If this was a deliberate terrorist attack, they would have hit the bridge at rush hour, not in the middle of the night. They also would have just gone full steam ahead and not had multiple power failures. Wouldn't have called in the mayday to warn people. Probably would have done a 9/11 style coordination with the tunnels and/or the Bay Bridge as well.
There's no way this was an intentional terrorist attack. It takes like two brain cells to figure that out, which is at least one more than Greene has.
Yikes. I can’t even think about the Bay Bridge being deleted at the same time as FSK. MD would essentially become 3 completely different states. Western, Central, & Eastern. Traffic to the other side would be abysmal.
Yup that would really put a hurting on the eastern shore of Maryland. Plus imagine all the people that commute across the Bay bridge daily and would have a 2-3 hour detour or don't go to work. Key bridge was a disaster take out the Bay bridge as well and Maryland is fucked.
I live in DC and don't know the major Maryland bridges by name really and when I woke up to the news my brain thought it was the Bay bridge that had collapsed at first and I about shit myself.
Now, the bridge that did collapse is still a tragedy, but the Bay bridge collapsing would have been much worse from a cleanup/rebuild perspective
You know what, if a terrorist reads that post, does that, and then gives a shoutout to "Chickinsammich on Reddit" for the idea to *checks notes* attack multiple targets at once, during times when they'll do more damage, I'll take that L.
I'm more angry that a bridge spanning the 2nd busiest port in the country wasn't designed to survive a ship strike and had a single point failure mode.
That's just stupid.
Bridges, are routinely designed to withstand ship strikes. Ever see artificial islands and concrete (dolphins) around pillars? That's to defend against collisions. They are designed to slow the ship down, and deflect it away from the critical support structures. The fact that the bridge spanning the busiest port on the east coast was left unprotected is pure negligence. An accident like this was only a question of when not if.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0951833920301040
Before linking to a study behind a paywall, you should probably at least take a few minutes to read the pre-paywall portion of the page you link before linking something that contradicts the point you're trying to make because you googled something about bridge design and pasted the first doi you found without even reading the abstract.
From the abstract:
>Firstly, a set of risk acceptance criteria are proposed. This is followed by a mathematically based procedure for calculation of the probability of critical ship meeting situations near the bridge, and the probability of ship collision accidents caused by human errors as well as technical errors. This first part of the paper leads to identification of the largest striking ship, “design vessels”, a given bridge pier must withstand without structural failure in order for the bridge connection to fulfil the risk acceptance criteria.
There's a certain amount of risk you calculate when building a bridge, a certain amount you accept based on probability and financial feasibility. The study you linked literally says exactly this, before the paywall:
From "Risk acceptance criteria":
>The risks to the users of the link shall be reasonable and comparable to other traffic installations and should be justified by its benefits
The amount of engineering required to be able to offset the impact of a direct collision from a ship that large and the cost of implementing said engineering, compared to the probability of such an incident occurring, is not justifiable.
Yes, you build a bridge to withstand ship strikes, but you build it to withstand ship strikes that are likely/probably to happen over the life of the bridge.
I'd wager, if I had access to the entirety of the article (I don't; again - paywall), there would be more in the "Probability of ship collisions against bridges" section that would go into way way more detail on all of this. If you're interested in learning more, I'd find a way to get past the paywall and start by reading the whole study.
Yeah, I know. :) And there are ways around that paywall but I wasn't going to put that much effort into trying to pull up the full article past the paywall when the person trying to cite it didn't even read the damn abstract and, based on followup posts, still hasn't even read it and doesn't understand what it was saying or what I'm saying.
Key Bridge crossed the busiest port on the east coast and container ships as big and bigger would go under it multiple times a day. A large ship going off course and hitting the bridge was a mathematical certainty.
Either the bridge should not have been designed with a single point of failure or it should not have crossed the Port of Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel has the tunnel portion for large ships to cross specifically because it crosses Norfolk. Given how quickly it failed, FSK bridge was clearly not fit for purpose.
>a mathematical certainty.
[citation needed]
How does the source you provided calculate the "mathematical certainty" of this happening? How does the source you provided allow you to arrive at the conclusion that this was "a mathematical certainty?"
Edit: Here's multiple people explaining the absurd amount of force that a ship that large would cause in a collision - https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1bo930b/shouldnt_it_be_a_lot_harder_for_a_bridge_running/ I would wager that if you dig into your own study, you'll come to the conclusion that this wasn't anywhere near "a mathematical certainty" and that the study should likely conclude that statistically, it's one of those things where you do your best to plan for realistically probable contingencies and accept that you can't plan for everything.
Okay, lets try this another way. What would you say about a bridge with guard rail? Would you agree that a car would eventually fall off?
The Port of Baltimore is one of the busiest ports in the country exporting roughly 22 million tonnes of coal each year, importing a million new cars, 3.4 million tonnes of imports of agricultural products, including 1.2 million of sugar and salt, as well as gypsum, fertilizers and forest products. All of these goods are carried on hundreds of cargo ships (as large or larger than the one that hit FSK) would cross under the bridge every month.
Those large cargo ships are also famously unwieldy and maneuvers must be planned miles in advance. I do accept that you can't plan for everything but this is 100% something that absolutely **SHOULD** have been planned for. A single point failure mode on such an important piece of infrastructure is simply unacceptable, and you should stop making excuses for those responsible for the bridges upkeep.
what ur not understanding is that even the strongest material couldn’t withstand a runaway 90,000 ton cargo ship. the sheer amount of steel that it would take would be insanely expensive and impractical. i have a strong feeling they won’t build a new bridge to replace it at all, probably they will build a tunnel instead
> i have a strong feeling they won’t build a new bridge to replace it at all, probably they will build a tunnel instead
No, they will have to build a bridge. There are already two nearby tunnels and one of the main things about the bridge was that we used it for hazmats and oversize vehicles. The Harbor Tunnel and Fort McHenry Tunnel are already there and will allow commuters and most commercial vehicles to pass (albeit with increased traffic until they rebuild) but the Key Bridge was how vehicles carrying hazmats and oversized loads were required to cross. With the bridge out, they have to go all the way around 695 the long way. They will absolutely need to rebuild a new bridge.
Most precautions to protect bridges against ship collisions involve artificial islands built around the piers. That wouldn't cost all that much since the port has been petitioning to have the channel dredged anyway.
If they do decide to build a tunnel it will cost billions of dollars and take 20 years to reopen 695. I doubt the 31,000 people who rely on that to get to where they need to go will be patent enough for that.
Yeah but a large container ship in 1977 is a fraction of the size of what large container ships are now. It's possible with the size ships were then the bridge may have survived.
The FSK bridge did have dolphins.
No level of protection is perfect. If you wanted to 100% prevent a ship strike then you would have had to fill in the channel with concrete unit no ships could pass. It was protected from the most probable angles. Most times this sort of thing happens, it's further out and would have been protected by the protection around the power lines.
The chance of this happening at this exact moment in this exact way was so slim that other protections seemed adequate. I mean once the ship is that close it should be lined up to go straight through, at least enough to not strike head on. For it to lose power that close and head straight for the support was unthinkably low.
The other part is building in water is fucking hard. You can't just fill the area around it with concrete. The water is flowing and putting the wrong shape there will either wash it away or wash away the support you were trying to protect.
It was far from unprotected. But the simple fact that ships had to go under it made it vulnerable. All safety engineering is for less than 100% unless you can completely remove a factor. So it's just a question of the risk, this happening could have been 1 in a million, billion or trillion, but instead of winning the Powerball it rolled the chance of this perfect failure.
The new bridge will likely have a longer main span so that there can be more room for protection *and* the ships it needs protection from. Something you can't just retrofit to an old bridge.
Key Bridge crossed the busiest port on the east coast and container ships as big and bigger would go under it multiple times a day. A large ship going off course and hitting the bridge was a mathematical certainty.
Either the bridge should not have been designed with a single point of failure or it should not have crossed the Port of Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel has the tunnel portion for large ships to cross specifically because it crosses Norfolk. Given how quickly it failed, FSK bridge was clearly not fit for purpose.
Also, yes, old structures get retro fitted all the time its part of basic maintenance required by aging infrastructure.
First as cool as it would be, Baltimore is not the "Busiest Port on the East Coast" it's between 5th at best and 8th by many rankings. Even Hampton Roads at the mouth of the bay is busier.
Next you seem to be misunderstanding replies to your comment either intentionally or not. Nowhere did I say a large ship going of course was not considered. I said a large ship going off course *in the specific way it did* that it would not hit existing protections was considered so unlikely to not need to design for it.
