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Lights on boat began to flicker before incident, suggesting some sort of power failure. Steering a full size car without power steering is possible, but spoiler, steering a huge container ship ain't.
Someone commented that exhaust increased noticably as well, possibly because pilot put ship in reverse after losing power (with prop walk veering the ship into the support).
All just people talking on the Internet at present, but "asleep at the wheel" isn't necessarily what happened.
Given how "easily" the bridge fell... Why aren't ships that size required to 100% be escorted by tugs???
At the risk of sounding too Clarke and Dawe, it is very rare that a ship loses power and control, and somewhere it could hit something important, and hits that thing, and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces. It's been there for 46 years, and the Port of Baltimore currently sees an average of 53 ships in and out per month, so about 3.5 big ships under the bridge per day. That's a lot of passages over the years without incident.
I mean, it just got hit with a hundred thousand ton hammer. That'll do a pretty good number on most structures, I imagine.
For a structure that normally has these ships pass under it every day, it sure as hell should have had bollards to protect the piers against such an impact.
made out of what and in what shape?
no, this is you speaking my language. we do 'risk assessments' and yeah I guess it's a case of severity*likelihood, where risk is never zero.
but, no matter what, when the risks 'line up' into a failure mode, holy shit is that failure catastrophic. crazy terrible regardless.
I don't know what the likelihood of this would be, but it's definitely miniscule. I suspect you'd still need safeguards to reduce the risk to an acceptable level, but I'm not sure what exactly you can do once a boat has failed and is going to make imminent impact.
At that point all you can do is mitigate the fatalities and evacuate.
The bridge fell off
Cause then we would have to hire more people to tug all those ships in and it would be less efficient.
Not very profit margin of you to suggest that.
What's the profit margin of the port with the river blocked? And of the city with a major road cut?
The shareholders want their returns NOW!
Decades of stability pales in comparison to next quarters margins
The company is about to find out that a quarter of high margins pales in comparison to the lawsuits awaiting them.
Politics.
"More tug jobs? Not on my watch!"
And money.
"Why do I need to pay for your safety"
This'll be the real reason.
My comment was just unhelpful and inappropriate - a bad joke aimed at puritanical Americans.
I actually don't disagree with anything you said. I don't think you should feel bad (unless the comment is edited and I'm misunderstanding)
They likely were, but there are limits on how fast even a group of tugs can influence a ship many times their size/weight/mass.
The laws of physics still apply.