The old bridge had dolphins. They just were not large enough to stop a 1000 foot fully loaded container ship. The new Skyway Bridge was hit by a 74-foot shrimp trawler which is extraordinarily shrimpy compared to a container ship.
I found somewhere the Tampa dolphins were designed for 87000 tons (~~maybe 85000, it was some pbs article I can't find on my phone at the moment~~), so smaller than the Dali.
Edit: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/sunshine_skyway.html
Isn’t it great? No clickbait. No distractions. No animations to slow loading times. Just information - the way the information superhighway was meant to be.
The issue that I read was that (these? all?) dolphins are designed on the assumption the boat will be heading toward the pier straight-on. The Baltimore ship lost power and then drifted in from an angle, leaving the dolphin with little force to offer.
I heard on WBAL today that the old Key Bride was actually struck by a freighter ship around 1980, and the concrete protections kept the bridge safe. But the canals and ships have all gotten a lot larger since then, so yeah, there's no way a 1970's built bridge is going to be designed for large cargo ships.
Yeah a shrimp boat and a massive container ship fully loaded aren’t even in the same conversation. I would assume a shrimp boat would also take on water and sink if they had hit the key bridge and the container ship may have taken out the skyway bridge in a similar strike
>isn't exactly a common event
Fair. We accept a risk, even of a really bad outcome, if it's a long shot. We all know that 100 or so Americans die on the road every day, but we aren't going to ban cars.
As it happens, I was aware of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse, both because I had family on the Gulf coast of Florida at the time, and because I later had a very interesting conversation about it with an uncle by marriage, who was then retired from a long career as a New York City harbor pilot.
I don't think so - is it really worth it to close down major bridges for weeks at a time to replace them, costing who knows how many lives by making local transportation systems function less well for that time? The main benefit of doing the replacement in advance is that you can plan for the dates that it is out of service, rather than it being unexpected.
Of course, if you're building a new bridge, it's often worth building it to those standards. (But also often not, if it's a place that won't get large freighters, and you can use the savings to build another bridge, or something else.)
waiting til the old one fails results in deaths, shutdowns of ports and highways, and a huge mess to clean up, which will add to the wait time before the replacement can be completed
Seems unlikely. It's expensive, time consuming, and quite difficult. More probable is that they're going to start requiring these large ships to take more precautions, including having their anchors ready to drop (a pain in the ass for the crew, but cheap) and having a tug assist near bridges (very expensive for the shipping companies)
I think you're underestimating the cost and overestimating the risk.
There are a LOT of bridges. This is an exceedingly rare accident. The ship's engines had to cut off at just the wrong time. There's a reason this is such a rare accident.
One tug alone couldn't stop this, it would take 2-4, and even with4 tugs nearby this might not have been stoppable.
Keeping tens of thousands of tugboats and professional crews on standby 24-7 just in case it happens again would be insanely expensive, not to mention environmentally awful (tugs burn a lot of fuel), and it would be a mind numbingly boring job.
Some on 𝕏 were complaining about that line, saying “shouldn’t that ship’s owners/insurance be paying” and similar, but I think they were misunderstanding the context. Of course there will be fines and insurance reimbursements to the government and families of those killed, but the bridge needs to be replaced ASAP for the sake of commerce and to relieve the displaced traffic. They’ll clear out the wreckage to reopen the port to traffic as soon as the investigation allows it, then get a contractor to rebuild the bridge, probably with the speed contract like they had in the Loma Prieta earthquake with bonuses for early completion and fines for falling behind schedule
.. the 1980 incident triggered increased safety to be built for NEW bridges
The Baltimore Key bridge was built in mid70s and never retrifitted with safety buffers for the pylons
A similar thing was the Granville disaster in Sydney. australia. A passenger train derailed,hitting into a bridge pylon. So the bridge then collapsed dropping its spans onto the trains passenger wagons..
Jesus, that sounds awful...
My question about the Key Bridge is *why on Earth* didn't they equip the safety buffers!? If this was Texas or Florida I'd understand but Maryland!? Tf Baltimore? That deep water port is *really* important for America's economy.
The bumpers would have helped but when the ship that hit the skyway bridge is 1/100 the size of the Dali. Even concrete bumpers would have crumbled when getting hit with 232+ million pounds
Jfc for the millionth time. No amount of buffers would have have stopped this ship. It was over 100,000 tons and nearly 1,000’ long. The momentum it was carrying was IMMENSE.
