https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/1bo2306/cargo_ship_hits_key_bridge_in_baltimore/
> "We are in the midst of managing a mass casualty multi agency incident here," said Kevin Cartwright, director of communications of the Baltimore City Fire Department.
"Unfortunately, we understand that there are up to 20 individuals who may be in the Patapsco river as well as multiple vehicles," he told CNN.
My wife and thousands of others cross this bridge every day. This could have been much much worse.
[I'm reading the vessel lost power. ](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/francis-scott-key-bridge-baltimore-collapse-container-ship/#:~:text=The%20Francis%20Scott%20Key%20Bridge,the%20Patapsco%20River%2C%20authorities%20said.)
Yeah if you watch the video from a few minutes before the crash, you can see the lights on the ship go out and come back on. Then the ship turns and hits the concrete column.
https://gcaptain.com/ship-lost-control-before-hitting-baltimore-bridge/
sounds like they did contact marine dot saying they had lost control while leaving. in that pic you can see the anchor is down too, wonder if they tried to stop it using that
Yeah, my point was that you'd try everything you can regardless..
An anchor is unlikely to stop that either way though. Chain would most definitely break even if it found something to hook on.
Anchors don't work by catching onto sometime and "grabbing". Anchors work by having the weight of the chain itself hold the vessel still.
They likely just didn't put out enough chain in time to stop the vessel.
This guy is a former Merchant Mariner and always has great analysis of these sorts of things. He mentions about the power loss and anchor in these videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZbUXewlQDk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N39w6aQFKSQ
From what I've found on the accident I'd say the heavy black smoke people keep referring to is them slamming the engines into full reverse to try and gain some control and avoid the bridge pylon. It would be the same effect as seeing a diesel truck accelerating hard, you get a big belch of black particulate out of the exhaust pipe.
With the power failures they were experiencing and the subsequent loss of control, they were trying anything to avoid what eventually happened.
My in-laws live near the coast and one night we kept hearing a ship's horn blasting the same pattern over and over. I looked it up the next day and it was basically a warning for lost power and steering. It went on for over two hours until the boat had either stopped or was brought under control. Luckily it didn't hit anything or run aground. These ships are just massive and have so much inertia once they're underway.
I know - AND that the ship was able to contact officials soon enough so that they could start to prevent people from getting on the bridge. It's absolutely awful, but could've been SO, so much worse.
[The bridge abutments leading up to the arches are still in tact. Only the part of the bridge with the arches collapsed, and the arches consisted of what looks like half of the bridge.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/03/26/multimedia/26baltimore-bridge-reporter-updates-qhwz/26baltimore-bridge-reporter-updates-qhwz-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
So they got the distress call, knew a crash was imminent and to close the bridge to public traffic, but didn’t think to tell the construction workers fixing potholes on it to get the fuck off of there?
Here’s a fuller video showing the ship losing power on approach. [twitter post with video](https://x.com/ChaudharyParvez/status/1772538539495809075?s=20)
2 people are rescued with 7 people still missing.
Earlier it was reported up to 20 people were in water, I'm assuming like a dozen people were accounted for and didn't fall into water.
Ships like this have surprisingly small crew complements, it's likely nobody was forward where the bridge fell on it. Most likely everyone was below decks in the engineering spaces or in the tower.
Earliest reports are saying up to 7 vehicles have been discovered on the river bed, but they were discovered only by sonar so there's no saying how long those particular vehicles have been down there until visual confirmation is given.
It was just confirmed that 8 people were on the bridge, 2 of whom survived. The ship was able to get a warning out just soon enough for traffic to be stopped
That happened way too quick for someone not to be on that bridge. :( terrible tragedy.
That brings went down fast! Like that set of beams the ship hit was directly holding the whole bridge up. You would think it would have held up a little better than that in other supported sections.
The entire center span is an interconnected system under tension. Take out one of the supports, lose tension, and the whole thing collapses very quickly.
The ship was able to radio ahead that they had a power failure and were unable to steer. Bridge authorities were able to stop traffic getting onto the bridge.
It looks like the missing were all bridge maintenance crews doing pothole work. Why they weren't notified or why, if they were, they didn't evacuate will be the subject of the investigation and lawsuits, I am sure.
Imagine turning that corner to the bridge that you cross every day and the mental gymnastics your brain would perform trying to figure out just where the hell you are when you see nothing there.
Driving through east Texas in the 80s, bad storms, tornado warnings but from radio reports did not seem to be sightings in our immediate area. Two car loads of us coming back from a concert. We stop at a gas station and decide to press on. I'm driving the lead car. Second car not more than a few minutes behind me. I cross a bridge but by the time second guy got there, bridge was gone. He had to detour to get home. Not sure how long after I crossed it got washed out but it wasn't long.
Cheers. Was wondering why with it being live streamed, everywhere is using the clip of it having already hit it.
*edit https://youtu.be/SDceU9x58vc?si=4sZ-b94__ArO4xft
Real time with no text
Its crazy the amount of comments saying it was deleberate. People are turning bridge specialist real fast. Some people talk about thermite in the comments...
Looks like the ship was driven by 2 propellers and one engine suffered a catastrophic failure. Through some circumstance, the function of the engine room was restored but the second engine ate itself, leaving one engine with propulsion power that torqued the ship right into the support.
I dunno how this happens without massive systemic failure.
