Disaster "Mass casualty incident" declared after Key Bridge in Baltimore collapses

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Featured on Mar 26, 2024 by Null: The Francis Scott Key bridge, an important part of the Baltimore-D.C. I-695 Beltway, has collapsed after being impacted by a Singaporean cargo ship manned by a crew of 22 Indians.
No article yet as this just happened, but could be big. One of the largest bridges in the world according to Wikipedia.


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sonatine said:
If it were terrorists, why would they come after THIS bridge in particular? It makes no sense. There is another Francis Scott Key in DC, maybe the retards were meaning to go after that one?
This is horrifying to think I drove over this last night at the same hour...
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I mean count yourself as a lucky lucky man. As for terrorists I'm thinking this is just an unfortunate accident.
Based Trees said:
Took 5 years to build this bridge in the 70s. How long will it take to rebuild it?
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It also cost $60.3 million dollars to build it ($308,789,732.67 when adjusted for inflation)
How much will it cost to rebuild it?

Source for everything: Some guys highway history website
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Also remember this bridge probably was near the end of its life span and knowing labor and costs it's going to be about 1.2 billion dollars to be done the right way.
dustbuster said:
Getting across the bay bridge in 15 minutes is a child's fantasy unless you're high at 3 am.

You can route around via the San Mateo bridge for the east bay and Golden Gate for the north bay.
The difference is roughly 1 hour to detour because everything is a parking lot anyway.


This happened as the UK was waking up, and everyone is still a fucking sleep on the east coast except the garbage men.



The source of cost for these major city bridges is communism and corruption.
The latest bridge project of this type was a rebuild of the bay bridge at 6.5 BILLION. ($6,500,000,000)
They had to bring in a Chinese firm because the USA didn't produce enough steel.
After it was done, there was a multi-billion-dollar retrofit because every bolt was substandard.

The bridges were much cheaper in the mid-century even adjusted for inflation because we had fucking domestic industry and no EPA.
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Lee iacocca had warned boomers in Congress and media and industry consistently about Deindustrializing the rust belt as a big red flag and risk to American industry. Even moving steel mills to Texas and the deep south a more solid idea has been ignored to push globalism and muh free market will bring a utopia. Because of this we're at a fucked crossroads where we can't build our own bridges domestically inhouse anymore.
 
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Procopius said:
Does it legally matter if there's a pilot on board. When that ship blocked the Suez canal a couple of years ago, the captain copped all the blame even though he had a very expensive pilot on board. Egyptian law said that the captain was responsible and that the pilot is there merely to advise.
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Watch the guy dip like that Italian cruise ship captain.
 
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I wonder how long salvage will take. I remember when a very similar continuous truss bridge in a town up the river from Memphis back in the mid-2000's, and the whole thing just collapsed into the Mississippi unexpectedly (very similarly to how this collapsed) when they blew the charges.

Apparently the salvage company had originally planned to drop just one span at a time, and believe it would take less than 48 hours to clean up each dropped section to avoid blocking shipping traffic in the river. I can't remember how long it took to remove the whole thing, since it all fell at once.

But there definitely was traffic on the river pretty quickly afterward, maybe just a week or two later. This looks about as shallow as the Mississippi was at that time. It might not take months to clear a basic passage for shipping, though full removal of the wreckage will obviously take a long time.
 
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Any focus on the crew doesn’t matter insofar as the actual navigation, although the crew and more accurately the ship’s master and the company that owns it holds blame for any maintenance issues that would lead to power failures, is off the mark. A pilot would’ve had either direct control or legally had control of navigation on that route.

I can believe it was catastrophic power failure. There’s no way to gauge speed like that and if they lost power coming to a course that would let them go through the middle of the bridge then it is literally worst case scenario. On a ship losing power at such a critical moment is literally everything that can go wrong going wrong.
 
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Procopius said:
Does it legally matter if there's a pilot on board. When that ship blocked the Suez canal a couple of years ago, the captain copped all the blame even though he had a very expensive pilot on board. Egyptian law said that the captain was responsible and that the pilot is there merely to advise.
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The pilot has a responsibility for safe navigation but at the end of the day the captain/ship’s master has all control over his ship and thus holds all of the actual responsibility for anything that happens. The buck, as it were, stops with him. This differs in jurisdiction though. The way it was always explained to me, in the Navy, was that pilots have the legal right to advise and take control for direction of safe transit but at the end of the day if anything happens it’s the shipmaster’s fault.
 
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CHARizard said:
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Kind of blows my mind that this boat is just floating there with a huge chunk of bridge just drapped across the bow.

Multiple yt news videos are stating that they're looking for "up to twenty" people in the water. That is an amazingly low number, all things considered.
 
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Dracula's Spirit Animal said:
Life in prison guaranteed if the captain is responsible.
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No. He will get less time than Derek Chauvin did, if anything.

Having spent years working on those ships, the video footage immediately suggested that the ship had lost power - from that huge smoke cloud, I speculate that it was a fuelling issue and they were trying to run on bunker fuel as a backup.
 
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Otterly said:
It just seems very odd to me that they seem to swerve into it. If power goes off, and it seems to be going on and off at least once why would you expect to swerve? These ships have huge inertia, it should have kept its course but instead it swerves.
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I don’t believe it’s that simple. These ships are huge and like you said, it has a lot of inertia. It’s possible - probable even - that they were doing a course correction to align better with the bridge and they lost power as they were on this correction. While there are ways to control the hydraulics through manual control of the rudders, I’ve personally had to do this a few times, I don’t know the standards of whatever the merchant fleet considers a “sea and anchor” and if they need that station manned. Realistically though if they lost power just before they crashed there’s nothing they could do. All of it looks like it went down within a few seconds.

Second Sun said:
Just losing power shouldn't kill all the hydraulics - there would also have to be loss of the backup controls to the rudder too. If so, the crew and company are fucked.
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While it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to transfer power from the SCC to wherever they have manual control is, it’s still precious seconds. It’s hard to say when, from what little evidence we have, they lost power.

Also even shifting to manual control won’t do much. On my ship when I was in the Navy, we had two back ups but one, which was used if we really lost all power, was only good enough to bring the rudder amidships and that took twenty turns to change one degree of rudder. Even then, it’s not going to stop the inertia from the engines.
 
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Governor Moore Statement on the Collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge​

Published: 3/26/2024


ANNAPOLIS, MD—Governor Wes Moore released the following statement on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge:

My office is in close communication with U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, and the Baltimore Fire Department as emergency personnel are on the scene following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
I have declared a State of Emergency here in Maryland and we are working with an interagency team to quickly deploy federal resources from the Biden Administration.

We are thankful for the brave men and women who are carrying out efforts to rescue those involved and pray for everyone’s safety.
We will remain in close contact with federal, state, and local entities that are carrying out rescue efforts as we continue to assess and respond to this tragedy.
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