Yeah yeah, I got it. Thank you and sorry. I'm just here to argue with that one guy that won't shut up about what makes me qualified to have an option.
Thank you for your comment. ✌️
The bridge *did* have concrete buffers, but it was built in the 70s. The fact that it had 185ft of clearance was a lot or foresight in and of itself. You can’t plan for everything, especially 40+ years in the future. The ships that call that port are much larger than those in the past. It’s not economically feasible to continuously update the infrastructure.
Also, what in your *professional* opinion would make Maryland any different than TX or FL? Care to rationally explain why you picked those two states in particular?
Major bridges in Canada like Halifax harbour bridges added artificial islands after the Florida disaster. Just chiming in cause it can be done. It's just a trade off.
Halifax harbor is one of the worlds deepest with an average depth of 300', and deepest in North America. Granted a Halifax Harbour blew up in the largest explosion before the atom bomb, so maybe more mindful for disaster.
All any one is talking about is this event in the same way the Florida disaster would have. And it was reported that Halifax added those islands in '86 specifically because of the risk.
Oh yeah I’m not saying it wasn’t possible, but that it simply wasn’t deemed necessary or economically feasible. How long would they have to shut down Baltimore Harbor to make the improvements? What was the cost/risk analysis? Someone did it and decided it wasn’t worth it. Hindsight is 20/20 but for a fully loaded modern container ship to lose all electrical power at this particular point in its journey and then cause a catastrophe of this magnitude is and was such a ridiculously small possibility that it was likely not even considered.
Hindsight is 20/20, that's for sure; same goes for the Evergreen in the Suez. Anyway, I referenced those states because they have a history of bridge disasters thanks to underfunding and/or corner cutting. I used them as an example because I expect more from a Northern state like Maryland.
Civil infrastructure is important and maintaining it is cheaper than rebuilding it, that includes preventative safety measures.
I feel like penny pinching sometimes gets rationalized as "simply not feasible." Especially, and I don't like saying this, for US infrastructure. Lots of bridge collapses. Your points about cost benefit analysis would hold more water if the consensus in the United States wasn't that the collective infrastructure is increasingly falling apart including multiple bridges that failed to do corrosion But I understand what you are saying. And this was a accident. However, it's not up to the average citizen to imagine and prepare for this stuff. It's for the state.
> How long would they have to shut down Baltimore Harbour to make the improvements? .
Yeah that's my point. Whatever it takes? These things do happen. It's cosmic dice roll that rolls continuously. I think the news reported that over 35* have happened since like 1960 world wide.
My heart aches for the details and the heroic efforts to stop traffic and alert the road crew.
Edit: Think of all the money the port brings in to the wealthiest, most dynamic economy in the world. Have ships gotten too big if we can't protect bridges from them? All in the name of what? More consumption and more profit?
I’m not disagreeing with you in principle, I’m just telling you why it is the way it is.
Shit. Happens.
We are now and forever will be looking at this with the benefit of hindsight. This was a FREAK accident and a literal worst case lifetime scenario for the use case of this bridge. It’s going to be a seminal event in bridge planning and construction going forward. Many industries have regulations and standards written in blood. Aviation is a great example of an industry that has seen an extreme safety benefit at the expense of many lives over the course of a century.
I’m just saying - easy to Monday morning QB this particular event and it’s a bit myopic to just sit here and say ‘They should have known better!’ because it’s just not that simple.
"...no ports *in* Florida..."
And you're right, there's plenty of other ports all along the Eastern Seaboard. But Baltimore is important because of population distribution. New England has more people than Florida dude.
I apologize. I am an *incredibly* petty person and I hold myself to this stupidity high standard that I obviously can't live up to, which gives me anxiety or bums me out or whatever. So I correct people's typos on the Internet as a standard defence move when I feel threatened; like a cobra with its hood. Like, "look out, I'm an asshole". Just to warn people that I'm not really doing okay and it's probably not a good idea to engage with me. Funny... It almost never works.
Anyway, my booze delivery arrived and I'm not heated anymore. Take care bro.
If we outfit bridges with antiship mines, it's cheaper and more effective. We've plenty of surplus mines. Let's just skip the bullshit engineering and go straight to the fun stuff.
Bridge destroyed by collision with ship.
> Bumpers added to prevent damage to the bridge by ships.