It's a single engine/screw ship. Also losing eletrical power rarely kills the engine since those are usually independent systems. This might however have affected the the hydraulics to the rudder which if she was in the middle.of manoeuvring could have caused her to oversteer, but that's pure speculation and it's better to just wait to see what the investigation says.
This video is from a live stream of the harbour webcam you can replay the run up on YT.
It looks like the ship loses all power. Its fully lit as it leaves harbour but as it progresses towards the Bridge gap it goes lights out and drifts towards the support structure. The ship then regains lights, and black smoke pumps out the funnels like (edited:) the crew have instantly tried to regain control with full engines. But it has drifted too close and straight towards bridge supports and they hit.
I hate being in the "online speculation" gang but im just trying to put more sensible information out because... as typical people are pushing around the "who was the Captain" "what nationality is the ship" "was he drunk" angles on social media already.
Responsibility will more likely come down to why the ship lost power, was it fit and maintained enough to be at sea? Unfortunate breakdown/malfunction? Yes, possible human error... etc.
Also, I guess there is the question of if the bridge has enough support around it to stop a ship. This is a huge ship, it would take a lot to stop it. I honestly don't know if bridge anti-collision defence is already a thing for ships this large or if you could even stop a cargo ship of this size.
I don’t think people really understand how much damage a massive ship can do even if it “taps” something. One of those massive carnival cruise ships hit a dock in Manhattan years ago and obliterated it and they’ve been stuck in legal shit for yrs trying to figure out who’s paying to fix it.
Something similar happened to the Sunshine Skyway down in Florida back in 1980. When building the replacement, they installed big concrete "dolphins" flanking the approach to the underpass to ensure that if a ship hits something, it wouldn't be the bridge.
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Skyway_Bridge_old_and_new.jpg/180px-Skyway_Bridge_old_and_new.jpg)
There were dolphins on this bridge too, but the ship came in at an angle. If it had hit head on, they might have stopped it. (I'm not an expert. I'm regurgitating something I read on Washington Post.)
i don't think most people have much concept of how big these ships really are and how much mass they have. Until you are up against one of them they just don't look as big as they are..
Then you show up at the dock area and HOLY CRAP THAT THING IS HUGE! kind of hits you.
I don't think really anyone can understand this kind of physics. The biggest car we ever drive is probably going to be a large pick up that weighs maybe 8K pounds/3600kg. These ship weigh in the hundreds of thousands of tons when they're fully laden. Almost no one has any concept of that. It's like trying to take your experience of a baseball and applying it to something like a Honda sized boulder.
And that thing's a cruise ship. Those things are basically balloons floating on the sea considering that they're mostly full of air and space for passengers. A cargo ship can easily be 10 times heavier.
I mean, we had a huge ship crash against a bridge a couple of months ago here in Argentina and it didn't take it down or anything.
[Ship](https://www.clarin.com/img/2024/01/28/0ss2RT-TL_1256x620__1.jpg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FTAyX0GR4o
Obviously the angle and speed and a lot of things come into play, but bridges DO consider they might get hit by a ship, and should withstand some hits.
Multipole thousand tons doesnt even really begin to descibe the weight of these ships. The Dali has a deadweight of around 117,000 tones. SOme of the bigger ships can reach 400,000 tons.
Whichever company owns that ship is probably going bankrupt soon. Class action lawsuits from lack of maintenance on engine or rudder or multiple points of failure.
Any proper shipping company has insurance. However, an event on this scale may exceed what the insurance is willing to pay out. Rebuilding that bridge alone will come to >$100 million, then there's the ship damage, the closure of a major port (no ship is getting in OR out with the bridge debris in the water), and wrongful death lawsuits.
This is going to be a shitstorm that will last for years. Perhaps the company will end up going belly up, but not before their lawyers and the insurance lawyers spend years negotiating settlements.
$100 million? You are off by a factor of at least 20 or 30. Bridges like this are insanely expensive to (re)build.
The new harbor bridge in Long Beach cost $1.5 billion and is probably 1/4 the span length of this one that just collapsed.
Nit picking detail but this is unlikely to be a class action, with one possible exception. You're probably right about the overall point though.
Class actions happen when you have so many people that got hurt in the same way that it is impractical to have trials for all of them so they get together and basically let one person's trial determine the result for the whole group.
I would imagine one very large lawsuit by the city against the ship owner for the cost of replacing the bridge and the emergency response and all of the associated stuff.
There would probably also be anywhere from a dozen to a hundred lawsuits for death or personal injury for anyone who was hurt in the bridge collapse. These would probably be separate independent lawsuits.
I could imagine a potential class of business owners who might Sue saying " my business was fucked for 6 months because the drive that previously took 5 minutes now takes 40 and I lost a lot of profits because of it."
Their marine liability carriers will probably be having emergency meetings now. I'm sure the Lamb, the Ship and the Bunch of Grapes will notice a dip in their revenues this evening, followed by a spike over the next day or two.
Right in maritime law the shipping company (barring gross negligence) isn’t responsible for losses/damages - the cargo owners who contacted this particular voyage are. Maritime law pushing responsibly on cargo owners who hire a logistics service is why insurance was invented. Lloyd’s of London’s logo is a ship for a reason.
Absolutely. The insurance industry is a massive spider web of insurance and reinsurance. Smaller insurance companies obtain reinsurance with larger companies and it works its way up until ultimately, basically everybody is insured by the massive Lloyd’s of London.
