concept.
The 1000 year medieval bridge we're talking about could have been an efficient design for its time.
But then one must make clear: necessary for what.
I think there is a great overlap between "holds for whatever scheme the prefecture will do to test it while I stand under" and "holds for a thousand years".
There is like a limit where fatigue stress stops being a thing in a cycle graph. Many failure modes is due to penny wise cost cutting.
People who engineered bridges during Roman Empire had different tradeoffs to consider than people who were building bridges in 20th century.
Standing for a thousand years is rarely an ultimate goal when engineering a bridge although it is possible that Romans planned for longer timescales than us.
If we decided to build like Romans did, there would likely be very little infrastructure and many structures would simply be impossible to construct.
Why? The romans build lots of infrastructure. Roads, sewage, irrigation, .. and they used the materials and technics of their time.
Can't we really do better today, with all our advanced technology?
Or can't we, because everything has to be cheap, cheap, cheap?
I mean, the romans used slaves. That is cheap. But we have machines.
Do you know the movements of the supply and demand curves of the materials required since Roman times?
These types of hypotheticals are a waste of time, and only serve to illustrate hubris, as if something as complicated as comparing Roman construction and resources to modern day construction and resources could be possible.
Well, one can compare the results.
Personally I like things that are build solid and can last a 1000 years.
But I don't think I said the romans build better. They just had a different intention: long lasting.
You implied a whole host of things with this statement, and considering the topic of this thread, also ramming a Roman bridge with a fully loaded modern day cargo ship.
The point is there are so many moving parameters, it is nonsensical to take 1 result of 1 technique from 1 point of time and use that as a basis for what one can expect at other points in time.
"If we decided to build like Romans did, there would likely be very little infrastructure"
Why not? They did not have the intention to make the bridge resistant to such heavy loads, as that was not a use case at that time.
They had the intention to make a bridge to last as long as possible for the traffic at their time. And they surely succeded with this.
Now whether they also could have made a bridge that resists 18 wheelers for 1000 years, well, I don't know.
Also we know a bit more about the romans than just their bridges.
Which is to say "let's just pretend that all of those pesky details do not exist".
What is well engineered depends on the goals and the limitations of the state of the art at the time. I would say that a thousand year old bridge might count as well engineered if the goal was a bridge that had a low total lifetime cost.
Do all bridges we build need to be able to withstand the force of an entire shipping container bridge hitting it at high speed? What planet should an engineer think that a shipping container has managed to veer off course so badly that they hit a bridge at full speed, fully loaded? That is a sad and significant outlier event.
It’s not meant to be an insult, but a compliment noting that engineers know what the essential parts of the bridge are
A bridge that could stand the loss of a single support pier without any significant collapse would obviously be preferable -- but that's a big ask. I'm not a structural engineer, but I am aware of scaling laws [1] and it feels to me that those scaling laws are going to mean that increasing the margin of safety by x is going to increase costs by x^n. For a project like this one, where cost was apparently the deciding factor over a tunnel, that matters.
[1] https://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/609.ral5q.fall04/L...
Well for starters, there's a better chance of less (or ideally no) people forced to get their feet wet and go missing or die from drowning or hypothermia.
The broader point is that attempts to blame the bridge designers here are misplaced. It really isn't reasonable to have hoped that they could design a structure that could cope with this kind of failure, within the cost constraints that they had. And cost constraints were a real thing for the designers of this particular bridge.
I guess we can be happy failure like this is rare, and that the bridge was not busy: reports indicate 13 cars, and about 7 persons still missing. This could be so much worse.
The best way to think about measures is after we know the full chain of events that have lead to this.
[I'm very busy, so hopefully I didn't forget/add a few 0s by accident. Anyone feel free to correct me if I did.]
On this bridge, the main section of the bridge is supported by four spaced pillars, making three main spans there. One of the middle two towers was hit, so this should affect two of the three spans. But it took down all three of them. A span that was supported on both sides by intact towers still came down. That is what I find most surprising here.
When any piece in the chain of those forces breaks, the entire structure loses ability to transfer forces and breaks.
This arrangement is what allows us to build these structures in the first place. There is careful calculations of forces and risks and allowance for margin for error and unexpected events. But, unfortunately, in many cases those do not include ramming things with a large container ship...
Random ship hits a bridge.
Shakes fist at sky "the government".
It sounded much more like a common trope, "the do-nothing government just lets things fail, doesn't take action until something fails".
A bridge got hit by a container ship at speed and folks here are talking about this like the bridge was not up to standard, or why there was a bridge there at all when they know nothing about the locale. I am not a structural engineer, but I am going to go ahead and guess that not much would still be standing from a direct hit from a container ship. And from observation bridges like this exist all over the world and don’t regularly get struck by container ships.
It was a freak accident.
If we want to point fingers or question things, perhaps if anything the question is why the container ship lost power repeatedly? Was this a known issue before leaving port?
You're right, I don't. But I do know there are other locales where they seem to explicitly avoid bridges crossing heavy ocean traffic.
I know they exist, and perhaps after this they'll exist a bit more.
This is a public bridge 5 years in the making and who knows how long in planning, and people have been extremely lucky that it collapsed at 3am and not in the middle of the day. It doesn't matter at all how unlikely this is in a given time frame if the impact if it happens at any point in time is catastrophic.
