Woof... Found a map of the area, and yeah, you can route around the collapse, but the next closest crossing is a ways away...
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Oof.... the traffic is gonna be hellish there for the foreseeable future.
Now imagine shipping traffic! Lots of deliveries not happening this week!
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And the tunnels (I-895 and I-95) forbid things like propane, so if you have some of that, you're off to the west side of the Baltimore Beltway, which is already extremely busy. Good luck with that!
(Relatively local person here who travels around Baltimore frequently. I've used the bridge that collapsed on several occasions to avoid the tunnels while carrying propane.)
Except if you’re carrying HAZMATS it’s even worse, they’re not allowed in either of the tunnel crossings, so all that traffic has to reroute aaaaaaall the way off your map via the western half of 695.
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.
and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Politics.
"More tug jobs? Not on my watch!"
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Roughly 20 people are still missing. Water is almost 0 degrees. I think this will be the death toll.
I also wonder how TF this happened.
The temperature in the river was about 47 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) in the early hours of Tuesday, according to a buoy that collects data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Edited to add:
Replies seem to think that I think 8°C water isn't cold or dangerous. I don't think that.
https://westpacmarine.com/samples/hypothermia_chart.php
Loss of consciousness is expected to occur within 30-60 minutes and death is expected within 1-3 hours at those water temps. I would assume none of the victims were wearing personal flotation devices, so rescue of anyone else seems highly unlikely.
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I’ll wear a t-shirt outside for 10 minutes when it’s 47 degrees outside. But 47 is a whole new level of cold when it’s water.
I have a little pond in the yard, so I occasionally have to reach in there throughout the year. Right now it’s close to that 47F mark, and it’s like past “this is cold” to “this hurts!”
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Water temp of 47 can be lethal very quickly.
Water cools the body about 25 times faster than air of the same temp. A diver in 70-degree water may go blue in the lips even with a wetsuit. 47 degrees will have your body going numb super quickly. Then you lose dexterity and start having muscle cramps all over. You lose the ability to swim away or even tread water.
It's bad.
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It is likely to disrupt shipping in a major US port. This will have repercussions throughout the economy until the port is fully reopened.
That bridge was also part of I-95, a major northeastern transit corridor. That will also be majorly impacted.
It looks like long-distance traffic would normally take the remaining bridge over I-895 rather than over I-695, though I suppose it'll be more congested now due to more traffic having to pass over it.
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Usually, this would be deleted for not being a news article.
OP, please link to the link below, and I'll let it stay.
Im sorry, i wasnt aware of that rule. I just wasnt seeing a video up on here at the time so i grabbed one off the live stream to post for others to see. I posted the link you gave in the description instead of the main url so people can still quickly pull it up. If theres a problem still ill do what i can to change it, or you can go ahead and delete this post since there are now more videos and such up online.
Nope. You did great. Our rules state that a post must contain a link to an article. Keeping the video as primary, and adding a link as the comment suffices. We usually don't give the warning, but I felt that your post added good context for the news surrounding the breaking news.
You guys (mods) are doing a helluva good job. A very civil request for the OP to correct the slight omission, encouragement and polite follow up, didn't just silently delete the post.
Kudos!
I feel like the whole thing shouldn't have come down as easy as it did...
Edit: Nevermind, I didn't realize how large this ship actually is.
I don't think integrity after getting a support annihilated by a massive ship is a reasonable design objective. You'd need way more supports and structure, at least doubling the weight and cost of the structure, I'd guess maybe 4x. As far as stress tests go, getting one of your two supports knocked out is an extremely stressing condition.
I learned recently that in engineering there’s a saying that anyone can build a bridge that will stand, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.
Which seems dark, but bridges are built on budgets while adhering to aesthetic, material, and site/traffic (on, under, and sometimes over) requirements.
And besides, that ship was between 210 to 257 million pounds, traveling at whatever speed it was going. I’m not a physicist, but I recon that’s enough force to knock down a bridge. (As evidenced.)
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if you ever made a bridge out of toothpicks in school, the lesson is how much force it can hold straight up and down. Something super heavy whacking at its side while also dead on nailing one of the major support structures.... yeah thing crumbled like toothpicks
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Welcome to Baltimore (bawlmore, for the locals). A local here, it's so devastating.
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