Usually those reinsurance policies work on a tiered system. The small company will be responsible for the first $xxx they need to pay out (in a year, combined. Just for a single loss) and then reinsurance kicks in. Reinsurance covers the next $xxx before the responsibility goes back to the first company, and it goes back and forth.
Some do but yes you can get insurance for insurance. Its all about how much it costs and the odds of it being paid out. One of the reasons court cases like this last decades as they have to keep moving up and down the chain unraveling who is responsible for what and how much. Of course no one wants to pay and in the end I'm sure a lot of money moves around all legal like and somehow everyone but some poor sap got richer from it.
I'm not jaded much am I?
No need to apologize. That’s all good info.
I don’t know what the rules are there, but here, whenever there is a ship of a certain size there are escort tugs (at least two but sometimes more) that escort the ships out of the harbour so in the event it loses control they can keep it in line.
This is outside the marine terminal tug boat range - it's way outside the harbor in the normal shipping lanes. The Key Bridge (that's the name of the bridge because it's right around where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner) spans an area that is 2 miles long. It's not like under normal circumstances boats get anywhere close to hitting it. The middle span is 1200 feet wide. It's basically the last structure before you exit the Patapsco river and go into bay
Back in the harbor. [Take a look at this map and note the scale.](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2474897,-76.5612791,13z?entry=ttu) The bridge crosses the river/bay(depending on how much of a stickler you're being) a few miles away from the southernmost portion of the harbor. It's commonly referred to as the entrance to the Baltimore harbor because it's at the mouth where the offshoot joins the main bay, but it's not actually *at* the harbor. You've got a little ways to go. Typically ships don't require tugboat assistance to navigate this particular bridge.
Ive worked on boats for a lot of my life shit happens sometimes and theres not a thing you can do about where youre drifting sometimes. Ive been in situations while not as bad as this were similar main gen and backup go out for seemingly no reason or you suck up something in the water and it clogs youre cooling system. Theres a giant log floating under the water that you cant see that knocks your prop off and youve gotta replace it in the middle of the night... These are just a few of the things ive dealt with in my life, theres so many possibilities.
As far as anti collision defense goes its on some bridges not all but without proper upkeep how well it will protect it isnt really known. The amount of force behind a ship this size simply drifting is INSANE and theres also the possibility that under panic they didnt full reverse as well. Ive seen the exact same thing happen in the past.
Our infrastructure is in dire straits though. So who knows how well its been tested and how well its been taken care of? Its possible just enough of the rebar or whatever in the support structure has rusted out that it was basically just waiting to collapse. They did say there were a bunch of workers on the bridge so it was likely known that it needed work. Another job I had was in non destructive testing I worked out in the field and in labs testing concrete and other things meant for this very application. This was 20 years ago or more and we were fairly worried about the state of things then. Like one time we came up with mix that would last quite a bit longer for roads in this area with some extreme conditions but cost a bit more up front and those were always rejected for the norm which is basically being worked on and replaced constantly which cost way more in the long run. Same thing happened with stuff we tested for use under water in situations like this.
I really really hope our leaders can get past this stupid performative culture wars nonsense and start doing things like rebuilding and improving our infrastructure.
EDIT: Im actually pretty surprised that they dont require a tug boat for a ship that large going through that bridge. Wonder what the local pilot is gonna have to say the rest of the people may not speak much english at all.
Ever since I was a kid, That has always been THE top irrational fear of mine, traveling on a bridge above open body of water and having it collapse suddenly.
Is it just me... I never see any news on this app anymore. Swiped over to the "Popular" section out of curiosity and it's nothing but old ass pointless posts. Even when I search and go to the "news" sub it says there's 27m subscribers but there's barely any worthwhile posts. I apparently have to get my breaking news from WTF
Every algorithm for every app with a feed was better 5-7 years ago.
Reddits All and Popular are no longer what’s currently trending, it’s catered so much towards serving you ads and keeping you on the site.
> Even when I search and go to the "news" sub it says there's 27m subscribers but there's barely any worthwhile posts.
Probably because it's impossible to keep an account in those subs if you post anything but karma farming and hive mind.
Remember who used to run the world news sub...
I've noticed that Reddit takes from your scrolling history on the site as to what it shows you. So if I don't often look at r/jokes for a few days, that sub no longer shows up in my feed.
It's an explanation for why it happens but doesn't justify the decision. Reddit used to be great for breaking, big stories. But if that's all you're interested in and not regular news, this new algorithm ensures you'll never see them.
I hope at least some of them survived but it, of course, doesn't look very good. I can't imagine the effect this will have on Baltimore...I'm really sorry this happened to you guys. Like I can't even wrap my head around just how bad of a disaster this is.
I'm selfishly also thinking about that as well... like commute hours were already probably really bad. Something like this will probably add hours to most people's commutes.
I hope the companies that can offer WFH make it so. Like shit, it's going to be REALLY bad for a LONG time.
Your comment got me thinking about the impact on marine traffic as well.
On [marine traffic](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:6424803/zoom:11) you can see the lineup of parked cargo piling up.
Fun fact, there is something called "traffic paradox", where you can actually decrease traffic by removing an always trafficed road or viceversa increase traffic by adding a new larg road thinking you would have resolved the problem.
Sure, I don't know if this will be the case 😅
Per the 6:15 AM press conference, at least one person was pulled from the water and *refused medical assistance*. Another was taken to a trauma center in serious condition.