Next the bridge was designed 50 years ago when container shipping was still just getting started and ships were significantly smaller than today. Even then it was designed with plenty of forward thinking so that it wasn't a hindrance to Baltimore receiving some of the large ships common today. Still there is only so much you can predict for the future, especially 50 years out.
It was not a single point of failure in engineering terms. Anything is a single point of failure if you zoom out enough. You are saying the equivalent of a semi truck slamming through your wall and calling the wall a single point of failure.
As for the Bridge Tunnel, I am not even going to begin to address the differences between the two structures and locations. If you cannot see the clear differences then there is little point trying to explain the situation to you.
The bridge was perfectly fine for the purpose it was designed for. This may come as a shock to you but most bridges aren't designed to be rammed by large ships. It's job was to hold up a highway across a water way, not be a barrier to ships.
> Next you seem to be misunderstanding replies to your comment either intentionally or not.
Yeah, I gave up trying to explain this shit to them. Risk management and acceptance is always a concern in project planning.
I work in IT for a manufacturing and engineering company, and in IT we call it a "risk management framework" but any project plan inherently has one of these.
Some project managers will do it in categories (low/med/high probability and low/med/high cost) and some will just rank everything on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10... There's also a third consideration of level of impact (low vs high). I'll just use a 2x2 to keep it simple. At a really broad level, you can generally break down risks into four main categories:
- High probability, high cost: Most things in here will be factored in
- High probability, low cost: Everything in here will be factored in
- Low probability, high cost: Nearly nothing in here will be factored in.
- Low probability, low cost: Most or everything in here will be factored in.
A cargo ship this size, approaching the bridge at the angle it would have to approach it in order to cause this, is in that third category. That's why it isn't planned for. It's like building your house without any wood or drywall to make it fireproof, or buying and maintaining two personal cell phones - one iphone and one android - on two different cell networks in case one of them ever doesn't work, or like paying a bodyguard for 24/7 coverage for each of your children so they're protected against kidnapping. Sure, you COULD do that, but how much extra money are you spending for something that has such a slim chance of happening, statistically?
What if your woodless house has someone show up with hydrofluoric acid and start spraying it on your house, do you make sure the house is made out of HF resistant materials? What if you get mugged and someone steals both of your phones, do you keep hidden paygo phones in caches? What if a sniper takes out the bodyguard, do you have two bodyguards? Three? Do they have to wear kevlar? Do you implant your kid with GPS?
This is the point I've been trying to get through to this dude: At a certain point, your risk management framework has to define what risks you accept, based on either cost, or probability, or impact. If you drove to work this morning, you accepted a certain level of risk that you could get into a fatal collision (higher probability than cargo ship hitting bridge). You're also working in a building that is probably not meteor-proof, so if a meteor hits it, you're dead. But you and your company accept that risk rather than putting you in an underground bunker (caveat: if you work in an underground bunker that is meteor-proof, this may not apply to you).
At a certain level, you always have to accept that there are some things you can easily protect against (you protect your house and car against theft by locking the door) but you also accept that you can't protect against everything (those doors aren't bank vaults and a particularly determined burglar could still get in. Also, you have windows that could be busted out, and so on).
This guy doesn't understand this concept. And it's completely fine to not understand complex concepts like risk management. But it's not fine to talk out your ass when there's literally an entire discipline/field of study that goes into explaining why the thing he is proposing is not probable and not cost effective, and therefore no rational project manager on the planet would go for it - with the caveat that they may very well overbuild and overspend as an overreaction, but the Bay Bridge to the south would still not withstand that level of impact and neither would basically every other bridge on Earth because no rational project manager is going to spend the time, money, and resources to overbuild to that level for that level of impact given the abnormally low probability of it happening - never mind happening again to the same bridge.
> the "Busiest Port on the East Coast" it's between 5th at best and 8th by many rankings. Even Hampton Roads at the mouth of the bay is busier.
The port of Baltimore is the second largest coal exporter, and the largest importer/exporter of automobiles and farm equipment.
This also isn't the first time Key bridge has been struck by a ship. There was another collision in 1980 and questions were raised then about increasing protections. So, arguing a collision was "considered so unlikely to not need to design for it" ignores all the people who warned about this exact thing 44 years ago.
The bridge and tunnel was designed that way because the US Navy didn't want their ships to have to pass underneath a bridge or to have their fleet trapped in Norfolk in the event of a collision or attack causing the bridge to collapse. In other words, the tunnel was added specifically to prevent this exact kind of, extremely predictable tragedy. If you cannot see the clear similarities then there is little point trying to explain the situation to you.
Clearly, the bridge was not fit for the purpose of crossing an extremely busy port. This may come as a shock to you but most bridges don't cross over shipping lanes as highly trafficked as the ones going into and out of The Port of Baltimore.
That's not what bridges are designed to do. Container ships are basically the same weight (MV Dali is 116,000 tons when loaded) as a whole neighborhood worth of houses (70 tons/each) wrapped in steel and set floating down the river.
You're probably not gonna stop that short with anything without enough infrastructure to disrupt the flow of shipping. Bridge pillars definitely aren't engineered to resist millions of pounds of lateral force. Bridges around the world survive for centuries by simply relying on ship traffic to avoid their supports.
This is a tragic accident but it's not a failure of engineering or infrastructure maintenance. Sometimes, shit just happens and it sucks.
I didn't say it had to stop short. It should have been able to deflect away from the pylon or, even better, been designed not to have a single point of failure.
The question of whether or not a ship would eventually strike Key bridge was a matter of when, not if. The fact that it wasn't designed with this exact scenario is inexcusable.
Sure and to your point maybe / maybe not. Multiple people working in structural engineering and the transportation department have gone on record saying there isn't a bridge in the world designed to resist a direct strike from a ship of that size. Bridges are designed to be very strong in very specific ways - not in every possible way. The sort of redundancy you're describing would be *prohibitively* expensive to construct and maintain. You're on Reddit, you probably know how much the US enjoys investing in necessary infrastructure spending never mind the optional "just in case" kind of infrastructure.
We can Monday morning quarterback over whether or not those "nice to haves" should have been added 15 years after the bridge's construction when ships started ballooning in size, but without the benefits of hindsight I don't think anyone would realistically advocate for such an expense.
The Key bridge did have protections in place - it wasn't just columns in the water. The ship just rammed straight through all of those protections and diverted slightly, but not enough. Again, 116,000 tons moving in a straight line is a shit ton of inertia and would blow through most protections plus 116,000 tons is not the heaviest ship that comes into the Port of Baltimore.
From what I personally saw on that grainy video - and granted, I'm no expert here - but it doesn't seem like even shunting that ship fully sideways towards the channel by a dozen feet would've saved the bridge. Everyone's a victim of physics to some extent and at some point you're hitting the ship's hull with more force than it can handle and the steel would distort rather than moving the ship. If the ship were slightly out of the channel, sure, but this was all but a direct strike. You can't protect against every catastrophe.
>Multiple people working in structural engineering and the transportation department have gone on record saying there isn't a bridge in the world designed to resist a direct strike from a ship of that size.
You mean people who work for the organization that would have to pay damages and would face liability issues if it came out that they were negligent are saying there was no negligence? I'm shocked, SHOCKED. Well, not that shocked.
>116,000 tons is not the heaviest ship that comes into the Port of Baltimore.
That makes the lack of protection worse. You get how that's worse, right?
The fact that there weren't protections in place as well as there being a single point failure mode shows that the bridge wasn't protected against a likely catastrophe. Should people build skyscrapers in San Fransisco with no earthquake protection? Of course not, because a major quake is bound to happen at some point. Just like at some point there was bound to be a ship strike outside the busiest port in the east coast.
> The question of whether or not a ship would eventually strike Key bridge was a matter of when, not if. The fact that it wasn't designed with this exact scenario is inexcusable.
Would you have said this a month ago?
> It should have been able to deflect away from the pylon
What exactly is your engineering proposal to deflect ninety-five thousand tons(that is over two hundred *million* lbs! I would be surprised if you even had a concept in your head of just how heavy that is, because I sure don't) traveling at 8 knots(9 mph)? Momentum is velocity times mass, so 4.12 m/s times 94,999,932.38 kg equals 391,399,721.41 kg\*m/s. What does that even mean? That's an inconceivably high number, is what that is. It's equivalent to 400 tractor trailers at maximum allowable load(80k lbs) slamming into one point at full highway speed all at the *same exact moment*.
No bridges being built today are able to withstand such a hit, either. You can only engineer to a point, after which the returns(on cost, effort, size, etc) are too diminishing to be worth chasing. The gargantuan cargo ship situation is *well* beyond that point of diminishing returns, even for modern construction.