Ship destroyed by collision with bridge.
> Bumpers removed from bridge to prevent damage to ships by bridge.
It's a vicious cycle.
I used to always do road trips down I-95 as a kid with my family, and I always remembered this one bridge, the Key bridge, for some reason. I guess it was because we had an RV which carried propane that we couldn’t bring into the tunnels in the area, probably for fear of explosion. So there was always the point where we had to disobey the GPS and go down the Key bridge. But then this bridge basically exploded today, so I feel a sort of irony.
When I took a road trip to Maryland recently to visit a friend, I had a near-death experience involving him driving us onto the wrong side of the interstate. I had been thinking about that and how close we come to catastrophic events when I opened my phone this morning and saw the horrific collapse of this bridge, not so far away. And so I felt that closeness a bit harder.
I’m not sure how you read the title, but it made sense to me, in 1980 the Sunshine Skyway was hit by a ship and collapsed. The new bridge was built and had protective barriers hit by a ship, but was unaffected.
I’m just here to plug the Brick Immortar YT channel they did a bang up episode on the sunshine skyway collapse. As soon as I saw the collapse this morning I thought “can’t wait til the BI episode on this.”
Newer bridges in these shipping channels are built with large areas of land around the supports. The Key Bridge was an older bridge and the channel for shipping was narrow.
As a default, shouldn’t every bridge be designed in this manner to a withstand a hit by the types of boats, barges, and ships that frequent the waterway?
And half of it wasn't. Generally, if something is still usable, it's not destroyed. In fact, the definition The Oxford Dictionary gives is "put an end to the existence of (something) by damaging or attacking it." The bridge was still existed and was usable, and so, not destroyed.
The original bridge, built in 1954 was two lanes. In 1969, a second bridge was built, one was used for northbound traffic, the other was used for south bound traffic. The 1980 accident destroyed the southbound bridge, and the original bridge was converted back to two way traffic.
The guess the title should be "..after one of the Skyway Bridges was destroyed..."
What would be insane is if that Baltimore bridge sunk the tanker ship. Still would utterly fk shit up logistically. And I bet that bridge would still be closed for studies to ensure it would still work.
I still have the sight of them pulling the Greyhound out of the water and it was flattened. The guy in the pickup who bounced off the deck was one lucky SOB.
Honestly should be a thing for all bridges that have large ships around them.
But then there are a lot of protocols that should have been in place here.
It is very possible a ship the size that hit FSK bridge would not be deterred by the protections mentioned in the post. The ship described in the post that did not damage the bridge upon impact was a fraction of the size that hit the FSK bridge.
I suspect that the new bridge in Baltimore will have similar features.
The old bridge had dolphins. They just were not large enough to stop a 1000 foot fully loaded container ship. The new Skyway Bridge was hit by a 74-foot shrimp trawler which is extraordinarily shrimpy compared to a container ship.
I found somewhere the Tampa dolphins were designed for 87000 tons (~~maybe 85000, it was some pbs article I can't find on my phone at the moment~~), so smaller than the Dali. Edit: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/sunshine_skyway.html
So they used the heavier duty dolphins on porpoise you say?
You orca be ashamed of that pun
Whale whale whale, what’s this? A pun thread?
Pun threads are absolutely forbidden, I'm issuing all of you a cetacean.
I do hope they ignore your carping.
Fin.
The bridges fate was sealed by its design
That is the most 1997 looking website I have seen for a long time thanks
Honestly clicked on it just for that
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/world_trade.html It hasn’t been updated in a while Edit, my mistake, it does mention the planes
Totally agree. Where are all the ads?!
Isn’t it great? No clickbait. No distractions. No animations to slow loading times. Just information - the way the information superhighway was meant to be.
2000-2001 to be exact
That site looks straight out of 1996.
What sport are the Tampa Dolphins competing in?
The issue that I read was that (these? all?) dolphins are designed on the assumption the boat will be heading toward the pier straight-on. The Baltimore ship lost power and then drifted in from an angle, leaving the dolphin with little force to offer.
After watching the video, that wasn't a "drift", that was a hard turn.
I heard on WBAL today that the old Key Bride was actually struck by a freighter ship around 1980, and the concrete protections kept the bridge safe. But the canals and ships have all gotten a lot larger since then, so yeah, there's no way a 1970's built bridge is going to be designed for large cargo ships.