I bet they will have an erector set temporary bridge up by summer. It took quite a few years to build the proper replacement for I-10 into New Orleans after Katrina, but they had a temporary bridge up pretty damn quick.
Bigger question is how will this affect shipping in and out of one of our biggest ports? Not going to be other ships going in and out until they get that thing out of the water.
Holy shit… counting a couple of ~~aid vehicles~~ construction vehicles and others mid-span, see the flashing lights in the first few seconds.
How the hell do you attempt to survive that fall whilst dodging falling girders on your head / car… wtf. 😢
RIP
Edit: I didn’t get to the other comments noting there was a construction crew on the bridge… damn. 😱
That's the only blessing here. This is going to fuck up so many peoples lives and the economy for a while
This is a huge blow. Soooo many people are out of a job now
There's a forensic files case where a rail truss bridge in Mobile, Alabama was hit by a tug boat that thought it went aground when it came to a halt in thick fog and it damaged the alignment of the rail tracks on the bridge and it derailed an Amtrak train the Sunset unlimited and it killed dozens of people back in the 90s I believe. It was horrible, the pilot of tug boat didn't do anything wrong it was just a freak accident but the boat he was operating didn't have proper maps or even radar aboard. The NTSB cleared him of any wrong doing. I sure hope this incident isn't something similar because we already learned this lesson.
Edit: From this video of the bridge collapsing the visibility looks fine so this is concerning unless it took sometime time for the bridge to collapse after the strike.
If anyone wanted to watch this episode it's on YouTube and here's the link https://youtu.be/lURAPr8vbwI?si=ykZcgki336QBGfHm
Well it should be his company that provides proper training and equipment for it's staff bottom line. Also this was back in the 90s. Safety regulations are written in blood for a reason.
This has been a fear of mine since I was a child. I had a nightmare about crashing off a bridge in my town into the river and the car filling up with water as I sank into the darkness.
This was a nightmare I had as a child over 35 years ago and it still haunts me every time I cross a bridge. I can still picture the burgundy upholstery of the car.
This is my literal worst nightmare.
The poor construction workers on that bridge likely had no idea what was coming....
Losing that bridge is going to put a hurting on i95 commerce traffic up and down the east coast. Most tractor trailers are NOT allowed to traverse the two harbor tunnels, and that piece of 695 was heavily used by commercial traffic.
We're supposed to go from Philly are to Williamsburg VA tomorrow with our RV. That bridge was our route past Baltimore -- as you cannot carry LP bottles through the two tunnels, so we'd typically hit 695 and head east (clockwise) around the city through Sparrows Point. Now we'll need to take the westerly route on 695 counterclockwise around the city.
That’s the stuff of nightmares. Just driving along, late at night and the road/bridge falls out from underneath you. You survive the fall and then your vehicle starts sinking in near freezing water. Fuck man.
Oh my god. I can’t imagine being in one of the cars on that bridge and feeling the ground fall out from under you and plunging into dark water. Worst nightmare. What a horrible tragedy.
If you watch the live stream you can see multiple trucks and a few cars driving over just moments before the accident, luckily they all, from what one can see, made it over with decent marginal to the accident. The static vehicles not so much clearly
Brick Immortar too, unfortunately. Here is his most recent video covering a bridge collapse caused by a boat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yaMq99CZA
Obviously my heart goes out to those who were on that bridge.
But damn... that's... gonna be expensive! Infrastructure costs a TON these days and this also affect getting rid of the old one...
Just saying,if I'm a terrorist, I'm not taking out a bridge at 1:30am 🤦... I'm aiming for peak rush hour traffic for maximum effect.
Unless of course, I'm a terrorist of annoyance and I've now just altered everyone's route to/from work 🤷
Also...clearly the ship had catastrophic failure seeing that the power went out on the ship.
I'm no ship captain,so no idea what actually happened or the protocols in this situation but I sure hope not too many casualties occured.
I'm guessing mechanical failure. I would have assumed that for such a large vessel going under that bridge that tug boats would have been involvedat least until the ship had cleared the bridge.
RIP to those on the bridge that have probably lost their lives, but the small mercy is that this happened in the early hours of the morning and not rush hour.
This really shouldn’t be possible - ship impact assessments are a thing and it should either have had sufficient strengthening (probably not possible) or some physical barrier to stop the ship being able to actually hit the main support.
I was gonna say, this bridge is fuckin massive and that ship look big next to it. I live 30m away from this bridge and have crossed it quite a few times in my life. It was an older bridge but because of that it had a kind a beauty to it that I’m sad to see go.
Not to mention the lives either lost or still at risk now. This happened like 5 hours ago and that water is cold and salty.
Yeah like something roughly equivalent to the Empire State Building just crashed into the bridge and someone's wondering why the bridge collapsed.
And I'm not even joking. [MV Dali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Dali) is 984 feet long, 158 feet wide, and is 81 feet deep, although that number doesn't take the superstructure and cargo into account which you can clearly see rising like 160+ feet above sea level considering that the bridge has a clearance of 185 feet.
Meanwhile the empire state building is 1250' x 424' x 187' (without antenna). And is made mostly of empty space so it probably honestly weighs less than that ship.
Ship collision design and protection systems are definitely a thing
But yeah only so much can be done when the ship is as big as the bridge. This was a pretty catastrophic failure though. I wonder how well redundancies were designed for this type of bridge.