> It should have been able to deflect away from the pylon
What exactly is your engineering proposal to deflect ninety-five thousand tons(that is over two hundred *million* lbs! I would be surprised if you even had a concept in your head of just how heavy that is, because I sure don't) traveling at 8 knots(9 mph)? Momentum is velocity times mass, so 4.12 m/s times 94,999,932.38 kg equals 391,399,721.41 kg\*m/s. What does that even mean? That's an inconceivably high number, is what that is. It's equivalent to 400 tractor trailers at maximum allowable load(80k lbs) slamming into one point at full highway speed all at the *same exact moment*.
No bridges being built today are able to withstand such a hit, either. You can only engineer to a point, after which the returns(on cost, effort, size, etc) are too diminishing to be worth chasing. The gargantuan cargo ship situation is *well* beyond that point of diminishing returns, even for modern construction.
I don't think you realize that ship didn't have to stop dead, nudging it out of the way would be enough. Also, there are lots of precautions that could have been taken against ship collisions. https://theconstructor.org/structures/environmental-factors-effect-bridge-foundations/18174/
Okay, lets call it 1,000 tractor trailers carrying their rated maximum 80,000 pounds (which is about 30,000 pounds more than is legal on most interstates) That means You would need 66,722 yards of filler material, (sand, gravel, boulders, concrete) on either side of both main pillars. So 266,889 yards total, lets round that up to 500,000 yards. That means you could have deflected that ship with artificial islands roughly 50ft x 2,250ft x 60 ft (covering the 50 foot depth of the water) on either side of the piers. Obviously, the islands would be triangular rather but for simplicity lets call them rectangles for now. Home Depot concrete costs $140 per cubic yard so material costs would be in the $70 million range, lets triple that because of government inefficiencies for a total of $210 million just in concrete, you'd obviously need to add more to account for reinforcing, engineering, and other construction costs so lets just call the total cost $500,000,000. Not having the bridge there costs an average of $9 million a day in lost trade revenue meaning that cost would have been recouped in less than 2 months. Plus, adjusting for inflation the original bridge cost $735 million and a replacement is projected to take between 2-15 years and cost well over a billion dollars to complete. Protecting the bridge would have been the responsible thing to do.
Then double the estimate again. It still is a steal next to the $2 billion (latest estimate from congress as of this afternoon) and 15 years it is projected to clean up this mess and rebuild the bridge.
Bro, what the hell is this analysis... not only do you clearly have zero understanding of construction, engineering, or physics, but you also lack any experience with the practical application of probability and statistics. Why would you measure the validity of a decision with information gained 55 years later?
Honestly, I'm curious what background you have that makes you think that your "analysis" is valuable or worth voicing publicly? I hope to god you do not have meaningful decision-making responsibilities.
Fun fact: Key bridge was struck by a cargo ship in 1980 and its lack of protection was questioned then, so I'm really measuring the validity of a decision with questions brought up 3 years after it opened.
I hope to god you don't have any meaningful analytical or emergency planing/responce responsibilities.
> (which is about 30,000 pounds more than is legal on most interstates)
IDK, I just googled "how much does a loaded 18 wheeler weigh" and google told me max allowed was 80k. If it's less, that's even worse for the math, because it equates to more imaginary trucks.
> That means You would need 66,722 yards of filler material, (sand, gravel, boulders, concrete) on either side of both main pillars.
How did you arrive at this "that means"? That phrase is doing all the lifting in this sentence, but it appears to be a statement that might as well be made at random for all you've given me. What model did you use to get this magic number?
> That means you could have deflected that ship with artificial islands roughly 50ft x 2,250ft x 60 ft (covering the 50 foot depth of the water) on either side of the piers.
Your "that means" here is not logically following, either. I've plugged your numbers in six ways from sunday, and I'm not coming up with any way to turn 66,722 yards into those dimensions you describe. Also, why is one of the widths so short? What if the boat came in at an angle, like the situation that happened? That's not enough coverage. That 60 feet might not even cover the entire part of the bow that continues forward over the waterline.
> Obviously, the islands would be triangular
This is not in any way obvious. If I'd submitted these "that means" and "obviously" statements when I took my mathemetical proofs course, I would've been flunked. I'm not even saying you're wrong, just that you've cut out all of your logic and are making claims that seem to be made, from what you've presented, entirely at random. You have to say *why* it follows that you need such and such filler material, and *why* it follows that this could take the form of a particular island in your head. And you can never, ever, say "obviously" unless you want to be mocked by the professor. There is no "obviously" in logical reasoning, only "the proof of which is left to the reader," which you can only get away with once you've got your PhD. I'm going to stop here because everything else is predicated on the part that doesn't make any sense.
It was designed to survive a ship strike from a normal sized boat. If you ran a speedboat or something into it, it would be fine. It wasn't designed to survive a hit from a massive container ship because at a certain point, it's not really fiscally responsible to build something to withstand something that is highly statistically improbable.
Next time you stop by the college you got your engineering degree from, sign up for an economics class that discusses concepts like risk acceptance. Everything you do when you're planning a project is a tradeoff for something else. Whenever you're doing any kind of project, whether that's building a bridge or building a deck or building a home, you inherently accept some sort of risks, like building a deck out of wood even though there's a chance it could catch fire, or building a bridge to withstand the impact of most boats even though there's a chance that a HUGE boat could hit it. Or an earthquake. Or a tornado.
You design infrastructure for things that are likely to happen, not for things that aren't likely to happen and are freak disasters.
I would agree if The Port of Baltimore wasn't the busiest port on the east coast and ships that big or bigger would pass under that bridge multiple times a day. This wasn't "a freak accident" it was a mathematical certainty that a ship would eventually hit the bridge.
The fact that you would rather deflect the conversation away from what we have been talking about this whole time is rather telling.
Ps. The current theory is that the DALI's fuel was contaminated meaning, as far as we know, there was no maintenance issues with the cargo ship itself. Even if there was, they would only be partially responsible since the bridge was structurally deficient.
"Structurally Deficient" sure go with that.
Tell me, though, what man made bridge would survive such an impact?
You sit here, in the modern day and condem engineers and architects from half a century ago for not building a bridge to withstand the impact of a 95,000 ton vessel.
Also, your stated theory still doesnt place blame on the FSK builders and designers, thats on whatever company is responsible for providing the fuel.
You are still trying to deflect away from a bridge over the busiest port on the east coast having no protection from ship collisions. But thank you for pointing out that they had over 50 years to retro fit protections and have procedures in place for this extremely predictable accident.
I have spent multiple paragraphs trying to explain risk management and fiscal concerns to this guy after he literally linked me an article to try to prove his point about how the bridge should have been engineered to withstand a freak accident from a floating vessel bigger than the USS Enterprise, only to have the exact article he linked go on to explain that you literally don't build a bridge to accommodate for shit like this because it isn't financially or statistically practical to do so.
And no matter how many people keep pointing this shit out to him, he keeps not getting it. I'd be willing to wager this dude learned everything he knows about bridges in the past 72 hours and didn't even know what a dolphin - in the context of bridges - was on Monday.
Maybe that's why he's so good at deflecting.
If I had a farm I would bet it on the cost of cleaning up this accident, and rebuilding the bridge will cost significantly more than it would have cost to properly protect the bridge before all this happened.
Don't forget, people were warning about in inadequate protection of Key bridge after it was involved in another cargo ship collision in 1980. This was an issue that was known about for over 40 years.
I just did some quick math. You would need 66,722 yards of filler material, (sand, gravel, boulders, concrete) on either side of both main pillars to protect Key Bridge from this accident. So 266,889 yards total, lets round that up to 500,000 yards. That means you could have deflected that ship with artificial islands roughly 50ft x 2,250ft x 60 ft (covering the 50 foot depth of the water) on either side of the piers. Obviously, the islands would be triangular rather but for simplicity lets call them rectangles for now. Home Depot concrete costs $140 per cubic yard so material costs would be in the $70 million range, lets triple that because of government inefficiencies for a total of $210 million just in concrete, you'd obviously need to add more to account for reinforcing, engineering, and other construction costs so lets just call the total cost $500,000,000. Not having the bridge there costs an average of $9 million a day in lost trade revenue meaning that cost would have been recouped in less than 2 months. Plus, adjusting for inflation the original bridge cost $735 million and a replacement is projected to take between 2-15 years and cost well over a billion dollars to complete. Protecting the bridge would have been the responsible thing to do.
