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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!”
We always knew when Coach had set the pool to the 45° F ice bath he would have us train in part of the time, cause the first person jumped in and almost came back out of the pool. When he set it to 75° that felt like a sauna and made me sleepy.
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.
It’s also the Patapsco River. Once it hits the city area it’s no longer the quiescent river that’s fun to play with. It’s basically the bay already, just not named as such yet. One thing that could save people though is the tide was low and moving in at the time.
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.
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.
"Bump" is a galactically humble description of a collision with a container ship weighing nearly 200 million pounds.
To illustrate this more cleanly, the momentum of a loaded Boeing 787 flying near top speed is 17,760,000 N.s. For this ship going at just 10 km/h, the momentum is about 260,600,000 N.s. In other words, the bridge would need to be able to sustain the equivalent of 14 9/11 attacks, simultaneously.
The way to tolerate incidents like this is to add multiple points of isolated failure so that even if one point is catastrophically destroyed, only a portion of the bridge goes down while the rest remains intact. I don't think there are many, if any, structures on the planet that can withstand that much force
This right here. You’d need a frankly ridiculous amount of solid stainless steel to build pylons for seaway protection, and that’s for low speed impacts.
Kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity!
I’m not a sailor it anything, but I suppose requiring tugboats for all harbor travel of shops over a gross weight might be a good thing. Makes more jobs, at least.
The crazy thing is it isn’t even the bridge being shoddy. It’s terrifyingly simple physics. High mass objects moving slowly and low mass objects moving quickly are both incredibly destructive. I’m not entirely sure how you build safeguards against a collision like that. It would need military grade protection – assuming even the military has something which could withstand that.
Think of it like this. A bridge is designed to distribute weight and force and stand up. It isn’t designed to take a hit like this.
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.)
It’s not just that the ship is as big as it is. A ship half it’s size could have done it too. Bridges like this are very strong in the way of supporting their deck. But the way they achieve it is by spreading the weight out over a very large area. Interrupt that and the whole thing comes down.
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
Not exactly. If you’re traveling I-95, you might take this if you’re carrying hazmat and can’t use the tunnels. Or you could go on the other side of the beltway (which I imagine many do, because it avoids the tolls for the bridge). Unfortunately, the west side of I-695 has more traffic than this side.
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.
If you slide down south of the Bay Bridge, there are about 12 ships anchored there. I usually a few when I cross the Bay Bridge, so I’m not sure if that’s a larger-than-usual amount. You have to figure that the ship that was leaving would have triggered another one inbound before long; I doubt they normally leave the dock empty for any longer than absolutely necessary.
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.
I would argue this wasn’t planned. If you want to cause damage, why do it in the middle of the night? Not sure how full this bridge is during rush hour, but I would imagine quite a lot more than it was when it collapsed now.
There were people on it! Not a whole lot of cars since it happened a couple hours ago. But there were around 50 people working on it at the time. Its so devastating.
That’s insane. I heard about this on NPR this morning, but I didn’t picture the bridge being so big. Glad it was early when there weren’t hundreds more people on it.
I’m thinking there will be many more parties to that lawsuit… Foremost insurers. And their re-insurers.
However right now it looks like this ship suffered a mechanical failure, so if I had a business in ship building/maintenance you bet I’d be calling everyone in the company to get confirmation that that ship was not on our customer list. And if it was I’d already be in an all-hands meeting with engineering and legal.
If I was in charge of whichever government entity is in charge of maritime traffic, I’d be discretely asking why the fuck boats big enough to bring a bridge down by slowly booping into it were allowed to be boating under the bridge. I would refute responsibility of course… but some maritime traffic rule changes might happen down the line.
To your last comment, ships never just boop. It smothers.
Let’s say 100k tons for a ship, and make it long tons to make it an even 100,000,000kg. This ship was moving roughly 4m/s… Thus the kinetic energy was somewhere around 800 MJ. A stick of dynamite is about 1MJ.
I’m pretty sure 800 sticks of dynamite could’ve fucked that support up pretty good, too, bringing down the bridge deck.
It’s more like either you give up on bridges or give up on ships if you are concerned about the two coexisting and breaking stuff in a low speed collision.
While using energy to measure the destructive power of a collision is… not great, OF COURSE no bridge pillar can withstand a direct collision with cargo ship that size (although I don’t think it would necessarily be unfeasible to build the pillars on artificial concrete islands ? Depending on currents and topology, it might just be very expensive).
There are also ways to mitigate risk (many of which surely are already implemented) around critical infrastructure. Slower speeds, backup generators, and for instance in Suez they have tugboats as well. They had one high-profile incident recently but they have way more traffic in a way more challenging environment.
Whether it makes economic sense to implement new safety measures in Baltimore I suppose depends on how likely such a collision is determined to be. Maybe it was a freak accident. Maybe with the amount of modern shipping traffic it’s bound to happen every few decades, and the risk/reward calculations should change to accommodate mitigation strategies.
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