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:
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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.