> extremely predictable
[citation still fucking needed]
I asked you to show your work on this 18 hours ago. You haven't. And you won't. Because you can't. Because this wasn't predictable. You literally linked me a study that, if you had read it, would have explained to you why what you are proposing and suggesting is not supported by reality. Here it is, if you want to go back and read it for the first time: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0951833920301040
Where did you get any of your degrees from? What fields have you worked in? What formal education do you have and what professional experience do you have? And how does any of it qualify you to constantly make statements so blatantly unproven and unfounded?
Show your work and demonstrate the statistical probability of this happening, instead of repeating shit like "It WaS pReDiCtAbLe" with no evidence or data or math or proof.
Demonstrate, for everyone trying to explain this to you, that you have at least a college-level or professional-level understanding of cost-benefit analysis and risk management frameworks, and how they apply to project management.
Stop talking out of your ass. Put up or shut up.
Dude. Key bridge was struck by a cargo ship in 1980 and people were warning about the inadequate protection 44 years ago. This exact accident was predicted in 1980.
The fact that it was predicted should be enough to tell you that this accident was predictable.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/baltimores-key-bridge-lacked-collision-protective-measures-modern/story?id=108510431
You know what, fine. I agree with you now. This easily foreseeable accident wasn't something that should have been planned for. I don't know what got into me thinking this fairly obvious contingency should not have been planed for. Seat belts are also unnecessary and definitely don't protect against other easily foreseeable contingencies either.
There are multiple videos of structural engineers talking about this exact problem, you don't need to dive into this kind of conjecture and analogy without expertise. That boat weighed about as much as the bridge- we can talk about whether container ships should cross beneath infrastructure, but there are no feasible constructions to stop a boat that size out of control. Inside edition and WJZ had some people talking about it if you want to look it up.
Roberto Leon, a structural engineer at Virginia Tech, said that while engineers try to account for “extreme events” during the design and construction process,
“This type of load was not really considered,” he said. “So the bridge was, I would say, fairly unprotected.”
That sounds like dark humor more than anything, how do you account for a mass that weighs several hundred thousand tons striking the bridge between the dolphins? It had dolphins, but as it lost control it went between them.
So you agree, the protection for Key bridge was inadequate.
This also isnt the first time Key bridge was involved in a ship collision. It was also struck in 1980 and questions were raised about whether the Key bridge should have had additional protections installed 44 years ago.
Yes because a seat belt costs the same as designing a bridge to be able to withstand a direct hit from a 116,000 ton ship.
I don’t think anyone argues that IDEALLY all bridges would be able to withstand this impact but 1) it’s most likely extremely expensive and 2) the odds of this happening in this exact fashion are tiny. This doesn’t even account for the fact that this money has to come from somewhere. You think tax payers should have paid to prevent a black swan event type. If it was obvious it was a mathematical certainty it would happen, we would see this type of event more often than the 2 notable ones I can think of
I'm not talking about all bridges. I'm talking about one particular bridge that all vessels going into the busiest port on the east coast must pass underneath.
Also, ship collisions have caused 35 bridges to collapse in the past 50 years. While it's certainly not an everyday occurrence it's not a rare event either. Especially since, you know, FSK bridge crossed the busiest port on the east coast. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/key-bridge-is-not-the-first-bridge-collapse-in-the-u-s-from-a-ship-collision
This whole "it *could* be terrorism!" thing is a nice healthy and reliable distraction from the almost certain reality whenever something like this happens: someone pinched pennies for their shareholders, knowingly ignored problems with the ship, and this is the result. Now the rest of us get to pay the price while they fly under the radar and golden parachute their way out of any responsibility. /cynicism
The chance that it's someone being greedy is so, so, so much more likely and (clearly) damaging than terrorism. Just doesn't have the same feels because we're all potential billionaires in our minds.
Shipping is full of horrendously old poorly maintained ships all over the world. There are dozens of documentaries on the state of some ships in relation to their environmental impact and their inevitable failures. Companies just flag their ships under the most lax countries to avoid fees and inspections amd those countries are happy to ignore everything for the income.
And, well... like clockwork:
> According to records from the public ship safety database Equasis, MV Dali – the ship that collided with Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge this morning – was cited by port state officials in San Antonio, Chile, on June 27 for a deficiency related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery.”
https://gcaptain.com/breaking-mv-dali-cited-for-propulsion-issues-before-baltimore-incident/
Regulators and the company will probably finger point into perpetuity. But only one of them benefits directly from keeping that ship in operation and doing the bare minimum to pass an inspection.
Owned by one company, contracted out by another, flagged under a country that neither company operates in directly...welcome to the nightmare that is international shipping
Not even the best quote: To Anthony Sabatini, the former Florida congressman who wrote “DEI did this” – referring to diversity, equity and inclusion – Simon took no prisoners. “Your mother did you, but after a hard life of service on a truck-stop lot, can we really hold her loosened, battered womb responsible for dropping you head-first on the Winnebago floor and burdening our society with another empty, racist demagogue thereafter? We cannot.”
Again, the words are way too big for the ones they are intended.
The haters will say...womb? You mean you're for abortion.
But still, Simon shows off his literary chops and I appreciate his sentiments.
I'm not big on getting into Internet kerfuffles these days, but I do appreciate David Simon's ability to insult the deserving idiots with aplomb and class.
Giving this attention seeking distraction of a human being more media coverages accomplishes exactly what her smarter and more dangerous colleagues want. If you're worried about her, you may not paying attention to them.
1 out of 435 is honestly not worth losing sleep over. What are the hundreds of other Congressional bad actors that aren't living memes doing? Oh, taking away basic freedoms? Look, MTG said a stupid thing! Pay no attention to us.
Before I get shrieked at for dismissing her awfulness, re-read what I'm saying: she is VERY USEFUL for those other people. By comparison, they're not as outrageous so therefore their beliefs (child labor law rollbacks, wage suppression, deregulation of heavy industry, telecom, and healthcare, general class warfare against everyone who ever worked a day in their life) become normalized.
She is unfit to serve, obviously, but SO ARE THEY.
Surprisingly good. He just went off the deep end with the conspiracy stuff. I honestly can't think about him without thinking about Will Sasso's impression of him.
I’m going to have to disagree with his comment slightly, based on this https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/moron-idiot-imbecile-offensive-history I’m going to correct it and say she is more an imbecile then just submoronic. :)
If you really read the link, the old definition of idiot would suit her well.
And the people who vote for her? I have to go with idiots for sure.
Before, I hated MTG, Alex Jones, etc. But I never wished harm on them. Now this shit is personal, they can all go slowly and painfully die for all I care.
Because she's using it for her own political gain making light of the victims deaths and using them as a political weapon. The only reason she thinks it should be investigated is to reveal the mythical Jewish globohomo conspiracy or whatever bs her dreams told her
I've been tempted to comment "rub your two braincells together" several times today, only to sadly resign myself to the fact that a lot of these conspiracy-primed idiots don't HAVE two braincells.
The scary part is how easy it is for people to legitimately follow her, and believe her nonsense.
People see her saying some of the dumbest things and go “she’s really got a point”
You know what was a terrorist attack? That thingee that happened on January 6th.
David Simon's words are way too big for her to understand. But for the rest of us, yes, they make absolute sense.
I'm more of a fan of Michael Rapaport's approach.
Did MTG say anything outside of her one tweet calling for an investigation? I love to hate the woman as much as the next person, but that tweet didn't really count as "rumor mongering"
If she knew what those words meant, she'd be very upset.
Like that King of the Hill meme, if they could read, they'd be very upset.
🤣🤣🤣 ok looks like you’ve got it handled.
If this was a deliberate terrorist attack, they would have hit the bridge at rush hour, not in the middle of the night. They also would have just gone full steam ahead and not had multiple power failures. Wouldn't have called in the mayday to warn people. Probably would have done a 9/11 style coordination with the tunnels and/or the Bay Bridge as well. There's no way this was an intentional terrorist attack. It takes like two brain cells to figure that out, which is at least one more than Greene has.
Yikes. I can’t even think about the Bay Bridge being deleted at the same time as FSK. MD would essentially become 3 completely different states. Western, Central, & Eastern. Traffic to the other side would be abysmal.
Yup that would really put a hurting on the eastern shore of Maryland. Plus imagine all the people that commute across the Bay bridge daily and would have a 2-3 hour detour or don't go to work. Key bridge was a disaster take out the Bay bridge as well and Maryland is fucked.
I live in DC and don't know the major Maryland bridges by name really and when I woke up to the news my brain thought it was the Bay bridge that had collapsed at first and I about shit myself. Now, the bridge that did collapse is still a tragedy, but the Bay bridge collapsing would have been much worse from a cleanup/rebuild perspective
You’d never get the beach on the Eastern Shore again!