Vertical clearance for ship traffic might have been the reason this kind of bridge was built in the first place. Otherwise, something lower and more causeway-like might have been sufficient.
That is a very interesting point I hadn't considered at all. Price is an obvious point, but I hadn't considered hazmat.
It does make me wonder how hazmat traffic is handled around Amsterdam. I think they are allowed in some tunnels here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_(Balt...
This was a big point of contention when a local town announced it was replacing the failing asphalt on the section with the most traffic with slabs of concrete. [0] People complained about the price. Meanwhile, over a decade on, nearby asphalt laid with the same renewal project is already cracking while the busy main thoroughfare remains undisrupted by road work.
It's hard to persuade people that long-term investment is worthwhile.
[0] PDF page 10 (print 17): https://www.dot.ga.gov/PartnerSmart/Public/Documents/publica...
It makes sense to me that cargo would be restricted, and it's bizarre that it would be related to terrorism (an additional rule isn't going to prevent an attack...).
The underlying problem here is that automobiles are inherently inefficient so you either get epic traffic jams or have to massively overbuild capacity, forcing the engineers to deliver as many lanes as they can for the budget.
Unfortunately, nobody who knew it would happen today warned anybody.
Those calculations are really hard: say they had built a tunnel, what are the odds of the same number of people dying in a fire after someone crashes into another car? Would we have needed to spend any money at all if more people had used railroad alternatives to driving and such an expensive bridge or tunnel was not justified on traffic grounds?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Road_Tunnel#2001_coll...
It is now a very large port that is completely closed off from the sea.
And two sides of the city no longer linked
The damage from this accident is only beginning.
Even if loss of control of a large container ship was considered in the design of the city, port, and that particular bridge, ships were not even close to the order of magnitude of mass of today's ships.
And, it lost power at almost exactly the worst moment. What are the odds?
I don't know, but I suspect we don't hear much about all the times power is lost at moments that are less than the worst.
Of course, it seems that a high(er) frequency of failures should be taken into account for zones where it is critical, such as in port. I just saw a few days ago that a ship docking took out a couple of cargo cranes (sadly, badly injuring a crane operator); didn't seem like a power outage, more of a misjudged steering.
Have you looked at a map of Baltimore? They're very much linked, you just have to drive a little farther. The only issue will be that all the traffic this bridge previously carried now has to reroute to the bridge farther north, so now traffic will be much heavier.
The direct or short link is now broken. Everyone must now go around the entire harbor, on roads that will now have 40k more cars every day, instead of directly across it. I wasn't saying that some area was a disconnected island, but that many trips will become more costly or non-viable for years until the bridge is rebuilt.
Perhaps I should have said "no longer directly linked", but thanks for the picked nit.
This is casual conversation. Writing quickly and colloquially, with the assumption that "no longer directly linked" or "no longer linked as they were 10min before" is inferred, certainly to anyone who has seen a map of the area. It should also be inferred from the sentence alone, as if the link had been to an island, then most writers would have made the much stronger point, saying "completely cutoff from the mainland" instead of the much weaker "no longer linked" (just because one link is broken does not imply that there are no others).
If you want to comment that "I was confused by your meaning and it could have been more clear if you said X" is a perfectly fair statement.
But deliberately taking absolutist definitions in a casual conversation where meanings can be implied / inferred, is an unfriendly, oppositional, if not hostile stance.
In any case, I apologize if you were offended that I didn't include all the qualifiers and assumed they would be apparent to the reader. Have a nice day.
However, please learn that ambiguity in informal speech/writing is substantially different from errors in formal edited speech/writing, and different responses are appropriate.
In the context of formal writing (e.g., an academic or industry paper, book, etc.) we should expect almost all ambiguity to be edited out, and not allow for inferences in either direction; i.e., your complaint would be valid.
However, in casual speech/writing (e.g., SMS, social media comments, non-formal emails, etc.) it is common and not serious to leave IMPLIED components in the conversation. It is certainly acceptable to ask for clarification such as "did you mean to imply that some area was made entirely inaccessible by that event?". But it is inappropriate to accuse someone of being dead wrong by leaving out the implication.
The request for clarification should result in the speaker/writer saying "ya, I did mean to imply XYZ, not PDQ, thx for pointing that out." — mutually and efficiently finding the truth. The accusation, especially continued insistence on the accusation being the one true correct way, is the way to start an argument trying to establish dominance.
It might also be worth noting that your class of people — those familiar with the Baltimore area — should have been MOST able to recognize that "not directly" was the inferred meaning, since you know it's not linking an island to the mainland. That you chose the hostile "j'accuse — you are wrong!" form of discussion rather than the collaborative friendly "btw, you did not mean to imply that the bridge linked to an island" (and continued to insist on the hostile approach) tells us all that this is more about your emotional state and/or approach to human interactions than about the ambiguity itself.
Have a great week
Edit: of course there are a ton of other solutions here as well. I am disagreeing with the parent that it is the cars which should get to stay and the container ships which have to move.
Amsterdam has no bridges at all crossing the IJ on the west side (where sea-going ships come from) and only a single bridge on the east side (though there's often talk of adding another). Everything is tunnels.
