My apologies for the Twitter link. Appears to have happened around 1:30 EDT, judging from the timestamp in the video. Seems unsurprising that Amerikkkan infrastructure is in this dire of a state (at the cost of innocent people's lives, as usual), but I'd still love to know what the hell happened here. Hopefully the early hour meant that more people weren't harmed.
Photo of the aftermath:
Prior to the ship hitting the support column, you can see it lose power, then regain power, then thick smoke starts billowing out the top, then it loses power again, and regains power again seconds before contact.
Could the bridge have been engineered to be strong enough to survive an impact by a >100k ton ship? Maybe, but it seems like better backup and emergency systems on these huge ships might be a more practical idea. Obviously we are still very light on information.
I think they usually build artificial islands around bridge columns so ships will run aground before hitting the column itself.
They do if they're required by law to, otherwise way waste the money on things like preventative safety measures.
Yeah, they're called dolphins They can be seen in the video near power pylons. However none were deemed necessary to protect the bridge itself apparently.
There should be tugs that could at least push it off of a direct collision course
Mr. Musk please invent an AI powered tug to guide these ships that will also say the N word
Well we have the ships and have taught them multiple slurs but we can't seem to get that other part working
what? These huge ships are usually followed out of port by multiple manned tugs.
Yeah, but I thought you were suggesting having tugs on standby 24/7 to guard every bridge from potential runaway cargo ships
Not exactly, I'm saying I think it's pretty routine to have a tug in the area at all times in case of an emergency.
https://www.audacy.com/knxnews/news/local/baltimore-ship-crash-has-one-expert-wondering-about-tugboat
There is no bridge in the world that would withstand a direct hit to a support by a container ship.
i did some napkin math and found it to be ~426 billion Newtons of force hitting that bridge, the equivalent to 850,000 miatas hitting the bridge at 60mph. a 100,000 Ton ship moving roughly at 8 knots with a very sudden stop. A crazy amount of force to be applied to a structure that is primarily intended on supporting a road from totally different forces
Most bridges have these however https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)
I have a high school understanding of bridge mechanics but how did a hit on one side make the whole thing fall? Can bridges be given supports to be secure if one section is damaged ?
By high school understanding, we had to build bridges out of sugar cubes or popsicle sticks that could support a heavy load.
whole bridge didn't fall. It hit a central support column that holds up both sides & a good chunk of it collapsed. The bridge is over a mile long so the videos make it seem like the entire bridge fell but that is only a section of it.
The bridge requires an even amount of weight to be on each pylon. If one pylon goes down all the weight shifts to the other and the whole thing goes down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_truss_bridge
Thanks! I was trying to understand how the untappee pylon still caused collapse.
jesus
also this bridge is a massively important part of keeping the entire east coast functioning. the tragedy of the people who were on it is obviously more important, but this is a massive disaster, like holy shit. the number of people this bridge is important to?
Reminds me of how
talks about the social value of bridges in bullshit jobsIt’s a major artery for Baltimore traffic. It’s going to massively fuck traffic patterns for the city for the foreseeable future. I’m very thankful that this happened at 1:30, because of that hit during morning rush hour, so many more people would’ve lost their lives.
It’s going to massively fuck traffic patterns for the city for the foreseeable future.
5-10 years if they can even bother to try and rebuild it, or permanently if they cancel the project half way through which is entirely possible if they decide it's already killed the businesses and life of the city in a few years.
America bombs Russia and Palestine I could care less, its karma.
Ah yes, a night-shift construction worker in Baltimore trying to feed and house themself and their family deserves to pay for America's foreign policy.
There are a lot of good people in Baltimore. AFAIK relatively high number of leftists. Remember they all marched in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder.
I wish I could believe in karma, because America deserves far, far, FAR more than this.
Karma in the proper sense takes effect after you die, not before.
I wonder if the chuds will blame TikTok and trans people for this, and not like, the state of their Empire
the Baltimore Sun is linking the incident with local trans YouTuber ContraPoints
Show
I'm no fan of adventurism or accelerationism, but glad to see Contra is finally actually doing something.
damn she hates nonbinary people enough to do terrorism?
Local trans people are just too damn cute and I can't keep myself from staring.
Well I saw a blue check on Twitter say the shipping company does DEI and that anti-whiteness is to blame for the incident
There's a bunch of people screaming about DEI in the twitter thread lol. That, ukrainians, China and Joe Biden false flag. Also some libs going "WHY DIDN'T THE ENGINEERS MAKE THE BRIDGE UNCOLLAPSABLE WHEN HIT BY A SHIP" to mock people suggesting that maybe they should've constructed dolphins or something like that.
I refuse to see anything on twitter anymore, especially since nitter was killed
liberal politics is deeply unserious, all these chuds and libs screaming about nonsense when it's clear it was because a massive ship hit a bridge.