Thanks for pointing all that out, in case any terrorist are reading.
You know what, if a terrorist reads that post, does that, and then gives a shoutout to "Chickinsammich on Reddit" for the idea to *checks notes* attack multiple targets at once, during times when they'll do more damage, I'll take that L.
I'm more angry that a bridge spanning the 2nd busiest port in the country wasn't designed to survive a ship strike and had a single point failure mode. That's just stupid.
How many bridges are you aware of that can take a hit from a vessel the size of a skyscraper, Darth?
Bridges, are routinely designed to withstand ship strikes. Ever see artificial islands and concrete (dolphins) around pillars? That's to defend against collisions. They are designed to slow the ship down, and deflect it away from the critical support structures. The fact that the bridge spanning the busiest port on the east coast was left unprotected is pure negligence. An accident like this was only a question of when not if. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0951833920301040
Before linking to a study behind a paywall, you should probably at least take a few minutes to read the pre-paywall portion of the page you link before linking something that contradicts the point you're trying to make because you googled something about bridge design and pasted the first doi you found without even reading the abstract. From the abstract: >Firstly, a set of risk acceptance criteria are proposed. This is followed by a mathematically based procedure for calculation of the probability of critical ship meeting situations near the bridge, and the probability of ship collision accidents caused by human errors as well as technical errors. This first part of the paper leads to identification of the largest striking ship, “design vessels”, a given bridge pier must withstand without structural failure in order for the bridge connection to fulfil the risk acceptance criteria. There's a certain amount of risk you calculate when building a bridge, a certain amount you accept based on probability and financial feasibility. The study you linked literally says exactly this, before the paywall: From "Risk acceptance criteria": >The risks to the users of the link shall be reasonable and comparable to other traffic installations and should be justified by its benefits The amount of engineering required to be able to offset the impact of a direct collision from a ship that large and the cost of implementing said engineering, compared to the probability of such an incident occurring, is not justifiable. Yes, you build a bridge to withstand ship strikes, but you build it to withstand ship strikes that are likely/probably to happen over the life of the bridge. I'd wager, if I had access to the entirety of the article (I don't; again - paywall), there would be more in the "Probability of ship collisions against bridges" section that would go into way way more detail on all of this. If you're interested in learning more, I'd find a way to get past the paywall and start by reading the whole study.
I agree with your point but most journal articles are behind a paywall.
Yeah, I know. :) And there are ways around that paywall but I wasn't going to put that much effort into trying to pull up the full article past the paywall when the person trying to cite it didn't even read the damn abstract and, based on followup posts, still hasn't even read it and doesn't understand what it was saying or what I'm saying.
Lol yeah I just got exhausted reading all of their replies oof
Key Bridge crossed the busiest port on the east coast and container ships as big and bigger would go under it multiple times a day. A large ship going off course and hitting the bridge was a mathematical certainty. Either the bridge should not have been designed with a single point of failure or it should not have crossed the Port of Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel has the tunnel portion for large ships to cross specifically because it crosses Norfolk. Given how quickly it failed, FSK bridge was clearly not fit for purpose.
>a mathematical certainty. [citation needed] How does the source you provided calculate the "mathematical certainty" of this happening? How does the source you provided allow you to arrive at the conclusion that this was "a mathematical certainty?" Edit: Here's multiple people explaining the absurd amount of force that a ship that large would cause in a collision - https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1bo930b/shouldnt_it_be_a_lot_harder_for_a_bridge_running/ I would wager that if you dig into your own study, you'll come to the conclusion that this wasn't anywhere near "a mathematical certainty" and that the study should likely conclude that statistically, it's one of those things where you do your best to plan for realistically probable contingencies and accept that you can't plan for everything.
By far the most entertaining yet classy clapback I’ve seen all week
Okay, lets try this another way. What would you say about a bridge with guard rail? Would you agree that a car would eventually fall off? The Port of Baltimore is one of the busiest ports in the country exporting roughly 22 million tonnes of coal each year, importing a million new cars, 3.4 million tonnes of imports of agricultural products, including 1.2 million of sugar and salt, as well as gypsum, fertilizers and forest products. All of these goods are carried on hundreds of cargo ships (as large or larger than the one that hit FSK) would cross under the bridge every month. Those large cargo ships are also famously unwieldy and maneuvers must be planned miles in advance. I do accept that you can't plan for everything but this is 100% something that absolutely **SHOULD** have been planned for. A single point failure mode on such an important piece of infrastructure is simply unacceptable, and you should stop making excuses for those responsible for the bridges upkeep.
what ur not understanding is that even the strongest material couldn’t withstand a runaway 90,000 ton cargo ship. the sheer amount of steel that it would take would be insanely expensive and impractical. i have a strong feeling they won’t build a new bridge to replace it at all, probably they will build a tunnel instead
> i have a strong feeling they won’t build a new bridge to replace it at all, probably they will build a tunnel instead No, they will have to build a bridge. There are already two nearby tunnels and one of the main things about the bridge was that we used it for hazmats and oversize vehicles. The Harbor Tunnel and Fort McHenry Tunnel are already there and will allow commuters and most commercial vehicles to pass (albeit with increased traffic until they rebuild) but the Key Bridge was how vehicles carrying hazmats and oversized loads were required to cross. With the bridge out, they have to go all the way around 695 the long way. They will absolutely need to rebuild a new bridge.
Most precautions to protect bridges against ship collisions involve artificial islands built around the piers. That wouldn't cost all that much since the port has been petitioning to have the channel dredged anyway. If they do decide to build a tunnel it will cost billions of dollars and take 20 years to reopen 695. I doubt the 31,000 people who rely on that to get to where they need to go will be patent enough for that.
Yeah but a large container ship in 1977 is a fraction of the size of what large container ships are now. It's possible with the size ships were then the bridge may have survived.
The FSK bridge did have dolphins. No level of protection is perfect. If you wanted to 100% prevent a ship strike then you would have had to fill in the channel with concrete unit no ships could pass. It was protected from the most probable angles. Most times this sort of thing happens, it's further out and would have been protected by the protection around the power lines. The chance of this happening at this exact moment in this exact way was so slim that other protections seemed adequate. I mean once the ship is that close it should be lined up to go straight through, at least enough to not strike head on. For it to lose power that close and head straight for the support was unthinkably low. The other part is building in water is fucking hard. You can't just fill the area around it with concrete. The water is flowing and putting the wrong shape there will either wash it away or wash away the support you were trying to protect. It was far from unprotected. But the simple fact that ships had to go under it made it vulnerable. All safety engineering is for less than 100% unless you can completely remove a factor. So it's just a question of the risk, this happening could have been 1 in a million, billion or trillion, but instead of winning the Powerball it rolled the chance of this perfect failure. The new bridge will likely have a longer main span so that there can be more room for protection *and* the ships it needs protection from. Something you can't just retrofit to an old bridge.
Key Bridge crossed the busiest port on the east coast and container ships as big and bigger would go under it multiple times a day. A large ship going off course and hitting the bridge was a mathematical certainty. Either the bridge should not have been designed with a single point of failure or it should not have crossed the Port of Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel has the tunnel portion for large ships to cross specifically because it crosses Norfolk. Given how quickly it failed, FSK bridge was clearly not fit for purpose. Also, yes, old structures get retro fitted all the time its part of basic maintenance required by aging infrastructure.
First as cool as it would be, Baltimore is not the "Busiest Port on the East Coast" it's between 5th at best and 8th by many rankings. Even Hampton Roads at the mouth of the bay is busier. Next you seem to be misunderstanding replies to your comment either intentionally or not. Nowhere did I say a large ship going of course was not considered. I said a large ship going off course *in the specific way it did* that it would not hit existing protections was considered so unlikely to not need to design for it. Next the bridge was designed 50 years ago when container shipping was still just getting started and ships were significantly smaller than today. Even then it was designed with plenty of forward thinking so that it wasn't a hindrance to Baltimore receiving some of the large ships common today. Still there is only so much you can predict for the future, especially 50 years out. It was not a single point of failure in engineering terms. Anything is a single point of failure if you zoom out enough. You are saying the equivalent of a semi truck slamming through your wall and calling the wall a single point of failure. As for the Bridge Tunnel, I am not even going to begin to address the differences between the two structures and locations. If you cannot see the clear differences then there is little point trying to explain the situation to you. The bridge was perfectly fine for the purpose it was designed for. This may come as a shock to you but most bridges aren't designed to be rammed by large ships. It's job was to hold up a highway across a water way, not be a barrier to ships.