Rotterdam has bridges (including the famous Erasmusbrug), but only east of the port area. To the west, everything is tunnels. And the largest ships don't even come close to the city center, but dock at the Maasvlakte out at sea.
For both cities, ports have constantly moved closer to the sea.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/as-residents-leave-balti...
>“There’s a lot of people staying [in those cities] and we want to be sure they’re not left with an excess of infrastructure that’s impossible to maintain,” he said. “So what do we do about it?”
I lived in the NOVA area for more than a decade and each visit to Baltimore (every few years) was more depressing. Of course, that's anecdotal but I'll stand by it.
It is hard not to feel a sense of tragedy if you know something about the place. It is written all over the city. The blocks and blocks of boarded up row houses speak for themselves. Now they are tearing them down. Maybe that is for the best, but it doesn't seem like a win.
I think the whole ship went dark for a moment. That may have had an impact on the rudder, and then some strong current and/or wind, pushing it sideways.
Couldn't see tug-boats.
I think there’s also an underlying expectation that any competent ship captain would at least be able to see that they’re on a collision course with the pylon well ahead of time and be able to compensate. Which obviously didn’t happen in this case.
I'm sure captain tried to do anything he can to avoid collision.
A container ship has huge inertia, I don't think any bridge could be built to take a direct hit like that.
I would be interested to know some calculations with factors like: expected bridge lifetime, chance of being rammed per year, cost of making supports strong enough plus an extra safety margin to survive maximum ramming force, cost of having major commercial shipping route unusable for an extended period.
They are designed to withstand smaller boat impacts because they occur relatively frequently, but cost vs benefit on rare events that are difficult to mitigate is quite different.
Though to be clear designed to last 50 years isn't the same as saying it will only last exactly 50 years, or that theirs nothing you can do to extend a bridges lifespan if it's replacement is running a little late.
The average age of a bridge in the USA is 43 years. But we also have an epidemic of unmaintained bridges.
No bridge made today is designed to last indefinitely. Many different forces will degrade the bridge over time, even with maintenance. Steel stresses weaken it over time. Concrete weathers over time due to salt, chemicals, water, wind, and the steel reinforcements tend to corrode eventually.
Stone bridges may last for an exceptionally long time, but their weight and expense makes them only useful in limited applications, typically as small rail overpasses. Ones that were designed for horse and buggy end up slowly failing as heavier trucks and cars in traffic weaken them.
The same fate lies for timber bridges. When well maintained they can last for 75 years, but it's expensive and requires certain skills. They were also mostly designed before heavier cars and trucks, and for less traffic. Most famous covered bridges today are being closed to traffic due to increased wear.
FHWA provides up to $7 Billion in assistance in maintaining bridges. But it would take at least $125 Billion to begin dealing with the structurally deficient bridges in the USA, according to the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card[1].
Add to this the fact that many bridges in the US are privately owned, and it's the responsibility of the bridge owner to maintain them. But guess what's not profitable for a private enterprise? Maintaining bridges. Despite this, train derailments and property damage continue every year due to unmaintained bridge and train infrastructure.
The executive has proposed funding for repairs, but as usual, it's not enough[2]. So far they've gotten almost half that number of bridges repaired, and pledged another $300M,[3] which is still just a drop in the bucket of what's needed of the backlog; it doesn't address all the new maintenance that will be needed each year.
According to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, there are 167 million crossings on 42,400 bridges rated in poor condition. [4]
[1] https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges-infras... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/biden-has-plan-fix-amer... [3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... [4] https://artbabridgereport.org/congressional/map
Is it impossible for these things to stop happening? No, not at all. But it's probably not going to stop, in this country, because we let private industry get away with whatever they want. If this were the UK the story would be very different.
I mainly made that comment because it still blows my mind the the City Bridge Foundation has been going for 740 years
The bridges we can all name are pushing 100+ right?
I’d argue the Bayonne Bridge raising kinda counts since it was almost a rebuild and more impressive in many ways since it stayed open the whole time.
Meanwhile in the San Francisco Bay Area they replaced the Bay Bridge…
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/a-bridge-that-ha...
1. Built to last only 50 years to save on materials (as the other commenter noted).
2. Built over literally the widest possible part of the Hudson because the governor got in a pissing contest with the Port Authority and wanted all the tolls to go to the state, which wouldn't have been the case had it been built like 2 miles south where the river is narrower.
3. Designed with zero redundancy, such that a "critical fracture could make the bridge fail completely because its supports couldn’t transfer the structure’s load to other supports." [0]
So yeah if we're being real, 50 years was quite optimistic.
The new Tappan Zee is apparently supposed to last 100 years, though given the incidents with substandard materials being used, as well as ever-increasing traffic, who knows.
That said, driving over a bridge 10 years past its planned EOL and being able to look down directly to the water through gaps in the concrete was always a nice feature though -- who needs coffee when you've got that to get your heart rate up!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tappan_Zee_Bridge_(1955%E2%80%...
Keeping in mind that mid-century Japan and Germany were in ruins and the possibility of nuclear annihilation of urban centers very much at the top of many people minds. 50 years may have seemed an optimistic survival rate of built structures at the time.
Its replacement is a self-anchored suspension bridge.
The original western span, actually a double suspension bridge, remains standing, as constructed in 1933, 91 years ago.
