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

No article yet as this just happened, but could be big. One of the largest bridges in the world according to Wikipedia.

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/breaking-news-key-bridge-collapsed

 

[Vic Viper T301]

Crazy. I remember when the 35W bridge in Minneapolis crashed, powerlevel but the day that happened I was almost on the bridge at the time of the collapse, I was about two blocks away when traffic just STOPPED dead cause they obviously had no where to go, and everyone had to 180 and drive on the wrong side of the road to the nearest exit to get off the highway and take alternate routes, it was a huge mess and took months and months to rebuild. At least that was good old fashioned incompetency and lack of maintenance, not some sheboon (do we know if it was a sheeboon yet I haven't read the whole thread) crashing into the damn thing.

 

[The Gene Genie]

Do big ships have data recording? I guess the marine equivalent of a black box.
Be interesting to see what went wrong, it’s a lot of Swiss cheese holes lining up at once.

Yes, there's multiple systems that would track its position in comparison to the planned course. These won't just be on the ship but presumably also held in the civilian equivalent of whatever port operations station that's responsible for vessel traffic service. This is a busy TSS so I imagine there's always a lot of eyes - both physical and electronic - on this sort of thing. It'll be trivial to retrieve this information. As for whatever happened in the engine room or the power plant, I don't really know how merchant ships work but on my navy ship every piece of data was fed into the central computer in the engineering control room that is protected from any kind of tampering in addition for logs kept by the actual watchstanders.

I wasn't an engineer, though, so I'm not familiar with how they did their logs and data-archiving intimately.

 

[Rudolf's Friend]

So are they going to make the alternate routes free or are they still gonna force people to pay for the tolls cause I know that when incidents like this occur they stop toll collection until everything's fixed.

 

[TJT]

So are they going to make the alternate routes free or are they still gonna force people to pay for the tolls cause I know that when incidents like this occur they stop toll collection until everything's fixed.

New bridge is going to cost 100X what the original cost and take years to build. Shit won't pay for itself amigo!

 

[Otterly]

but on my navy ship every piece of data was fed into the central computer in the engineering control room that is protected from any kind of tampering in addition for logs kept by the actual watchstanders.

Does that include any kind of video / audio recording of the bridge, and engine room or is it just telemetry type stuff? I guess I’m just wondering what kind of timeline they will be able to put together when they investigate.

 

[Shark Senpai]

Reminds me of the sunshine skyway bridge collapse. Seems weird they wouldn't include protective pilings in front of the bridge like the rebuild of the sunshine skyway bridge did.

 

[a terminal posture]

It’s a fucking cantilevered bridge - they cannot stand without the pillar! And once that goes the other side goes the opposite way.

The only thing to prevent that is to not build a cantilevered bridge but then you can’t have as wide a span.

Its not a cantilevered bridge. Its was a three-span continuous through arch truss, plus approach spans. When the pier was taken out the two adjacent spans fell. The third span seesawed up off the end pier before the second span broke off, and when it crashed back down it took out the end pier, which also took down the adjacent approach span (bridges are not designed to be picked up and dropped).

Ever since the Sunshine Skyway Collapse (1980) there has been a big push to design new bridges to withstand vessel impact and to retrofit old bridges with pier protection. This was an interstate route so something had to have been done, but whatever it was was insufficient.

 

[Sad Chad]

Mildly educated opinion on this.

I've watched the video like 20 times. Ship loses the plant. Looks like the vessel is lined up to pass under the center span of the bridge before loss of power. Thirty seconds after power loss either plant is restored or the EDG finally trips. Vessel goes full astern (black exhaust out the stack means she's really pushing it) and the ship begins turning to the right.

Why? Because a standard propeller backs to the left, turning the bow to starboard.

If I were making a guess, I'd say the accident was caused not just by a loss of power but also likely a poor response from the conning officer. While I like "oh shit dump it" commands as much as the next guy, I think this was probably the cause of the vessel veering and ultimately the allision.

 

[Bec Noir]

On the anniversary of the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal thanks to a woman driver.

That was fake news. The driver was male.

Thirty seconds after power loss either plant is restored or the EDG finally trips.

What's EDG?

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

New bridge is going to cost 100X what the original cost and take years to build. Shit won't pay for itself amigo!

Usually when this stuff happens Congress steps in and authorizes “holy fuck we look bad” funding, so they actually get things rebuilt kinda quickly.