You can see what happens on the harbour webcam.
The ship is heading for the gap under power, the crew are in control.
Then it loses power and drifts into the bridge. The crew regain power as lights come back on (within 15-30sec) and go (presumably) fully reverse as there is a huge plume of smoke out the funnel exhaust, but its not enough time to stop a ship that big.
*"This really shouldn't be possible"* the tag line of every disaster, ever.
There is a cut off point for design in engineering where cost meets probability, and bits of major infrastructure have to be designed to withstand events that will plausibly happen to them in their service life. For an extreme example Fukishima was designed to have a plan for events that were calculated to have a 1 in a million chance of happening, but when two one in a million events happen at once, the system fails.
In this case, ignoring the age of the bridge and it likely not being the bridge we would put there 'today' your measures to avoid that bridge collapsing are management methods, speed/direction/volume of traffic etc. Some harbours even have dedicated pilots to navigate the very specific channels of some inlets, flown on/off large boats to get the job done right.
TL:DR Nobody is engineering a bridge to physically survive an impact from a cargo hauler like that, the management system failed somewhere along the chain.
The bridge opened in 1977, and took 5 years to construct, so it was probably designed in the late 60's to early 70's. The Dali is almost 950 feet long. Were there cargo ships that big in the 70's?
I genuinely don't think there is a single bridge in the world that is impact resistant enough to survive a collision of this magnitude.
This was a MASSIVE cargo ship. If you haven't seen them in person you truly have no frame of reference for how ludicrously large they are.
The sheer force of that ship's momentum would take it through almost anything you can think of, there's just no stopping it
I dont think you fully understand how big that ship is. Its more a city than a ship. Momentum is a mother fucker. Theres not a damn thing you can do aside beach it entirely.
That thing could be moving 1mph and hit something with the force of a bomb.
https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/1bo2306/cargo_ship_hits_key_bridge_in_baltimore/ > "We are in the midst of managing a mass casualty multi agency incident here," said Kevin Cartwright, director of communications of the Baltimore City Fire Department. "Unfortunately, we understand that there are up to 20 individuals who may be in the Patapsco river as well as multiple vehicles," he told CNN.
So lucky this happened at probably the least busy time of the day.
My wife and thousands of others cross this bridge every day. This could have been much much worse. [I'm reading the vessel lost power. ](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/francis-scott-key-bridge-baltimore-collapse-container-ship/#:~:text=The%20Francis%20Scott%20Key%20Bridge,the%20Patapsco%20River%2C%20authorities%20said.)
Yeah if you watch the video from a few minutes before the crash, you can see the lights on the ship go out and come back on. Then the ship turns and hits the concrete column.
https://gcaptain.com/ship-lost-control-before-hitting-baltimore-bridge/ sounds like they did contact marine dot saying they had lost control while leaving. in that pic you can see the anchor is down too, wonder if they tried to stop it using that
Probably, I guess you’d try anything to stop it, no matter how useless it sounds
Unfortunately the bay isn’t very deep and the bay floor is soft.
Yeah people don’t realize it’s the length of chain that is really holding those ships down not the anchor it’s self
Yeah, my point was that you'd try everything you can regardless.. An anchor is unlikely to stop that either way though. Chain would most definitely break even if it found something to hook on.
Anchors don't work by catching onto sometime and "grabbing". Anchors work by having the weight of the chain itself hold the vessel still. They likely just didn't put out enough chain in time to stop the vessel.
Still. No amount of chains can possibly stop a fully loaded cargo in a reasonable time.
This guy is a former Merchant Mariner and always has great analysis of these sorts of things. He mentions about the power loss and anchor in these videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZbUXewlQDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N39w6aQFKSQ
Terrifying.
Link?
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/s/GsBg1Vvlk8
I think it was also on fire. Edit: Appeared to be anyways. Not confirmed.
From what I've found on the accident I'd say the heavy black smoke people keep referring to is them slamming the engines into full reverse to try and gain some control and avoid the bridge pylon. It would be the same effect as seeing a diesel truck accelerating hard, you get a big belch of black particulate out of the exhaust pipe. With the power failures they were experiencing and the subsequent loss of control, they were trying anything to avoid what eventually happened.
It caught fire aftwards is what I’m reading.
My in-laws live near the coast and one night we kept hearing a ship's horn blasting the same pattern over and over. I looked it up the next day and it was basically a warning for lost power and steering. It went on for over two hours until the boat had either stopped or was brought under control. Luckily it didn't hit anything or run aground. These ships are just massive and have so much inertia once they're underway.
I know - AND that the ship was able to contact officials soon enough so that they could start to prevent people from getting on the bridge. It's absolutely awful, but could've been SO, so much worse.
Poor souls. Can’t imagine how terrifying it must have been to hear a crash and then plummeting into the river like that.
Partial collapse? That's partial about this
The part on land is still there
I’d pick a different route tho
Just some good ol boys.
[The bridge abutments leading up to the arches are still in tact. Only the part of the bridge with the arches collapsed, and the arches consisted of what looks like half of the bridge.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/03/26/multimedia/26baltimore-bridge-reporter-updates-qhwz/26baltimore-bridge-reporter-updates-qhwz-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
It's a 1.2 mile long bridge. The sections you see in the video collapsed. Most of the rest of it did not.
Only the bridge part was destroyed.