Here's an interesting list of major bridges with dates, most of the newer ones being replacements: https://www.carolinadesigns.com/obx-guide/fun-info/bridges/
They even note a rare exception designed to last 100 years with maintenance.
They more or less do continuous maintenance during the warmer months of the year.
(So older than 50, but younger than 100)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilwaukee_Bridge
Sticking with the mid-western therme, the Chicago Skyway was built in 1958
The Millau Viaduct also comes to mind when thinking of famous, iconic modern bridges.
There are now two Tacoma Narrows Bridges. The oldest was built in 1950. The one that infamously collapsed was built in 1940. The newer bridge is from 2007. The West Seattle Bridge was closed due to damage in 2020 and reopened after repairs in 2022. It was originally built in the 1980’s after the previous bridge was hit by a ship. There are two floating bridges on I-90 east of Seattle. One of them sunk during reconstruction work in 1990 and was replaced. Theres also a new 520 floating bridge that opened in 2016. The Hood Canal Bridge (also a floating bridge) originally opened in 1961, sunk in 1979, was reopened in the 1980’s, and large parts of it were replaced in the 00’s.
The Ballard Bridge actually is over a century old! It was opened in 1917. However there was a lot of reconstruction done during the 1930’s. The Fremont Bridge is also from 1917. Both of these bridges span a ship canal that was built between 1911 and 1934. The Aurora Bridge was also built in the 1930’s.
In the DC/MD/VA area, almost all the bridges I can name are less than 100 years old. Woodrow Wilson, American Legion, Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, Key Bridge, Key Bridge, Nice Bridge, Memorial Bridge, Chain Bridge, 14th street bridges... Some of those were even built after 2000! Also the New River Gorge Bridge in WV is pretty famous and not even 50.
Well, actually, the Key Bridge (in DC) apparently turned 100 years old last year. And I guess the Long Bridge (though not a road bridge) is also over 100...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
So it's an issue, but those bridges where also constructed by a far poorer nation so it's not that big a deal.
That's a must more interesting question when discussing the topic of infrastructure.
Sure we've created a lot more money in the last 50 years, but we've also lost a lot of domestic manufacturing. When it comes to something as vital as roads and bridges are we poorer when we have less paper money or when we are less independent in the manufacturing and maintenance of them?
I think people feel poorer because income inequality increased so much. New homes are huge because new home buyers are the upper end of the wealth curve. Same deal with cars etc. Stuff that targets everyone like normal sized TV's ends up being extremely cheap because revealed preferences show people buy cheap when it's an option.
it's not that clear-cut. regulations regarding construction are many times more strict, as well employment restrictions and safety code.
I mean, the things like the transcontinental railroad were built with what would largely be considered inhumanely treated human slaves by today standards -- that kind of 'advantageous hiring condition' thankfully no longer exists.
Stuff like that plus millions of other regulatory nuances that drive the cost of development to be many times more expensive than during the bad old 'wild west' make these kind of value analysis gapped by many years near impossible.
As to regulations, in 2023 an I-95 bridge failed after a gasoline tanker truck fire. They took 12 days to get a temporary replacement that got traffic flowing again. You occasionally see such projects where we need a fix now and then it happens. However, it was a temporary replacement and they needed an actual long term solution.
The difference between such rapid projects and more typical ones include time consuming steps to preventing dirt from settling and causing problems in the future etc. Regulations are filled with such tradeoffs, but that doesn't mean we're unable to move more quickly just that we can afford to do something else.
Production per capita may have gone up, but that's (a) likely measuring productivity in financial terms and (b) heavily correlated with an increase in natural resource consumption, especially fossil fuels.
If we want to consider ourselves richer because we are able and willing to use more natural resources today could lead down a dark (and very hot) road.
Compare a modern jet with one from the 1974 and sure many passengers have less leg room but it's hauling both people and 3rd party cargo while still using far less than 1/2 the fuel per passenger mile. Such improvements really add up and include things like engineered lumber using fast growth pines.
Look at the most popular car 50 years ago and you'll see the Ford Pinto. It's slow, unsafe, tiny, time consuming to maintain, fuel inefficient, and missing modern amenities but it was affordable. Inflation adjusted it's roughly the cost of a Mitsubishi Mirage which while better in just about every way is a rough equivalent the reason people are buying crossovers rather than the Mirage today is because people just have more wealth in real terms.
The data I found only goes back to 1965 [1], but from the absolute peak in the 70s to today we've reduced per capita use by around 30%. Over the last 20 years we've reduced it by around 15%, going back 10 years and the reduction is only around 5%. Time scale matters a lot here, as does a definition of what "way downdowm" would mean in real % reductions.
I totally agree we've made use of oil more efficient in things like engine efficiency. We've also found more uses for oil byproducts, which can be good or bad depending on your opinion (and again, on your time scale). If we've improved fuel efficiency by 50% and at best reduced fossil fuel per capita by 30%, we've squandered some of those gains by using more oil for other things.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is really up to opinion, goals one has in mind, and how one weighs the trade offs.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-per-capita
That chart gives 31% in 49 years 63,836 in 2022 vs 92,635 in 1973, but the numbers are dropping faster each year.
Makes me want to find the data now. I don't actually known if our bridges are too old, poorly maintained and falling apart early, or if the whole topic is just herd mentality and politics.
