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

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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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It could be that, or it could be that everything they did only reduced the collision energy slightly. Even if it did (like the titanic) cause it to happen or be worse, I'm not going to assign blame immediately for trying.
Youre right- I assume the lateral impact would have made things worse but I wonder if it did slow things down enough to save some lives. Either way I dont blame anyone right now- it's just tragic. I will be curious to see if any reports come out of poor maintenance or some Boeing-esque type of quality control though.
 
This isn't about durability. It's about structural integrity, of which truss bridges have very little. The ship collided with the truss support, and the entire truss collapsed.
i'm not an engineer, but i personally think that if the entire bridge relies solely on one point then maybe we should consider trying to find a better design
 
Why not drop the anchor?
They did drop one of them. The inertia is just too large because the ship was loaded with containers

It's like a train , there's no way it could have stopped in time.

Best bet would have been to try to steer it down the channel under the bridge, but the pilot only had seconds to respond in pitch-black power-out darkness in the middle of the night while panicking.

It sounds like when the power flickered back on, the pilot dropped anchor and reversed the prop to try to slow down, but this action might have caused a loss of the ship's directional control, and it slammed into the pylon.
 
i'm not an engineer, but i personally think that if the entire bridge relies solely on one point then maybe we should consider trying to find a better design
It's a legacy, ribbon-cutting design from the early 70's that was already obsolete by the time they finally got around to building it, and it's a megastructure span, it's been subjected to weight loads far beyond what it was intended for at least 20 years, there's a lot of things wrong when it comes to the overall structural integrity of these things. Part of the reason these massive truss bridges have such a good reputation is because this kind of thing doesn't happen too often.
 
Is there gonna be added unreasonable shipping port security now?
Probably more pylons and barriers by Bridges and probably more searches done to ships and vessel examinations. The issue is that the United States Coast guard is very understaffed and the only people who are eligible to do this are the United States Coast guard and the United States Coast guard auxiliary and the auxiliary is not well advertised and is a volunteer group.
 
Even every single picture tells the story; those pylons look absolutely tiny and fragile compared to the immense bulk of that ship.

You can't really stop a direct ram, but you can build deflectors that "shove" the ship aside in many cases. If we get legislation paying for those, that won't be too bad.
 
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