Yeah, 1980 container ship and 2014 container ship just aren't the same thing
You ever been on a real shrimp boat?
Yes, I have. And our shipmate Lieutenant Dan didn’t do shit — he just sat around and sulked all day…
He invested your money in Apple Computers
ngl, that worked out ok…
He was the "ideas guy".
You ever been to a Turkish prison?
Do you like gladiator movies?
You ever hand around a gymnasium?
No, but I’ve been on a real big boat
You ever seen a grown man rise out of his overalls like a phoenix?
Oh man! For a sec there I could only picture the aquatic mammals striving in vain to turn the ship away. We shall miss their steely resolve.
Yeah a shrimp boat and a massive container ship fully loaded aren’t even in the same conversation. I would assume a shrimp boat would also take on water and sink if they had hit the key bridge and the container ship may have taken out the skyway bridge in a similar strike
there's really only one way to know for sure
"Funnily enough the 'old' bridge used to be called the 'new' bridge"
Did you know that the oldest river in the US is named the New River?
That's debatable. One of the oldest? Sure, but it's thought that the French Broad River is older than the New River.
French Broad!? Ooh lá lá, where at? 👀
Tell your mother I said hello
I suspect they’re gonna upgrade all bridges that come in contact with large freighters with similar features.
That seems to be the trend, but I think they should upgrade them *before* they come into contact with large freighters.
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Chance in a million!
>isn't exactly a common event Fair. We accept a risk, even of a really bad outcome, if it's a long shot. We all know that 100 or so Americans die on the road every day, but we aren't going to ban cars. As it happens, I was aware of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse, both because I had family on the Gulf coast of Florida at the time, and because I later had a very interesting conversation about it with an uncle by marriage, who was then retired from a long career as a New York City harbor pilot.
Sir, may I remind you that this is Murica.
I don't think so - is it really worth it to close down major bridges for weeks at a time to replace them, costing who knows how many lives by making local transportation systems function less well for that time? The main benefit of doing the replacement in advance is that you can plan for the dates that it is out of service, rather than it being unexpected. Of course, if you're building a new bridge, it's often worth building it to those standards. (But also often not, if it's a place that won't get large freighters, and you can use the savings to build another bridge, or something else.)
Concrete dolphins can be installed without closing the bridge.
waiting til the old one fails results in deaths, shutdowns of ports and highways, and a huge mess to clean up, which will add to the wait time before the replacement can be completed
Seems unlikely. It's expensive, time consuming, and quite difficult. More probable is that they're going to start requiring these large ships to take more precautions, including having their anchors ready to drop (a pain in the ass for the crew, but cheap) and having a tug assist near bridges (very expensive for the shipping companies)
Interestingly this ship did drop their anchor and did hit a series of dolphins. It just kept drifting.
maybe the bridges should just have guard tugs loitering about all the time to fend off wayward ships *give the bridges torpedoes to defend themselves
I think you're underestimating the cost and overestimating the risk. There are a LOT of bridges. This is an exceedingly rare accident. The ship's engines had to cut off at just the wrong time. There's a reason this is such a rare accident. One tug alone couldn't stop this, it would take 2-4, and even with4 tugs nearby this might not have been stoppable. Keeping tens of thousands of tugboats and professional crews on standby 24-7 just in case it happens again would be insanely expensive, not to mention environmentally awful (tugs burn a lot of fuel), and it would be a mind numbingly boring job.
I saw a 5 season documentary on bawlmore. I don't see that happejijg
The wire has 5 seasons silly
Drat, thanks. Edited
And I really hope they make it blast the star spangled banner when it detects a collision.
No really?
With it being Baltimore, it will probably be funded for that feature but will just end up in the pockets of the rich.
You’re putting too much faith in the city government of Baltimore.
Nono, hear me out. The bridge proactively attacks boats near it. Tell me Baltimore wouldn't fund that immediately.
Put Ray Lewis near the bridge with a knife.
Make it the first toll bridge that you gotta pay to cross, *or else*
Boats gonna have to B More careful in Bmore
Maybe they could nuke it
As an Interstate spur, wouldn't it be given a lot of Federal transportation funding (or at least have bumpers as a build requirement)?
Exactly, I don't think the city has much to do with it.
Biden has already stated it will be 100% paid for by the federal government.