8 years ago, the bridge was called "structurally deficient", although I don't know if anything changed since then.
It was called one of Amerika's scariest bridges for truckers 3 years ago. People have called it "high and tight".
20 workers were actively doing bridge repair as it was knocked down
reports are 7/20 went into the drink, can’t imagine hearing a loud crash while working on a bridge and turning to see a freighter knocking out a support column while you’re on it, the anticipation of knowing that falling hundreds of meters is inevitable and that the freezing water leads to hypothermia quickly, all to the soundtrack of screaming, twisting metal and crunching concrete
Can't imagine working on a bridge and seeing a ship that size and thinking... huh... that's getting awfully close... its... its going to miss right?
And then ...OHFUCKOHSHITOHFUCKOHSHIT!
Real annoying how the only posts with any information beyond this are coming from the most MAGA chud accounts imaginable. Serves me right for using Elon's hellsite.
Companies will crash a boat into a bridge before giving organized labor an inch, huh?
What about my sex arses? I can't have them stuck on a container ship for a second time!
'Mass casualty incident' as US bridge hit by ship collapses into river
- A bridge in the US city of Baltimore has entirely collapsed into the Patapsco River after being hit by a container ship
- Up to 20 people and several vehicles have fallen into the river, says Baltimore City Fire Department who are currently at the scene
- The fire department says a large vessel hit a column of the Francis Scott Key Bridge at around 01:30 ET (05:30 GMT)
- Videos on social media appear to show the bridge entirely descending into the water
- A number of casualties have been reported and there is now a large multi-agency rescue and recovery operation under way
This ship rammed the bridge pillar:
Show
300 metres long, fully loaded so around 115.000 tons
Show
>Write national anthem for country
>Country names bridge after me
>Bridge collapses
>I'm a metaphor or somethingMy hot take is this shouldn’t be possible to occur as an accident during normal operations. Either the bridge is dilapidated or poorly designed, or ships that large should not be allowed under it.
Shit like this will occur with increasing frequency in America, and it will be normalized as an unavoidable, just like mass shootings.
No bridge is going to be designed to take a direct hit from a container ship. This is a multi level failure of the ship and the tugs.
I would think that bridges should have redundancy such that taking out a single support doesn’t cause total failure. Idk I’m not an entomologist
Most bridges have safety precautions to avoid a head on collision however.
Maybe America shouldnt be so reliant on its waterways to transport treats?
???? you're treatposting in response to a container ship hitting a bridge & causing its collapse. world's best communist
I’ll alienate myself from any working class in the pursuit of communism
Oh ok I didn’t realize you were gonna solo communism, now it makes sense
La Forge, report to sick bay and then the holodeck for a mandatory time-out
Bruh, did someone switch out your theory reading list for iseksai web novels or some shit? What world are you on?
looks like we've got the Big Communism Builder Himself right here. bask in His glory, He will awash the masses in communism and they will give thanks to Him
This is the kind of take that people point to when they say, "America bad is no substitute for an actual analysis"
Apart from treat discourse being a weird response to this, waterways are the most efficient way to move treats massive distances, so this doesn't even make sense.
The bridge was opened in 1977. I believe loaded cargo ships have gotten much more massive since then. Does that mean the bridge could withstand getting hit by a standard 70s cargo ship? I don’t know. That doesn’t invalidate the point that a cargo ship that size should be crossing it - but these massive container ships are what drive global capitalism. No surprise that they would disregard safety for profit here.
Calling it now, the rescue operation will be a shitshow and cops will get in the way
God it's so embarrassing how many online libs are suddenly bridge engineers now and trying to explain away this disaster. Like their only explanation for this is that sometimes massive ships will just hit and collapse bridges and that fine.
Like no reflection on why a 50 year old bridge didn't have any modern protective measures, why massive Panamax ships are apparently seconds away from catastrophic impact every time it passes this thing, how they even let a ship on the verge of a double power failure into the harbor in the first place.
how they even let a ship on the verge of a double power failure into the harbor in the first place.
Is there new news I haven't seen on the root cause of the power failure? cause it likely wasn't obvious. Plus the ship regained power pretty quickly, just not soon enough to stop. I won't be at all surprised if some signs were ignored but I don't think "they've got mechanical issues, bar them from the harbor" would be normal procedure regardless right?
But I agree, it's wild how many people are going "freak accident nothing to see here, nothing we could have done" when there are no protective barriers around the main piers, and this is like a known problem for decades that could easily have been solved, and should have been, for a bridge near a busy port
there is no alternative
there is no alternative
there is no alternative
Reported on the top of Reddit as an “incident” that closed the bridge.
They can’t turn off the propaganda switch. It’s stuck in the on position.
Mr President, a third 