Fern Hollow Bridge Mk. II?
There's a list of many more failures at Wikpedia, though international in scope:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures>
There are a number of ship-bridge collisions listed, as well as fuel-tanker explosions, which seems to be a surprisingly common failure mode.
Also numerous failures in China, though how much of that is simply a scale effect I can't say.
The bridge projects I've been on spec 75 or 100 years. Main difference is better protection/sacrificial depth on ferrous members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Bridge
Opened in 1781, still in service and perfectly safe. Of course, there are no container ships nearby. But I reckon you could sail a container ship under it, given enough water; and to damage the bridge supports, the container ship would need climbing equipment.
1781 isn't many years after the Declaration of Independence.
It didn't take motor traffic, because when it was built, there was no motor traffic. But the claim I replied to was about all bridges. But it used to take vehicle traffic: the WP article says "In 1934 it was designated a scheduled monument and closed to vehicular traffic."
A tiny fraction reach 500 and so far none that we know of have hit 5,000 though there’s a few possibilities.
For example, if tomorrow we decided to build a new bridge next to every old bridge, average lifespan would half.
> if tomorrow we decided to build a new bridge next to every old bridge, average lifespan would half.
The only way building a bunch of new bridges changes lifespan is if we changed how they where built.
Figuring out lifespan rather than age is at best an approximation after looking at the bridges that didn't survive and the condition of bridges that do, but the uncertainty is low.
But that's talking about the tail end of the bell curve not it's center.
And in practice only bridges that "barely" stand are economically viable
That really depends on what is counted as part of the economy and who is doing the valuing.
For example the great pyramids of giza are very solidly built. You certainly don't expect that level of build for every commercial or residential building out there.
Now, on the other end of the spectrum you can have buildings that can collapse on minor earthquakes.
There is a balance somewhere in the middle.
It's pretty similar to this one.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2015/11/18/suspension-bridges-of-disbel...
No matter(1) the engineering there is no pretty much way to not lose the whole large middle area and left area leading to the destroyed pillar in that situation.
Such a collapse crates so much force (tension vibrations etc.) so that the collapse of the section right of the right pillar is not unreasonable.
The only question is if the impact should have made the pillar collapse.
But a loaded container ship is ... absurdly massive I mean they are like multiple high raise building (but not sky scrapers) standing squished together side by side. So the force it can apply is huge and if cargo moving in it there will be force applied to whatever it crashes into even after the initial impact.
And looking at the waves caused by impact with the base it was at least 8m high I think (depending on the container ship). So that wasn't a "slow moving" impact. And even slow moving impacts with container ships can tear apart a solid jetty.
So while the US has issues with infrastructure maintenance idk. if anything but building a many pillar bridge would have made any difference. And building a many pillar bridge might not be very viable depending on the under water landscape and water use under the main area.
EDIT: Looking at pictures with daylight where you can try to estimate the high of the ship using containers I would say the waves where handwavingly 4 containers high so ~9.5m and it also looks like the ship might have embedded half of the pillars fundament into/under itself (but it's a bit hard to tell to the angle of the picture). I think if that's the case probably the huge majority of bridge pillars of past and presence would have collapsed.
But I guess I thought that maybe there was... typically some kind of earthen buffer around the pillar to prevent such an impact?
That's probably impractical too, I guess.
I guess I just didn't realize ~$1bn bridges were one fluky ship accident away from total collapse at any given time. I think maybe I prefer my previous state of ignorance, to be quite honest....
It does look reasonable to have such a buffer. But any preventive measure will have limits as what and how serious an impact it can deal with.
In this case the ship this massive is something that is carrying ridiculous inertia, and its highly unlikely even a buffer could stop such an impact.
I think at some point you are better off solving these issues with more regulation(smaller ships)? Instead of treating this as a engineering problem.
The recent grounding of a large container ship in Baltimore's harbor channel demonstrates that a sufficiently massive berm will stop any ship. What's needed is the will to do something about low-probability but catastrophic events (though large-ship collisions, groundings and fortuitously harmless steering failures are frequent enough that this should not have been dismissed as a low-probability event.)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/16/business/evergreen-container-...
In this case, the nearby towers supporting transmission lines across the channel seem to be better-protected against ship collisions than the piers of the bridge.
https://images.app.goo.gl/J6vTeDW5xjysbdjr9
Secondly, I believe riprap would be preferred to compacted soil (though compacted soil did a pretty good job stopping the Ever Given three years ago.)
Thirdly (and rendering the above moot), what's been done around the replacement Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa bay (mentioned in other posts here) shows that protection is, in fact, practical.
In view of these considerations, I'm not even going to check if, for example, xoa considered the energy absorbed by the ship (Update: in fairness, I did take a look at what xoa wrote, and I see that it is you who has introduced the figure of 1000 J/M^3.)
For an introduction to a serious engineering approach to this problem, look here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/stco.200910...
That said, the dolphin-bulwarks around the Tampa Skyway are interesting. I've sailed through similar and not known their purpose other than to observe that local waterfowl like to line up at them ahead of tidal shifts to catch the fish as they're encouraged by the currents through them.