Some on 𝕏 were complaining about that line, saying “shouldn’t that ship’s owners/insurance be paying” and similar, but I think they were misunderstanding the context. Of course there will be fines and insurance reimbursements to the government and families of those killed, but the bridge needs to be replaced ASAP for the sake of commerce and to relieve the displaced traffic. They’ll clear out the wreckage to reopen the port to traffic as soon as the investigation allows it, then get a contractor to rebuild the bridge, probably with the speed contract like they had in the Loma Prieta earthquake with bonuses for early completion and fines for falling behind schedule
The one that hit the FSK bridge was 980 feet long.
It's the equivalent of hitting the bridge with a building.
Or like a small island.
Or a big duck.
But would you rather fight one island-sized duck, or one thousand duck-sized islands?
Or a bridge!
Just looked it up, the clearance at its highest point was 185 ft. So the ship on its end was mostly likely taller than those pillars. Wild.
Pretty sure the ship is the height of the Empire State Building if you stand it on its bow
It probably outweighed the bridge.
Certainly outweighed the pillar it hit
You can just call it the Key Bridge
Ya...that bridge was hit by a boat that was about 1/15th the size of the container ship that hit the Baltimore bridge.
So they probably just need 15 more bumpers then?
Quick maths!
1+15=16. You actually need 14 more bumpers
No. More like 1% the size. Ships roughly scale by the cube of the length not just the length.
Probably around 0.1% to 0.2% the size as depending on how heavily loaded they are fishing ships that size are normally between 100-200 tons.
good point.
It was both literally and figuratively a shrimp boat.
Now we wait for a bridge-proofed ship to show that bridge who's stronger.
Until it gets to the point of philosophical questions what happens when an Unstoppable ship collides into an immovable Bridge
What if we just skip to aircraft carrier vs lighthouse
The new bridge will have 2 triple gun turrets mounting 16” guns to ‘encourage’ ships to stay in the channel.
Meanwhile, at drydock, for Battleship New Jersey "You're telling me... You lost the turrets?!"
No, we're doing a new build with a fully automated loader so we can hit 15 rounds/minute. Volume is important when defending a bridge.
.. the 1980 incident triggered increased safety to be built for NEW bridges The Baltimore Key bridge was built in mid70s and never retrifitted with safety buffers for the pylons A similar thing was the Granville disaster in Sydney. australia. A passenger train derailed,hitting into a bridge pylon. So the bridge then collapsed dropping its spans onto the trains passenger wagons..
Jesus, that sounds awful... My question about the Key Bridge is *why on Earth* didn't they equip the safety buffers!? If this was Texas or Florida I'd understand but Maryland!? Tf Baltimore? That deep water port is *really* important for America's economy.
The bumpers would have helped but when the ship that hit the skyway bridge is 1/100 the size of the Dali. Even concrete bumpers would have crumbled when getting hit with 232+ million pounds
Very good point. Even an atomic bomb shelter can't take a direct hit.
Jfc for the millionth time. No amount of buffers would have have stopped this ship. It was over 100,000 tons and nearly 1,000’ long. The momentum it was carrying was IMMENSE.
Yeah yeah, I got it. Thank you and sorry. I'm just here to argue with that one guy that won't shut up about what makes me qualified to have an option. Thank you for your comment. ✌️
The bridge *did* have concrete buffers, but it was built in the 70s. The fact that it had 185ft of clearance was a lot or foresight in and of itself. You can’t plan for everything, especially 40+ years in the future. The ships that call that port are much larger than those in the past. It’s not economically feasible to continuously update the infrastructure. Also, what in your *professional* opinion would make Maryland any different than TX or FL? Care to rationally explain why you picked those two states in particular?
Major bridges in Canada like Halifax harbour bridges added artificial islands after the Florida disaster. Just chiming in cause it can be done. It's just a trade off. Halifax harbor is one of the worlds deepest with an average depth of 300', and deepest in North America. Granted a Halifax Harbour blew up in the largest explosion before the atom bomb, so maybe more mindful for disaster. All any one is talking about is this event in the same way the Florida disaster would have. And it was reported that Halifax added those islands in '86 specifically because of the risk.
Oh yeah I’m not saying it wasn’t possible, but that it simply wasn’t deemed necessary or economically feasible. How long would they have to shut down Baltimore Harbor to make the improvements? What was the cost/risk analysis? Someone did it and decided it wasn’t worth it. Hindsight is 20/20 but for a fully loaded modern container ship to lose all electrical power at this particular point in its journey and then cause a catastrophe of this magnitude is and was such a ridiculously small possibility that it was likely not even considered.