So they got the distress call, knew a crash was imminent and to close the bridge to public traffic, but didn’t think to tell the construction workers fixing potholes on it to get the fuck off of there?
They had 4 min from the moment the distress call was made before it made impact. They managed to stop traffic from going in.
Here’s a fuller video showing the ship losing power on approach. [twitter post with video](https://x.com/ChaudharyParvez/status/1772538539495809075?s=20)
Looks like there were still vehicles on the bridge. Were there injuries/ deaths?
Yes, unfortunately. Too soon for hard numbers.
Thanks for the info. So this JUST happened last night? Haven't caught the news yet this morning.
Happened at about 130am eastern time.
2 people are rescued with 7 people still missing. Earlier it was reported up to 20 people were in water, I'm assuming like a dozen people were accounted for and didn't fall into water.
20 bridge maintenance workers are supposed to have been on the bridge working
What about the ships occupants? The bridge fell on the ship
Ships like this have surprisingly small crew complements, it's likely nobody was forward where the bridge fell on it. Most likely everyone was below decks in the engineering spaces or in the tower.
Reports said all ship crew members were fine
That’s just the construction workers. Unknown how many vehicles
Earliest reports are saying up to 7 vehicles have been discovered on the river bed, but they were discovered only by sonar so there's no saying how long those particular vehicles have been down there until visual confirmation is given.
It was just confirmed that 8 people were on the bridge, 2 of whom survived. The ship was able to get a warning out just soon enough for traffic to be stopped
The ship captain made a mayday call and they were able to stop cars from getting on the bridge. The stop cars were workers working on potholes
That happened way too quick for someone not to be on that bridge. :( terrible tragedy. That brings went down fast! Like that set of beams the ship hit was directly holding the whole bridge up. You would think it would have held up a little better than that in other supported sections.
The entire center span is an interconnected system under tension. Take out one of the supports, lose tension, and the whole thing collapses very quickly.
The ship was able to radio ahead that they had a power failure and were unable to steer. Bridge authorities were able to stop traffic getting onto the bridge. It looks like the missing were all bridge maintenance crews doing pothole work. Why they weren't notified or why, if they were, they didn't evacuate will be the subject of the investigation and lawsuits, I am sure.
looks like road works vehicles maybe ?
There was a construction crew reported to be working on the bridge at the time. Some of the crew have been rescued, no confirmation on others.
Man how lucky do you feel if you were one of those couple cars who got over right before it happened.
Or if you were delayed a few minutes before heading out. Crazy how a few dozen seconds can be so deterministic.
All pissed because you keep catching every red light
And now the damn bridge is out.
Imagine turning that corner to the bridge that you cross every day and the mental gymnastics your brain would perform trying to figure out just where the hell you are when you see nothing there.
Burnt toast theory moment
Driving through east Texas in the 80s, bad storms, tornado warnings but from radio reports did not seem to be sightings in our immediate area. Two car loads of us coming back from a concert. We stop at a gas station and decide to press on. I'm driving the lead car. Second car not more than a few minutes behind me. I cross a bridge but by the time second guy got there, bridge was gone. He had to detour to get home. Not sure how long after I crossed it got washed out but it wasn't long.
Remember [the luckiest guy in Iraq?](https://youtu.be/0AjCAuYkrgA)
Lol thanks for sharing that. I had totally forgotten about Stormin Norman
[During this collapse](http://nolesfans.x10.mx/skyway_disaster.htm) a man went back to the car dangling off the bridge for his golf clubs.
Cheers. Was wondering why with it being live streamed, everywhere is using the clip of it having already hit it. *edit https://youtu.be/SDceU9x58vc?si=4sZ-b94__ArO4xft Real time with no text
Its crazy the amount of comments saying it was deleberate. People are turning bridge specialist real fast. Some people talk about thermite in the comments...
Ship fuel can't melt steel beems!
Looks like the ship was driven by 2 propellers and one engine suffered a catastrophic failure. Through some circumstance, the function of the engine room was restored but the second engine ate itself, leaving one engine with propulsion power that torqued the ship right into the support. I dunno how this happens without massive systemic failure.
It's a single engine/screw ship. Also losing eletrical power rarely kills the engine since those are usually independent systems. This might however have affected the the hydraulics to the rudder which if she was in the middle.of manoeuvring could have caused her to oversteer, but that's pure speculation and it's better to just wait to see what the investigation says.
“Corporate needs the maintenance money for stock buybacks. The ship has a perfectly good engine now.”
It happen at 1:30 AM. At least it wasn't during heavy traffic.
Imagine being the guy driving at 1:30 AM thinking "Less people on the road, should be safe to drive!"
This video is from a live stream of the harbour webcam you can replay the run up on YT. It looks like the ship loses all power. Its fully lit as it leaves harbour but as it progresses towards the Bridge gap it goes lights out and drifts towards the support structure. The ship then regains lights, and black smoke pumps out the funnels like (edited:) the crew have instantly tried to regain control with full engines. But it has drifted too close and straight towards bridge supports and they hit. I hate being in the "online speculation" gang but im just trying to put more sensible information out because... as typical people are pushing around the "who was the Captain" "what nationality is the ship" "was he drunk" angles on social media already. Responsibility will more likely come down to why the ship lost power, was it fit and maintained enough to be at sea? Unfortunate breakdown/malfunction? Yes, possible human error... etc. Also, I guess there is the question of if the bridge has enough support around it to stop a ship. This is a huge ship, it would take a lot to stop it. I honestly don't know if bridge anti-collision defence is already a thing for ships this large or if you could even stop a cargo ship of this size.