Want to rebuild a dying bridge? Spend thirty years in legislation hell.

Bridge falls down? Suddenly everyone is all for rebuilding.

 

[No Batty Boys in Jamaica]

I would like to apologize for my prior disparaging comments about Indian engineering.

The bridge would’ve been fine if they had just built it out of Nagarjuna cement.

 

[The Gene Genie]

Does that include any kind of video / audio recording of the bridge, and engine room or is it just telemetry type stuff? I guess I’m just wondering what kind of timeline they will be able to put together when they investigate.

Like I said I'm unfamiliar with merchant ship regulations or if they have audio-visual recording devices, but from my experience I imagine not. The Navy didn't. There will be telemetry data and all the deck logs of orders passed, engine conditions, etc during the transit both in the engine room and the pilot house. It won't get actually what was spoken but it'll cover every order passed and what they'll do is compare that data that's on the logs with what shows up on the recorded telemetry.

 

[Shark Senpai]

Does that include any kind of video / audio recording of the bridge, and engine room or is it just telemetry type stuff? I guess I’m just wondering what kind of timeline they will be able to put together when they investigate.

IIRC large commercial ships tend to have something that records the bridge audio along with the steering inputs and the like which is designed to break free from the ship if it sinks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_data_recorder

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

Ah, fuck.

I've been on a highway overpass when it was hit by an oversize load from a semi truck.

It was brutal. We didn't fall off into the void only because the driver (of the vehicle I was in) had the presence of mind to hit the gas, hard, at the moment the impact was felt. If the driver had braked we'd have fallen to the oncoming traffic below.

Even as it was we had broken ribs and back injuries that still hurt years later.

Imagining that on a scale a thousand times larger is just awful. I didn't think I could get actual flashbacks from that time but hey here they are!

 

[mlanguishi]

Andrew Tate has this figured out already.

https://twitter.com/Cobratate/status/1772584641024741519

 

[Sad Chad]

That was fake news. The driver was male.

What's EDG?

Emergency Diesel Generator

 

[Doctor Love]

I'm a engineering student, this shit screams either poor upkeep or poor design who doesn't account for redundancies, which is a e key aspect of civil engineering.

I don't see how tard-wrangling third-world workcrews is related to a big fuck-off boat crashing into it.

 

[Bec Noir]

We didn't fall off into the void only because the driver had the presence of mind to hit the gas, hard, at the moment the impact was felt. If the driver had braked we'd have fallen to the oncoming traffic below.

A part of the overpass collapsed?

 

[Otterly]

Like I said I'm unfamiliar with merchant ship regulations or if they have audio-visual recording devices, but from my experience I imagine not. The Navy didn't. There will be telemetry data and all the deck logs of orders passed, engine conditions, etc during the transit both in the engine room and the pilot house. It won't get actually what was spoken but it'll cover every order passed and what they'll do is compare that data that's on the logs with what shows up on the recorded telemetry.

Thanks. Sorry shipping is not a world I’m familiar with whether merchant or naval.
Another question? Are the control systems hard wired or capable of being damaged remotely? Like the airliners that can fly by wire?

 

[FILTH Tourist]

Get ultra raped, capitalist pedophile. Capitalist solzhenitsyns can't help but lie, it's in the name.

My dad was serving in the army at the time of the USSR's biggest similar disaster and had to collect the corpses. The catastrophe wasn't caused by regulation, it was caused by the first mate being a faggot and reading books on the job.

The bridge shaved the top deck off the ship and smeared the people on it (there was a party) into paste.

There was a train on the bridge at the time. The bridge held. The train didn't fall off (although it got derailed).

This is because Soviet bridges were built according to Soviet regulations, to withstand a nuclear war, and capitalist bridges are built to capitalist regulations to save money for yachts and child prostitutes.

Capitalist deregulation started with Gorby (and immediately caused another maritime disaster).

If it pasted the guys on deck, then it didn't hit the support pillar (like here) and the bridge was just tall enough not to get hit directly by the ship and let it slide under. It really seems like they got lucky, rather than a highlight of soviet construction. Also, another thing to keep in mind is the sheer size of cargo ships dwarf the ones used in the Cold War era. If a modern ship hit that bridge, it will not fare much better regardless of SUPERIOR SOVIET ENGINEERING.