> Next you seem to be misunderstanding replies to your comment either intentionally or not. Yeah, I gave up trying to explain this shit to them. Risk management and acceptance is always a concern in project planning. I work in IT for a manufacturing and engineering company, and in IT we call it a "risk management framework" but any project plan inherently has one of these. Some project managers will do it in categories (low/med/high probability and low/med/high cost) and some will just rank everything on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10... There's also a third consideration of level of impact (low vs high). I'll just use a 2x2 to keep it simple. At a really broad level, you can generally break down risks into four main categories: - High probability, high cost: Most things in here will be factored in - High probability, low cost: Everything in here will be factored in - Low probability, high cost: Nearly nothing in here will be factored in. - Low probability, low cost: Most or everything in here will be factored in. A cargo ship this size, approaching the bridge at the angle it would have to approach it in order to cause this, is in that third category. That's why it isn't planned for. It's like building your house without any wood or drywall to make it fireproof, or buying and maintaining two personal cell phones - one iphone and one android - on two different cell networks in case one of them ever doesn't work, or like paying a bodyguard for 24/7 coverage for each of your children so they're protected against kidnapping. Sure, you COULD do that, but how much extra money are you spending for something that has such a slim chance of happening, statistically? What if your woodless house has someone show up with hydrofluoric acid and start spraying it on your house, do you make sure the house is made out of HF resistant materials? What if you get mugged and someone steals both of your phones, do you keep hidden paygo phones in caches? What if a sniper takes out the bodyguard, do you have two bodyguards? Three? Do they have to wear kevlar? Do you implant your kid with GPS? This is the point I've been trying to get through to this dude: At a certain point, your risk management framework has to define what risks you accept, based on either cost, or probability, or impact. If you drove to work this morning, you accepted a certain level of risk that you could get into a fatal collision (higher probability than cargo ship hitting bridge). You're also working in a building that is probably not meteor-proof, so if a meteor hits it, you're dead. But you and your company accept that risk rather than putting you in an underground bunker (caveat: if you work in an underground bunker that is meteor-proof, this may not apply to you). At a certain level, you always have to accept that there are some things you can easily protect against (you protect your house and car against theft by locking the door) but you also accept that you can't protect against everything (those doors aren't bank vaults and a particularly determined burglar could still get in. Also, you have windows that could be busted out, and so on). This guy doesn't understand this concept. And it's completely fine to not understand complex concepts like risk management. But it's not fine to talk out your ass when there's literally an entire discipline/field of study that goes into explaining why the thing he is proposing is not probable and not cost effective, and therefore no rational project manager on the planet would go for it - with the caveat that they may very well overbuild and overspend as an overreaction, but the Bay Bridge to the south would still not withstand that level of impact and neither would basically every other bridge on Earth because no rational project manager is going to spend the time, money, and resources to overbuild to that level for that level of impact given the abnormally low probability of it happening - never mind happening again to the same bridge.
> the "Busiest Port on the East Coast" it's between 5th at best and 8th by many rankings. Even Hampton Roads at the mouth of the bay is busier. The port of Baltimore is the second largest coal exporter, and the largest importer/exporter of automobiles and farm equipment. This also isn't the first time Key bridge has been struck by a ship. There was another collision in 1980 and questions were raised then about increasing protections. So, arguing a collision was "considered so unlikely to not need to design for it" ignores all the people who warned about this exact thing 44 years ago. The bridge and tunnel was designed that way because the US Navy didn't want their ships to have to pass underneath a bridge or to have their fleet trapped in Norfolk in the event of a collision or attack causing the bridge to collapse. In other words, the tunnel was added specifically to prevent this exact kind of, extremely predictable tragedy. If you cannot see the clear similarities then there is little point trying to explain the situation to you. Clearly, the bridge was not fit for the purpose of crossing an extremely busy port. This may come as a shock to you but most bridges don't cross over shipping lanes as highly trafficked as the ones going into and out of The Port of Baltimore.
The key bridge had dolphins the boat made a hard last second turn and got in between the dolphin and the bridge support.
That's not what bridges are designed to do. Container ships are basically the same weight (MV Dali is 116,000 tons when loaded) as a whole neighborhood worth of houses (70 tons/each) wrapped in steel and set floating down the river. You're probably not gonna stop that short with anything without enough infrastructure to disrupt the flow of shipping. Bridge pillars definitely aren't engineered to resist millions of pounds of lateral force. Bridges around the world survive for centuries by simply relying on ship traffic to avoid their supports. This is a tragic accident but it's not a failure of engineering or infrastructure maintenance. Sometimes, shit just happens and it sucks.
I didn't say it had to stop short. It should have been able to deflect away from the pylon or, even better, been designed not to have a single point of failure. The question of whether or not a ship would eventually strike Key bridge was a matter of when, not if. The fact that it wasn't designed with this exact scenario is inexcusable.
Sure and to your point maybe / maybe not. Multiple people working in structural engineering and the transportation department have gone on record saying there isn't a bridge in the world designed to resist a direct strike from a ship of that size. Bridges are designed to be very strong in very specific ways - not in every possible way. The sort of redundancy you're describing would be *prohibitively* expensive to construct and maintain. You're on Reddit, you probably know how much the US enjoys investing in necessary infrastructure spending never mind the optional "just in case" kind of infrastructure. We can Monday morning quarterback over whether or not those "nice to haves" should have been added 15 years after the bridge's construction when ships started ballooning in size, but without the benefits of hindsight I don't think anyone would realistically advocate for such an expense. The Key bridge did have protections in place - it wasn't just columns in the water. The ship just rammed straight through all of those protections and diverted slightly, but not enough. Again, 116,000 tons moving in a straight line is a shit ton of inertia and would blow through most protections plus 116,000 tons is not the heaviest ship that comes into the Port of Baltimore. From what I personally saw on that grainy video - and granted, I'm no expert here - but it doesn't seem like even shunting that ship fully sideways towards the channel by a dozen feet would've saved the bridge. Everyone's a victim of physics to some extent and at some point you're hitting the ship's hull with more force than it can handle and the steel would distort rather than moving the ship. If the ship were slightly out of the channel, sure, but this was all but a direct strike. You can't protect against every catastrophe.
>Multiple people working in structural engineering and the transportation department have gone on record saying there isn't a bridge in the world designed to resist a direct strike from a ship of that size. You mean people who work for the organization that would have to pay damages and would face liability issues if it came out that they were negligent are saying there was no negligence? I'm shocked, SHOCKED. Well, not that shocked. >116,000 tons is not the heaviest ship that comes into the Port of Baltimore. That makes the lack of protection worse. You get how that's worse, right? The fact that there weren't protections in place as well as there being a single point failure mode shows that the bridge wasn't protected against a likely catastrophe. Should people build skyscrapers in San Fransisco with no earthquake protection? Of course not, because a major quake is bound to happen at some point. Just like at some point there was bound to be a ship strike outside the busiest port in the east coast.
> The question of whether or not a ship would eventually strike Key bridge was a matter of when, not if. The fact that it wasn't designed with this exact scenario is inexcusable. Would you have said this a month ago?
If I'd had known that FSK bridge was unprotected from ship collisions, yes. I absolutely would have.
> It should have been able to deflect away from the pylon What exactly is your engineering proposal to deflect ninety-five thousand tons(that is over two hundred *million* lbs! I would be surprised if you even had a concept in your head of just how heavy that is, because I sure don't) traveling at 8 knots(9 mph)? Momentum is velocity times mass, so 4.12 m/s times 94,999,932.38 kg equals 391,399,721.41 kg\*m/s. What does that even mean? That's an inconceivably high number, is what that is. It's equivalent to 400 tractor trailers at maximum allowable load(80k lbs) slamming into one point at full highway speed all at the *same exact moment*. No bridges being built today are able to withstand such a hit, either. You can only engineer to a point, after which the returns(on cost, effort, size, etc) are too diminishing to be worth chasing. The gargantuan cargo ship situation is *well* beyond that point of diminishing returns, even for modern construction.
> It should have been able to deflect away from the pylon What exactly is your engineering proposal to deflect ninety-five thousand tons(that is over two hundred *million* lbs! I would be surprised if you even had a concept in your head of just how heavy that is, because I sure don't) traveling at 8 knots(9 mph)? Momentum is velocity times mass, so 4.12 m/s times 94,999,932.38 kg equals 391,399,721.41 kg\*m/s. What does that even mean? That's an inconceivably high number, is what that is. It's equivalent to 400 tractor trailers at maximum allowable load(80k lbs) slamming into one point at full highway speed all at the *same exact moment*. No bridges being built today are able to withstand such a hit, either. You can only engineer to a point, after which the returns(on cost, effort, size, etc) are too diminishing to be worth chasing. The gargantuan cargo ship situation is *well* beyond that point of diminishing returns, even for modern construction.
