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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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.
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