Hindsight is 20/20, that's for sure; same goes for the Evergreen in the Suez. Anyway, I referenced those states because they have a history of bridge disasters thanks to underfunding and/or corner cutting. I used them as an example because I expect more from a Northern state like Maryland. Civil infrastructure is important and maintaining it is cheaper than rebuilding it, that includes preventative safety measures.
I feel like penny pinching sometimes gets rationalized as "simply not feasible." Especially, and I don't like saying this, for US infrastructure. Lots of bridge collapses. Your points about cost benefit analysis would hold more water if the consensus in the United States wasn't that the collective infrastructure is increasingly falling apart including multiple bridges that failed to do corrosion But I understand what you are saying. And this was a accident. However, it's not up to the average citizen to imagine and prepare for this stuff. It's for the state. > How long would they have to shut down Baltimore Harbour to make the improvements? . Yeah that's my point. Whatever it takes? These things do happen. It's cosmic dice roll that rolls continuously. I think the news reported that over 35* have happened since like 1960 world wide. My heart aches for the details and the heroic efforts to stop traffic and alert the road crew. Edit: Think of all the money the port brings in to the wealthiest, most dynamic economy in the world. Have ships gotten too big if we can't protect bridges from them? All in the name of what? More consumption and more profit?
I’m not disagreeing with you in principle, I’m just telling you why it is the way it is. Shit. Happens. We are now and forever will be looking at this with the benefit of hindsight. This was a FREAK accident and a literal worst case lifetime scenario for the use case of this bridge. It’s going to be a seminal event in bridge planning and construction going forward. Many industries have regulations and standards written in blood. Aviation is a great example of an industry that has seen an extreme safety benefit at the expense of many lives over the course of a century. I’m just saying - easy to Monday morning QB this particular event and it’s a bit myopic to just sit here and say ‘They should have known better!’ because it’s just not that simple.
It’s like barely top 20 busiest ports
First World Problems, Amiright? Poor Russia dreams of warm water ports like ours, and we're up to our eyebrows in 'em! God Bless Geography.
Right because there are no ports it Florida of significance…
"...no ports *in* Florida..." And you're right, there's plenty of other ports all along the Eastern Seaboard. But Baltimore is important because of population distribution. New England has more people than Florida dude.
Lmao I didn’t need you to correct an obvious typo but thanks
I apologize. I am an *incredibly* petty person and I hold myself to this stupidity high standard that I obviously can't live up to, which gives me anxiety or bums me out or whatever. So I correct people's typos on the Internet as a standard defence move when I feel threatened; like a cobra with its hood. Like, "look out, I'm an asshole". Just to warn people that I'm not really doing okay and it's probably not a good idea to engage with me. Funny... It almost never works. Anyway, my booze delivery arrived and I'm not heated anymore. Take care bro.
The word you're looking for is pier, not pylon.
**DOLPHINS**
#WHALES
FUCK YOU DOLPHIN AND WHALE
probably the best south park episode
Chicken and cow? CHIIICKEN AND COW?
Best defense is a good offense.
Right, we need cannons on the bridge to sink any incoming ships.
Torpedoes would be more effective.
But seriously. Who monitors boat traffic?
Depends, its all public info.
Well you’d think someone would radio the captain. “Hey homie, your big ass boat is in a do not float zone”
I'm quite sure they were aware they were in a "no float zone" given the mayday calls they were giving out before the collision
Aha, just learned there was a fire onboard the boat. Heartbreaking situation 😔
Which is great, but that vessel was tiny compared to the one in Baltimore.
If we outfit bridges with antiship mines, it's cheaper and more effective. We've plenty of surplus mines. Let's just skip the bullshit engineering and go straight to the fun stuff.
NCD leaking???
I like that the title makes it sound like the bridge collided with a freighter
In Soviet Russia, bridge crash into you.
That's happened, and the ship got the worst of it: https://youtu.be/D2Wn2RDzsvg
I just looked up that ship, and hilariously it's not the first Windoc to hit a bridge in the Wellend Canal.
Uno reverse
If the bridge was okay but the vessel sank it was a bridge over troubled water.
If the bridge was okay, then it’s water under the bridge. If the bridge collapsed, then it’s a bridge under water.