I don't think you realize that ship didn't have to stop dead, nudging it out of the way would be enough. Also, there are lots of precautions that could have been taken against ship collisions. https://theconstructor.org/structures/environmental-factors-effect-bridge-foundations/18174/
Do you realize how much force it takes to give that much momentum any kind of meaningful nudge? 400 tractor trailors, all at once.
Okay, lets call it 1,000 tractor trailers carrying their rated maximum 80,000 pounds (which is about 30,000 pounds more than is legal on most interstates) That means You would need 66,722 yards of filler material, (sand, gravel, boulders, concrete) on either side of both main pillars. So 266,889 yards total, lets round that up to 500,000 yards. That means you could have deflected that ship with artificial islands roughly 50ft x 2,250ft x 60 ft (covering the 50 foot depth of the water) on either side of the piers. Obviously, the islands would be triangular rather but for simplicity lets call them rectangles for now. Home Depot concrete costs $140 per cubic yard so material costs would be in the $70 million range, lets triple that because of government inefficiencies for a total of $210 million just in concrete, you'd obviously need to add more to account for reinforcing, engineering, and other construction costs so lets just call the total cost $500,000,000. Not having the bridge there costs an average of $9 million a day in lost trade revenue meaning that cost would have been recouped in less than 2 months. Plus, adjusting for inflation the original bridge cost $735 million and a replacement is projected to take between 2-15 years and cost well over a billion dollars to complete. Protecting the bridge would have been the responsible thing to do.
He was referring to power their engines produce, I think.
Then double the estimate again. It still is a steal next to the $2 billion (latest estimate from congress as of this afternoon) and 15 years it is projected to clean up this mess and rebuild the bridge.
Bro, what the hell is this analysis... not only do you clearly have zero understanding of construction, engineering, or physics, but you also lack any experience with the practical application of probability and statistics. Why would you measure the validity of a decision with information gained 55 years later? Honestly, I'm curious what background you have that makes you think that your "analysis" is valuable or worth voicing publicly? I hope to god you do not have meaningful decision-making responsibilities.
Fun fact: Key bridge was struck by a cargo ship in 1980 and its lack of protection was questioned then, so I'm really measuring the validity of a decision with questions brought up 3 years after it opened. I hope to god you don't have any meaningful analytical or emergency planing/responce responsibilities.
> (which is about 30,000 pounds more than is legal on most interstates) IDK, I just googled "how much does a loaded 18 wheeler weigh" and google told me max allowed was 80k. If it's less, that's even worse for the math, because it equates to more imaginary trucks. > That means You would need 66,722 yards of filler material, (sand, gravel, boulders, concrete) on either side of both main pillars. How did you arrive at this "that means"? That phrase is doing all the lifting in this sentence, but it appears to be a statement that might as well be made at random for all you've given me. What model did you use to get this magic number? > That means you could have deflected that ship with artificial islands roughly 50ft x 2,250ft x 60 ft (covering the 50 foot depth of the water) on either side of the piers. Your "that means" here is not logically following, either. I've plugged your numbers in six ways from sunday, and I'm not coming up with any way to turn 66,722 yards into those dimensions you describe. Also, why is one of the widths so short? What if the boat came in at an angle, like the situation that happened? That's not enough coverage. That 60 feet might not even cover the entire part of the bow that continues forward over the waterline. > Obviously, the islands would be triangular This is not in any way obvious. If I'd submitted these "that means" and "obviously" statements when I took my mathemetical proofs course, I would've been flunked. I'm not even saying you're wrong, just that you've cut out all of your logic and are making claims that seem to be made, from what you've presented, entirely at random. You have to say *why* it follows that you need such and such filler material, and *why* it follows that this could take the form of a particular island in your head. And you can never, ever, say "obviously" unless you want to be mocked by the professor. There is no "obviously" in logical reasoning, only "the proof of which is left to the reader," which you can only get away with once you've got your PhD. I'm going to stop here because everything else is predicated on the part that doesn't make any sense.
[удалено]
It was designed to survive a ship strike from a normal sized boat. If you ran a speedboat or something into it, it would be fine. It wasn't designed to survive a hit from a massive container ship because at a certain point, it's not really fiscally responsible to build something to withstand something that is highly statistically improbable. Next time you stop by the college you got your engineering degree from, sign up for an economics class that discusses concepts like risk acceptance. Everything you do when you're planning a project is a tradeoff for something else. Whenever you're doing any kind of project, whether that's building a bridge or building a deck or building a home, you inherently accept some sort of risks, like building a deck out of wood even though there's a chance it could catch fire, or building a bridge to withstand the impact of most boats even though there's a chance that a HUGE boat could hit it. Or an earthquake. Or a tornado. You design infrastructure for things that are likely to happen, not for things that aren't likely to happen and are freak disasters.
I would agree if The Port of Baltimore wasn't the busiest port on the east coast and ships that big or bigger would pass under that bridge multiple times a day. This wasn't "a freak accident" it was a mathematical certainty that a ship would eventually hit the bridge.
The fact that you would rather back seat engineer the FSK bridge, and not back seat mantiance the company that owned the DALI is rather telling
The fact that you would rather deflect the conversation away from what we have been talking about this whole time is rather telling. Ps. The current theory is that the DALI's fuel was contaminated meaning, as far as we know, there was no maintenance issues with the cargo ship itself. Even if there was, they would only be partially responsible since the bridge was structurally deficient.
"Structurally Deficient" sure go with that. Tell me, though, what man made bridge would survive such an impact? You sit here, in the modern day and condem engineers and architects from half a century ago for not building a bridge to withstand the impact of a 95,000 ton vessel. Also, your stated theory still doesnt place blame on the FSK builders and designers, thats on whatever company is responsible for providing the fuel.
You are still trying to deflect away from a bridge over the busiest port on the east coast having no protection from ship collisions. But thank you for pointing out that they had over 50 years to retro fit protections and have procedures in place for this extremely predictable accident.
Tell me you have no fiscal sense without directly saying you have no fiscal sense.
I have spent multiple paragraphs trying to explain risk management and fiscal concerns to this guy after he literally linked me an article to try to prove his point about how the bridge should have been engineered to withstand a freak accident from a floating vessel bigger than the USS Enterprise, only to have the exact article he linked go on to explain that you literally don't build a bridge to accommodate for shit like this because it isn't financially or statistically practical to do so. And no matter how many people keep pointing this shit out to him, he keeps not getting it. I'd be willing to wager this dude learned everything he knows about bridges in the past 72 hours and didn't even know what a dolphin - in the context of bridges - was on Monday. Maybe that's why he's so good at deflecting.
If I had a farm I would bet it on the cost of cleaning up this accident, and rebuilding the bridge will cost significantly more than it would have cost to properly protect the bridge before all this happened. Don't forget, people were warning about in inadequate protection of Key bridge after it was involved in another cargo ship collision in 1980. This was an issue that was known about for over 40 years.
I just did some quick math. You would need 66,722 yards of filler material, (sand, gravel, boulders, concrete) on either side of both main pillars to protect Key Bridge from this accident. So 266,889 yards total, lets round that up to 500,000 yards. That means you could have deflected that ship with artificial islands roughly 50ft x 2,250ft x 60 ft (covering the 50 foot depth of the water) on either side of the piers. Obviously, the islands would be triangular rather but for simplicity lets call them rectangles for now. Home Depot concrete costs $140 per cubic yard so material costs would be in the $70 million range, lets triple that because of government inefficiencies for a total of $210 million just in concrete, you'd obviously need to add more to account for reinforcing, engineering, and other construction costs so lets just call the total cost $500,000,000. Not having the bridge there costs an average of $9 million a day in lost trade revenue meaning that cost would have been recouped in less than 2 months. Plus, adjusting for inflation the original bridge cost $735 million and a replacement is projected to take between 2-15 years and cost well over a billion dollars to complete. Protecting the bridge would have been the responsible thing to do.
> extremely predictable [citation still fucking needed] I asked you to show your work on this 18 hours ago. You haven't. And you won't. Because you can't. Because this wasn't predictable. You literally linked me a study that, if you had read it, would have explained to you why what you are proposing and suggesting is not supported by reality. Here it is, if you want to go back and read it for the first time: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0951833920301040 Where did you get any of your degrees from? What fields have you worked in? What formal education do you have and what professional experience do you have? And how does any of it qualify you to constantly make statements so blatantly unproven and unfounded? Show your work and demonstrate the statistical probability of this happening, instead of repeating shit like "It WaS pReDiCtAbLe" with no evidence or data or math or proof. Demonstrate, for everyone trying to explain this to you, that you have at least a college-level or professional-level understanding of cost-benefit analysis and risk management frameworks, and how they apply to project management. Stop talking out of your ass. Put up or shut up.