You guys are doing amateur engineering. Firstly we don't even know what happened here yet. Secondly we don't know the nature of the problem we'd have to solve in protecting any span that would have been at that position. (How deep is the water? How far down to bedrock? Geological nature of the soil? etc etc etc)
It seems almost impossible for us as humans to just give the professionals some time and space to work so we can see what happened. I get that. I even engage in it at times. But you guys are stating things with certainty and almost indignation? Come on fellas.
Just say your peace and admit it's just a wild ass guess that's likely to be wrong in the end like the rest of our comments.
ETA: Thank you bmelton for owning that.
You're right that it's amateur. This isn't remotely what I do. To your point though, I don't have that much confidence that the Skyway bulwarks would do -- I'm sure they're more than adequate in preventing strikes from my 40' sailboat. Probably much more than that. My gut tells me they are inadequate to stop the momentum of 100k tonnes at speed, but if they did SOMEthing, perhaps that would be enough to differentiate between bridge damage and bridge collapse. I can't find any details on how it's reinforced, with what, or how deeply those reinforcements are buried, so this too is wild speculation... but I wonder if it isn't somewhat security theater. My wife is already scared of bridges, and we're Marylanders who frequent that bridge and the (much longer) bay bridge -- putting something down there to calm her nerves enough that she isn't panicking for the duration of every crossing is almost certainly worthwhile, but doesn't leave the nerds much to ponder.
Measuring a satellite image in Google Maps [1] tells me the bridge's central span is more than 300 meters.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/SzAzuzQRUwW7s2gN8
I Googled the distances before the post but apparently got the wrong value. Danke!
e.g. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/uploads/imported_images/uploads...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Skyway_Bridge#/media/...
Given how the Skyway collapse is burned into the local consciousness, I suspect some of the benefit comes from their visibility.
I truly don't know how the dolphins would fair against a massive ship strike but I can imagine them doing their job.
(ship passing): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FPgQhy2X0AE8yw1.jpg
I don’t think that is likely? My intuition is that in order to stay seaworthy ships are constructed with more integrity than that.
I don’t have any hard evidence though, just that I have looked at many ship collision/allision aftermath photos and what you describe is not a failure mode I have seen so far.
but only on per-pillar per-direction and with quite a bit of distance between it and the pillar
one some pictures you can see that the ship barley missed one of them due to the angle it was going at
And while I'm not quite sure what it is for the bridge had concrete pillars orthogonal in front of the pillars (this picture shows them well, to be clear I do NOT mean the power line isles: https://www.upi.com/News_Photos/view/upi/7191ba50f17c5a68307...). They would have stopped the ship if it would have went orthogonal to the bridge (i.e. if they mistook where the pillar where in a otherwise normal situation). Through not sure if that was the purpose of them.
Exactly. It is only the scale and the viewing angle that makes it seem slow moving.
The MV Dali (IMO#9697428) is a little over 95000 GT, or ballpark-ish probably around 114000 tons loaded (and it seems to have been loaded, which would make sense on departure). If it was going even 5kn (2.6 m/s) that'd be about 300 million newton-seconds, or about 3.3 times the momentum of a large jumbo jet like a 747 shortly at cruising speed (around 560 mph). It'd still have the same momentum as said jet if it was going just 1.5kn. The ship of course is enormously more stoutly built and the force is going to be transmitted far more directly into whatever it hits vs into explosions driving mass elsewhere.
I've read that both on water and in space for that matter enormously massive objects moving very slowly messes with human perception and "common sense", it "feels like" something moving along smoothly and slowly should be stoppable or come to a stop. Enormous momentum and forces can be terrifying things.
Yes, hence warnings to amateur boat users (e.g. on a canal boat) not to try to stop a collision with the bank using your arms or legs.
[Edit] Boats can also do things that are unintuitive if you are used to driving a car. E.g. turning round the centre of gravity when you steer rather than following the front wheels.
People would think they could stop them like soccer balls, and lose a foot.
One time the pulling cart broke down and we had to switch it for another, but when we took it off the rails we forgot about the "shoe" that is supposed to go between the rail and one of the wheels so it can't move downhill (it was like 1degree of slope so barely recognizable as a slope).
It started moving extremely slowly, and all of us except one tried to hold back the force of the train, which of course was imossible and dangerous. The one who did not try to push it very quickly found the "shoe" and put in place. Initially it did not seem to help at all, the train just continued moving at the same pace, tearing up asphalt with the shoe. It finally came to a stop after about 3-5m(?) which takes a fair bit of time with such low speed, and felt like forever given the situation.
The train tracks headed out into an open road, so it could have been so much worse if it were not for the only person thinking clearly in the situation (he was one of the more experienced in our group).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGhBHrr5CYQ
The only major difference is that they often use a safety air brake system shared across an entire consist (train) that requires “charged” pressure (above atmosphere) to disengage the brake (although I think they have moved to an electronic system that now monitors air pressure in each car individually).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfA0ftgWI7U
This reminds me of a vivid memory I have. I’d just finished a shift cooking, and out back of our restaurant there were railroad tracks. I had a beer and smoke out there with my shift mate, and a train was rolling by. I thought it would be fun to practice jumping on the train. So I do a few passes jogging alongside it, hopping on and off. Then my buddy, standing still, reached out and grabs a rung of a ladder on one of the cars. It immediately picked him up, but he gripped harder due to being startled. He got ragdolled through the air about 10 feet from where he was initially standing.