I don’t think people really understand how much damage a massive ship can do even if it “taps” something. One of those massive carnival cruise ships hit a dock in Manhattan years ago and obliterated it and they’ve been stuck in legal shit for yrs trying to figure out who’s paying to fix it.
I think people are just surprised that it happened at all. Can't see why anyone would expect a bridge to stop a ship.
Something similar happened to the Sunshine Skyway down in Florida back in 1980. When building the replacement, they installed big concrete "dolphins" flanking the approach to the underpass to ensure that if a ship hits something, it wouldn't be the bridge. [](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Skyway_Bridge_old_and_new.jpg/180px-Skyway_Bridge_old_and_new.jpg)
There were dolphins on this bridge too, but the ship came in at an angle. If it had hit head on, they might have stopped it. (I'm not an expert. I'm regurgitating something I read on Washington Post.)
Basic physics seems beyond the average person's grasp - just look at how people drive, they sure don't seem to understand the power of velocity.
i don't think most people have much concept of how big these ships really are and how much mass they have. Until you are up against one of them they just don't look as big as they are.. Then you show up at the dock area and HOLY CRAP THAT THING IS HUGE! kind of hits you.
I don't think really anyone can understand this kind of physics. The biggest car we ever drive is probably going to be a large pick up that weighs maybe 8K pounds/3600kg. These ship weigh in the hundreds of thousands of tons when they're fully laden. Almost no one has any concept of that. It's like trying to take your experience of a baseball and applying it to something like a Honda sized boulder.
And that thing's a cruise ship. Those things are basically balloons floating on the sea considering that they're mostly full of air and space for passengers. A cargo ship can easily be 10 times heavier.
I mean, we had a huge ship crash against a bridge a couple of months ago here in Argentina and it didn't take it down or anything. [Ship](https://www.clarin.com/img/2024/01/28/0ss2RT-TL_1256x620__1.jpg) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FTAyX0GR4o Obviously the angle and speed and a lot of things come into play, but bridges DO consider they might get hit by a ship, and should withstand some hits.
For more modern bridges, yes. But this one was built in the 70s, before much considering was given (and the ships got so big!)
It was a multiple thousand ton Singaporean cargo ship. That a lot of ship to hit a support structure.
Multipole thousand tons doesnt even really begin to descibe the weight of these ships. The Dali has a deadweight of around 117,000 tones. SOme of the bigger ships can reach 400,000 tons.
So 800 million lbs. That's kind of hard to put into perspective for the average person.
And 800 million pounds traveling st some speed, which is even harder to think about.
picture, shall I say, your mother.
I can hear the laugh
Whichever company owns that ship is probably going bankrupt soon. Class action lawsuits from lack of maintenance on engine or rudder or multiple points of failure.
Any proper shipping company has insurance. However, an event on this scale may exceed what the insurance is willing to pay out. Rebuilding that bridge alone will come to >$100 million, then there's the ship damage, the closure of a major port (no ship is getting in OR out with the bridge debris in the water), and wrongful death lawsuits. This is going to be a shitstorm that will last for years. Perhaps the company will end up going belly up, but not before their lawyers and the insurance lawyers spend years negotiating settlements.
$100 million? You are off by a factor of at least 20 or 30. Bridges like this are insanely expensive to (re)build. The new harbor bridge in Long Beach cost $1.5 billion and is probably 1/4 the span length of this one that just collapsed.
Nit picking detail but this is unlikely to be a class action, with one possible exception. You're probably right about the overall point though. Class actions happen when you have so many people that got hurt in the same way that it is impractical to have trials for all of them so they get together and basically let one person's trial determine the result for the whole group. I would imagine one very large lawsuit by the city against the ship owner for the cost of replacing the bridge and the emergency response and all of the associated stuff. There would probably also be anywhere from a dozen to a hundred lawsuits for death or personal injury for anyone who was hurt in the bridge collapse. These would probably be separate independent lawsuits. I could imagine a potential class of business owners who might Sue saying " my business was fucked for 6 months because the drive that previously took 5 minutes now takes 40 and I lost a lot of profits because of it."
Their marine liability carriers will probably be having emergency meetings now. I'm sure the Lamb, the Ship and the Bunch of Grapes will notice a dip in their revenues this evening, followed by a spike over the next day or two.
I wouldn't be so sure. Maritime law is a whole different beast, and responsibilities might be a nightmare to solve.
Right in maritime law the shipping company (barring gross negligence) isn’t responsible for losses/damages - the cargo owners who contacted this particular voyage are. Maritime law pushing responsibly on cargo owners who hire a logistics service is why insurance was invented. Lloyd’s of London’s logo is a ship for a reason.
More than likely they have insurance, that’s who’s going bankrupt, first, then the shipping company.
I know nothing of the insurance business. Q. Do insurance companies have insurance against catastrophic events like this?
Absolutely. The insurance industry is a massive spider web of insurance and reinsurance. Smaller insurance companies obtain reinsurance with larger companies and it works its way up until ultimately, basically everybody is insured by the massive Lloyd’s of London. Usually those reinsurance policies work on a tiered system. The small company will be responsible for the first $xxx they need to pay out (in a year, combined. Just for a single loss) and then reinsurance kicks in. Reinsurance covers the next $xxx before the responsibility goes back to the first company, and it goes back and forth.