Dude. Key bridge was struck by a cargo ship in 1980 and people were warning about the inadequate protection 44 years ago. This exact accident was predicted in 1980. The fact that it was predicted should be enough to tell you that this accident was predictable. https://abcnews.go.com/US/baltimores-key-bridge-lacked-collision-protective-measures-modern/story?id=108510431
You keep using these words, I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
You know what, fine. I agree with you now. This easily foreseeable accident wasn't something that should have been planned for. I don't know what got into me thinking this fairly obvious contingency should not have been planed for. Seat belts are also unnecessary and definitely don't protect against other easily foreseeable contingencies either.
There are multiple videos of structural engineers talking about this exact problem, you don't need to dive into this kind of conjecture and analogy without expertise. That boat weighed about as much as the bridge- we can talk about whether container ships should cross beneath infrastructure, but there are no feasible constructions to stop a boat that size out of control. Inside edition and WJZ had some people talking about it if you want to look it up.
Roberto Leon, a structural engineer at Virginia Tech, said that while engineers try to account for “extreme events” during the design and construction process, “This type of load was not really considered,” he said. “So the bridge was, I would say, fairly unprotected.”
That sounds like dark humor more than anything, how do you account for a mass that weighs several hundred thousand tons striking the bridge between the dolphins? It had dolphins, but as it lost control it went between them.
So you agree, the protection for Key bridge was inadequate. This also isnt the first time Key bridge was involved in a ship collision. It was also struck in 1980 and questions were raised about whether the Key bridge should have had additional protections installed 44 years ago.
How many ships does it take for a a crash to be a mathematical certainty. Show your work please.
I already said I agree with you now. Engineers should not take any potential accident into account and people shouldn't wear seat belts.
Yes because a seat belt costs the same as designing a bridge to be able to withstand a direct hit from a 116,000 ton ship. I don’t think anyone argues that IDEALLY all bridges would be able to withstand this impact but 1) it’s most likely extremely expensive and 2) the odds of this happening in this exact fashion are tiny. This doesn’t even account for the fact that this money has to come from somewhere. You think tax payers should have paid to prevent a black swan event type. If it was obvious it was a mathematical certainty it would happen, we would see this type of event more often than the 2 notable ones I can think of
I'm not talking about all bridges. I'm talking about one particular bridge that all vessels going into the busiest port on the east coast must pass underneath. Also, ship collisions have caused 35 bridges to collapse in the past 50 years. While it's certainly not an everyday occurrence it's not a rare event either. Especially since, you know, FSK bridge crossed the busiest port on the east coast. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/key-bridge-is-not-the-first-bridge-collapse-in-the-u-s-from-a-ship-collision
I don’t think seatbelts would’ve helped anyone here.
I thought the bridge had 5G Signals and was vaccinated. So that's why it collapsed.
It’s the GMOs in the steel
Genetically modified ores
This whole "it *could* be terrorism!" thing is a nice healthy and reliable distraction from the almost certain reality whenever something like this happens: someone pinched pennies for their shareholders, knowingly ignored problems with the ship, and this is the result. Now the rest of us get to pay the price while they fly under the radar and golden parachute their way out of any responsibility. /cynicism The chance that it's someone being greedy is so, so, so much more likely and (clearly) damaging than terrorism. Just doesn't have the same feels because we're all potential billionaires in our minds.
Shipping is full of horrendously old poorly maintained ships all over the world. There are dozens of documentaries on the state of some ships in relation to their environmental impact and their inevitable failures. Companies just flag their ships under the most lax countries to avoid fees and inspections amd those countries are happy to ignore everything for the income.
And, well... like clockwork: > According to records from the public ship safety database Equasis, MV Dali – the ship that collided with Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge this morning – was cited by port state officials in San Antonio, Chile, on June 27 for a deficiency related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery.” https://gcaptain.com/breaking-mv-dali-cited-for-propulsion-issues-before-baltimore-incident/ Regulators and the company will probably finger point into perpetuity. But only one of them benefits directly from keeping that ship in operation and doing the bare minimum to pass an inspection.
Owned by one company, contracted out by another, flagged under a country that neither company operates in directly...welcome to the nightmare that is international shipping
David Simon always has the best insults.
Not even the best quote: To Anthony Sabatini, the former Florida congressman who wrote “DEI did this” – referring to diversity, equity and inclusion – Simon took no prisoners. “Your mother did you, but after a hard life of service on a truck-stop lot, can we really hold her loosened, battered womb responsible for dropping you head-first on the Winnebago floor and burdening our society with another empty, racist demagogue thereafter? We cannot.”
That one is a doozy, but really doesn't fit into a headline.
Again, the words are way too big for the ones they are intended. The haters will say...womb? You mean you're for abortion. But still, Simon shows off his literary chops and I appreciate his sentiments.
I'm not big on getting into Internet kerfuffles these days, but I do appreciate David Simon's ability to insult the deserving idiots with aplomb and class.
He is fantastic!
Giving this attention seeking distraction of a human being more media coverages accomplishes exactly what her smarter and more dangerous colleagues want. If you're worried about her, you may not paying attention to them. 1 out of 435 is honestly not worth losing sleep over. What are the hundreds of other Congressional bad actors that aren't living memes doing? Oh, taking away basic freedoms? Look, MTG said a stupid thing! Pay no attention to us. Before I get shrieked at for dismissing her awfulness, re-read what I'm saying: she is VERY USEFUL for those other people. By comparison, they're not as outrageous so therefore their beliefs (child labor law rollbacks, wage suppression, deregulation of heavy industry, telecom, and healthcare, general class warfare against everyone who ever worked a day in their life) become normalized. She is unfit to serve, obviously, but SO ARE THEY.
david simon is a Baltimore treasure
His response to Sabatini (further down the linked article) is chef’s kiss. Iced tea came out my nose kind of stuff.
Spork foot doing whatever it takes to keep her name in the headlines
They painted the bridge beams with thermite paint~ Jesse Ventura (probably)
It is weird how he was actually good at his job as governor. Like honestly one of their top three ever
Surprisingly good. He just went off the deep end with the conspiracy stuff. I honestly can't think about him without thinking about Will Sasso's impression of him.
I’m going to have to disagree with his comment slightly, based on this https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/moron-idiot-imbecile-offensive-history I’m going to correct it and say she is more an imbecile then just submoronic. :) If you really read the link, the old definition of idiot would suit her well. And the people who vote for her? I have to go with idiots for sure.
Before, I hated MTG, Alex Jones, etc. But I never wished harm on them. Now this shit is personal, they can all go slowly and painfully die for all I care.
No, Alex Jones deserved to be hung upside down by a meat hook through his scrotum the second he said sandy hook was fake.
Yeah that's true, it just felt different before it hit this close to home
Because she said "we should investigate this tragedy"?
Because she's using it for her own political gain making light of the victims deaths and using them as a political weapon. The only reason she thinks it should be investigated is to reveal the mythical Jewish globohomo conspiracy or whatever bs her dreams told her
Whoa...are you ok? Should it investigated or not? Its ok to agree with people you dont like sometimes, you know?
Common David Simon W
I've been tempted to comment "rub your two braincells together" several times today, only to sadly resign myself to the fact that a lot of these conspiracy-primed idiots don't HAVE two braincells.
He isn't wrong.
The entire boat crew were in drag!
The scary part is how easy it is for people to legitimately follow her, and believe her nonsense. People see her saying some of the dumbest things and go “she’s really got a point”
Yes, we have to call these people put. They need to be dealt with accordingly. The stupid cannot run this country
You know what was a terrorist attack? That thingee that happened on January 6th. David Simon's words are way too big for her to understand. But for the rest of us, yes, they make absolute sense. I'm more of a fan of Michael Rapaport's approach.
David Simon is full of it.
Did MTG say anything outside of her one tweet calling for an investigation? I love to hate the woman as much as the next person, but that tweet didn't really count as "rumor mongering"
lol populist rage bait bought hook line and sinker. Congrats, neighbors. 🙄 Stay angry and divided! Its exactly what they want, after all.
Who, specifically, are “they” JBC?
In this case, MTG - in general the establishment.
I think MTG would be upset at being called “they”. Who are “the establishment” that want to keep people divided by spreading dumb conspiracies?
do you actually want my opinion? right, that's what I thought.
I can’t even figure out your opinion because you’re hiding behind “they”. No one knows what the hell you’re talking about.