Kids, don’t play with trains (trespassing issues aside).
Trains are very scary stuff even when moving at a crawl.
A 110,000 ton ship collision is something the human brain is just not going to understand intuitively.
I don't know what sort of speed ships travel in harbors (though I know that they are faster than they appear.) In this case, it was an ebb tide (though within an hour of the low) which might have added something to the ship's speed.
https://tides.willyweather.com/md/baltimore-city/patapsco-ri...
Good estimation! :)
For another comparison, Wikipedia gives an estimate of "Apollo 11 launched from Earth to orbit" at 495 million N s [1]. So this is a momentum that's order-of-magnitude comparable to space launches.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton-second
Ship KE = 0.5 * (114000 short tons) * (7.5 knots)^2 = ~7.7e8 J.
747 KE = 0.5 * (510,000 lbs) * (560 mph)^2 = ~7.25e9 J.
747 avg weight = (MTOW + OEW) / 2 = ~510,000 lbs
Posted video of power loss. Also black smoke coming out rear — is that normal? Any clue of what onboard crisis they were dealing with?
Also looks like it's emergency vehicles in standstill that are falling, i can't discern any moving cars at collapse?
What happened will be meticulously reconstructed and everyone involved in this is going to have their lives put under a microscope for years worth of legal battles. I don't think we should rush to judgement or second guess from a position of ignorance.
Watching this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJNRRdha1Xk) shows that the ship was incredibly close to the bridge in the first place, even prior to the supposed failure. It's a bit bewildering to me, with my current knowledge, that this scenario wasn't envisioned prior.
There are cities with skyscrapers near airports, which depend on the airplanes not hitting the skyscrapers.
Doesn't sound plausible to me. Very large Panamax ships were used in the 1970's when the bridge was built.
https://www.container-transportation.com/worlds-largest-cont...
The ship that knocked down the bridge could weigh ("DWT") up to 115 000 tons.
Some ships from the 1960s and 1970s:
Universe Ireland: Launched in 1968, it had a DWT of over 300 000 tons.
Esso Atlantic (1977): DWT of over 500 000 tons.
But these were tankers. You're right that container ships were not as big back then.
One of the larger container ships when the bridge was built in 1977 was MV Hamburg Express. It was 280 meters long, 32 meters wide, and had a DWT of 50 000 tons.
Do you really think a 280 meter long ship weighing 50 000 tons would not have knocked down the bridge in exactly the same way?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg-Express-Klasse_(1972)
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1c/6e/f8/1c6ef8db981c77b1bd7809827...
Ironically there are power lines running in parallel that have much more substantial protection, here you can see the powerline protection and the tiny bumpers...
https://patabook.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cbsn-fu...
There were container ships with a DWT of 50 000 tons when the bridge was built.
There were also tankers with 10x that (500 000 tons), so large and heavy ships shouldn't be a Pikachu-face surprise to the bridge designers. If nothing else, the trend in increasing ship sizes was clear to anyone looking at it.
Do you think the bridge steel pylons would have resisted a 50 000 tons ship plowing into them?
When the Golden Gate needs replacement, the Marin NIMBY's that didn't extend BART to the north bay are going to be sad (more likely, their children will be).
Many revolved around the unlikelihood that a building would collapse the way the towers collapsed just due to knocking out a few floors at the top. But the truth is all these mega structures are quite fragile and can instantly collapse in unintuitive ways.
Having a large force strike perpendicular to gravity is just not something it's designed for at all. All it ever has to handle in the form of force from that direction is wind, and that's absolutely nothing compared to a fully laden container ship hitting it.
Also, if the ground is sloped, it will act like a ramp, lifting the ship out of the water. The loss of buoyancy means its weight will push downward on the ground below it. An increased normal force means more friction, thus more stopping ability.
That is exactly what they did around the pylons of the large Öresundsbridge between Denmark and Sweden.
https://i.imgur.com/w9foiSB.jpg
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/nov/28/john-waters-b...
John Waters’ Baltimore:
https://baltimore.org/what-to-do/john-waters-baltimore/
Hopkins is huge.
https://www.bmoretaqueria.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern_Hollow_Bridge
This just happened at a particularly bad time and place.
I think this is most harmful for commuters.
Blocking the Baltimore harbor is brutal although I suspect the passage will be cleared as quickly as possible.
EDIT: That number seemed fishy; I think the reporter is referring to the traffic along the entire I-95 corridor.
https://x.com/CBSNews/status/1772556368106450953?s=20
Per another comment it's much closer to correct for the annual number of vehicle crossings.
11.5 million cars/day is equivalent to :
Clearly, somethings ... a tad off.11.5 million cars per year however works out to:
Or roughly a 3 second headway per vehicle. Given four traffic lanes (two in each direction), that would be a vehicle every twelve seconds per lane, which seems far more reasonable. That's spread out over the day, so peak-hour traffic would be much higher.Peak capacity for a highway lane is just shy 2,000 vehicles/hour:
<https://www.mikeontraffic.com/numbers-every-traffic-engineer...>
Which would put the Key Bridge's maximum capacity at about 192,000 vehicles/day.
For comparison, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge saw about 42.7 million paid toll crossings. As these are metered only in the westbound direction, actual crossings are likely double that, or 85.4 million/year, or about 230,000/day.