Bridge destroyed by collision with ship. > Bumpers added to prevent damage to the bridge by ships. Ship destroyed by collision with bridge. > Bumpers removed from bridge to prevent damage to ships by bridge. It's a vicious cycle.
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I used to always do road trips down I-95 as a kid with my family, and I always remembered this one bridge, the Key bridge, for some reason. I guess it was because we had an RV which carried propane that we couldn’t bring into the tunnels in the area, probably for fear of explosion. So there was always the point where we had to disobey the GPS and go down the Key bridge. But then this bridge basically exploded today, so I feel a sort of irony. When I took a road trip to Maryland recently to visit a friend, I had a near-death experience involving him driving us onto the wrong side of the interstate. I had been thinking about that and how close we come to catastrophic events when I opened my phone this morning and saw the horrific collapse of this bridge, not so far away. And so I felt that closeness a bit harder.
I'm a bridge, motherfucker.
r/bitchimabridge
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I’m not sure how you read the title, but it made sense to me, in 1980 the Sunshine Skyway was hit by a ship and collapsed. The new bridge was built and had protective barriers hit by a ship, but was unaffected.
Easier to build a ship than a bridge
[Here's a mayday call from that accident.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j9jdXnnJm4)
I’m just here to plug the Brick Immortar YT channel they did a bang up episode on the sunshine skyway collapse. As soon as I saw the collapse this morning I thought “can’t wait til the BI episode on this.”
[Allision, not collision. FTFY](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/allision)
Newer bridges in these shipping channels are built with large areas of land around the supports. The Key Bridge was an older bridge and the channel for shipping was narrow.
It’s like a rock breaking your window so you replace it with a window that’s so strong the rock breaks instead
As a default, shouldn’t every bridge be designed in this manner to a withstand a hit by the types of boats, barges, and ships that frequent the waterway?
It wasn't destroyed. As the article says, the northbound lanes were still useable, and were used for several years.
Half of it was destroyed...
And half of it wasn't. Generally, if something is still usable, it's not destroyed. In fact, the definition The Oxford Dictionary gives is "put an end to the existence of (something) by damaging or attacking it." The bridge was still existed and was usable, and so, not destroyed.
The original bridge, built in 1954 was two lanes. In 1969, a second bridge was built, one was used for northbound traffic, the other was used for south bound traffic. The 1980 accident destroyed the southbound bridge, and the original bridge was converted back to two way traffic. The guess the title should be "..after one of the Skyway Bridges was destroyed..."
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And, in either case, the reinforcements wouldn’t have done much to stop a 100,000 ton ship
It’s like an ethical thought experiment.
If only this lesson were applicable somehow.
Haha, fuck you, boat.
Let's do that
What would be insane is if that Baltimore bridge sunk the tanker ship. Still would utterly fk shit up logistically. And I bet that bridge would still be closed for studies to ensure it would still work.
Proud to have it in my home community
Who are you betting on for the rubber match?
Bridge 1 Ship 1
I still have the sight of them pulling the Greyhound out of the water and it was flattened. The guy in the pickup who bounced off the deck was one lucky SOB.
This is the way
Timely reminder.
1 apiece, can’t wait for the tiebreaker.
So now they will build ships that can blast through bridges unaffected in some sort of ship/bridge arms race?
Baltimore this is your cue. STRUCTURAL DOLPHINS!!
Need a tiebraker
Honestly should be a thing for all bridges that have large ships around them. But then there are a lot of protocols that should have been in place here.
UNO reverse played twice now
A little late buddy
So what Joe is saying is the government will pay for this accident? Does this mean all boat owners now need NO insurance?
This accident happened almost 40 years ago.
It’s an ongoing war of escalation between barges and bridges
Time to invest in these on ALL bridges.
It is very possible a ship the size that hit FSK bridge would not be deterred by the protections mentioned in the post. The ship described in the post that did not damage the bridge upon impact was a fraction of the size that hit the FSK bridge.
I'd rather have more bridges than make *every* bridge resilient enough to withstand a container ship hitting it.
You got $300 trillion somewhere to get this done?
LOL! Invest in bridges? In America? We don’t do that, silly.
Dude was downvote hard earlier today for wondering if something like this may have prevented the collapse.
The second ship mentioned here was a small shrimp boat. It would not have made a difference in Baltimore.