(The bridge sees 1/3 the total traffic of all California state-owned bridges.)
<https://mtc.ca.gov/operations/programs-projects/bridges/san-...>
Edit: Maybe I'm just tired and need more sleep.
I think that's called "having feelings". Nothing wrong with it.
I worked next door to the church that was shot up in Charleston and felt similarly moved despite not knowing them, never having been inside the building, and not having even been a Christian at the time.
It is a bit strange at some level - not having any true connection beyond proximity but you should probably worry if you _don’t_ at least feel a little something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't even know where to start with this comment.
I would be much more concerned if you didn't feel devastated by this and you didn't want to cry.
What you're describing is a normal human reaction to a tragedy.
I'm wondering if that's how they stopped almost all of the traffic. Flip a switch, most people stop, a couple of assholes blow through the caution and FAFO.
The 295 bridge collapse a decade ago was similarly shocking
U.S. infrastructure is beyond crisis level.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosco_Busan_oil_spill
Though the Maryland accident looks like it struck it dead on - just a massive amount of energy to absorb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_Bridge
It's assumed that everyone comes from California unless proven otherwise.
In a Bridge of Theseus sort of way. The entire Eastern span is very new, a lot of the approaches have been rearranged, and major components of the Western span has been replaced over the years. But I guess none of this affects the age of the bridge, at least in Wikipedia’s estimation :)
------
No bridge survives being struck by a container ship. That's why barriers are erected around critical points. There already were barriers, they just weren't complete coverage for some reason. (EDIT: Maybe the older 1970s era design of this particular bridge wouldn't allow more protection to be placed. Obviously this situation calls for a full investigation / lessons learned kind of thing, as part of the new bridge building process)
Edit to add: Check out Fort Carroll, precisely such an artificial island just a few hundred yards away in the very same harbor. It was built in the 1840's as a military position to defend the harbor, and has fallen into disuse. Now just imagine if the bridge sat on a couple of those, instead of the foundations it had. Ship would've barely dented the wall.
There is an expectation that a disaster happening in the west in a result of unforeseeable act of god, but in China it will be a result of corruption or shoddy workmanship.
Whereas in reality maintenance standard in the west have fallen but in the east they improved.
So now this bias protects responsible decision makers from legal consequences - no one went to prison for grenfell disaster, postmaster scandal or the Boeing debacle.
In the context of this incident, are you saying that we _previously_ used to go around retrofitting our 50-year-old bridges with more modern defenses, and then at some point since then we stopped doing this? Obviously if we're talking about new construction, it stands to reason that standards have only _increased_, but this was an old bridge built to old standards. So which standards have "fallen" to result in this disaster specifically?
> 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition. Unfortunately, 178 million trips are taken across these structurally deficient bridges every day
For example, it's possible maintenance standards never changed and the old bridges simply got older and more exposed to risk as the years went on.
Not a container ship, but an abandoned bulk carrier ship: https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2022/11/14/po...
That bridge survived with little damage, and was reopened the following day after small repairs (https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2022/11/15/te...).
I lived <1 mile from it at the time it went down, and had crossed it earlier in the day on my commute.
I'm hearing there were at least 20 cars and a truck on the bridge, plus construction workers, at the time; my heart goes out to those families
According to current reports, the Maryland Transportation Authority Police responded to the ship’s “mayday” and stopped traffic in the minutes before the catastrophe, but 6 construction workers are still unaccounted for.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/2024/03/26/key-bridge-collapses...
I haven't timed how frequently cars are coming, but it seems to be about every 30 seconds or so, which--combined with the time it takes to cross the bridge--is evidence that a bridge closure was effected just before the bridge collapse.
The Washington Post has police audio at the time of the closure (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/baltimore...). A quick summary of the timeline from that audio:
* There was a request to close the bridge when the ship lost power, which went over police dispatch about a minute before the bridge collapse (the bridge collapse is reported at timestamp 1:09 in the audio).
* Someone was able to hold the outer loop traffic at ~0:20 in the audio, as they reported they were already driving along at the time.
* Inner loop traffic is reported stopped at ~0:56 in the audio. I suspect there may already have been a police car there because of the construction on the bridge.
* Between 0:20 and 0:56, the conversation is about pulling the workcrew off the bridge. The police officer blocking inner loop traffic, after reporting stopping traffic, is indicating that he's waiting for a second unit to arrive before going onto the bridge to collect them.
* At 1:09, the bridge is reported collapsed, and multiple officers confirm. There is a question as to which traffic is stopped--the people blocking inner loop traffic are unable to confirm outer loop stoppage, but the person holding outer loop informs them of the stoppage at the end of the recording.
So traffic seems to have been stopped for about 10-50 seconds before the bridge collapse, depending on the exact length of time between someone stopping traffic and radioing in that they did so. From what I can tell, it sounds like outer loop traffic was stopped in time solely by sheer coincidence, while the inner loop traffic may have been existing police presence (for the construction zone) changing posture to a full closure.
And it is tragic how close the police were to evacuating the work crews. I interpret that the officer blocking one entry intended to go on to the bridge but was waiting for another cruiser to block the bridge before he left. A few more minutes and the bridge might have collapsed with no casualties. Though at least an officer attempting a rescue wasn't hurt.