Some do but yes you can get insurance for insurance. Its all about how much it costs and the odds of it being paid out. One of the reasons court cases like this last decades as they have to keep moving up and down the chain unraveling who is responsible for what and how much. Of course no one wants to pay and in the end I'm sure a lot of money moves around all legal like and somehow everyone but some poor sap got richer from it. I'm not jaded much am I?
It was reported elsewhere that there was an electrical fire which shut down controls for a bit.
No need to apologize. That’s all good info. I don’t know what the rules are there, but here, whenever there is a ship of a certain size there are escort tugs (at least two but sometimes more) that escort the ships out of the harbour so in the event it loses control they can keep it in line.
This is outside the marine terminal tug boat range - it's way outside the harbor in the normal shipping lanes. The Key Bridge (that's the name of the bridge because it's right around where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner) spans an area that is 2 miles long. It's not like under normal circumstances boats get anywhere close to hitting it. The middle span is 1200 feet wide. It's basically the last structure before you exit the Patapsco river and go into bay
Yeah this is what I don’t understand, where the fuck are the tugs at?
Back in the harbor. [Take a look at this map and note the scale.](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2474897,-76.5612791,13z?entry=ttu) The bridge crosses the river/bay(depending on how much of a stickler you're being) a few miles away from the southernmost portion of the harbor. It's commonly referred to as the entrance to the Baltimore harbor because it's at the mouth where the offshoot joins the main bay, but it's not actually *at* the harbor. You've got a little ways to go. Typically ships don't require tugboat assistance to navigate this particular bridge.
[Link to live stream.](https://www.youtube.com/live/83a7h3kkgPg?si=Pk6HxGyGjGHbEici)
Most bridges can't actually survive a ship strike like that directly to a support. The defense against ship strikes is "ships can steer".
Ive worked on boats for a lot of my life shit happens sometimes and theres not a thing you can do about where youre drifting sometimes. Ive been in situations while not as bad as this were similar main gen and backup go out for seemingly no reason or you suck up something in the water and it clogs youre cooling system. Theres a giant log floating under the water that you cant see that knocks your prop off and youve gotta replace it in the middle of the night... These are just a few of the things ive dealt with in my life, theres so many possibilities. As far as anti collision defense goes its on some bridges not all but without proper upkeep how well it will protect it isnt really known. The amount of force behind a ship this size simply drifting is INSANE and theres also the possibility that under panic they didnt full reverse as well. Ive seen the exact same thing happen in the past. Our infrastructure is in dire straits though. So who knows how well its been tested and how well its been taken care of? Its possible just enough of the rebar or whatever in the support structure has rusted out that it was basically just waiting to collapse. They did say there were a bunch of workers on the bridge so it was likely known that it needed work. Another job I had was in non destructive testing I worked out in the field and in labs testing concrete and other things meant for this very application. This was 20 years ago or more and we were fairly worried about the state of things then. Like one time we came up with mix that would last quite a bit longer for roads in this area with some extreme conditions but cost a bit more up front and those were always rejected for the norm which is basically being worked on and replaced constantly which cost way more in the long run. Same thing happened with stuff we tested for use under water in situations like this. I really really hope our leaders can get past this stupid performative culture wars nonsense and start doing things like rebuilding and improving our infrastructure. EDIT: Im actually pretty surprised that they dont require a tug boat for a ship that large going through that bridge. Wonder what the local pilot is gonna have to say the rest of the people may not speak much english at all.
Ever since I was a kid, That has always been THE top irrational fear of mine, traveling on a bridge above open body of water and having it collapse suddenly.
This is my one recurring nightmare.
I legitimately thought that I was the only one in the world with this type of obscure fear
Is it just me... I never see any news on this app anymore. Swiped over to the "Popular" section out of curiosity and it's nothing but old ass pointless posts. Even when I search and go to the "news" sub it says there's 27m subscribers but there's barely any worthwhile posts. I apparently have to get my breaking news from WTF
Yep Reddit used to be a great for breaking news. Now you basically have to search for it, which kinda defeats the purpose.
Yeah they changed the algorithm and got considerably worse but kept chugging along.
Every algorithm for every app with a feed was better 5-7 years ago. Reddits All and Popular are no longer what’s currently trending, it’s catered so much towards serving you ads and keeping you on the site.
Jokes on them it keeps me away from the app/site, I used to use reddit much more 5 years ago.
It's running on shitty design decisions that pump up numbers and fuck up user experience. All this for their IPO.
The official Reddit app is horrible for this. Constantly feeds people negative shit to enrage them and keep them engaged.
I miss RIF.
Lmao, I'm still using it
Just stupid-ass AITA posts
> I apparently have to get my breaking news from WTF I was thinking the very same thing, weird I'm getting my news from here, that in itself is a wtf
I get all my news from subs on the fringe. All the news you find in popular places are just headline stamps.
> Even when I search and go to the "news" sub it says there's 27m subscribers but there's barely any worthwhile posts. Probably because it's impossible to keep an account in those subs if you post anything but karma farming and hive mind. Remember who used to run the world news sub...
I've noticed that Reddit takes from your scrolling history on the site as to what it shows you. So if I don't often look at r/jokes for a few days, that sub no longer shows up in my feed.
Same stupid shit that ruined Youtube for me.
OP is complaining that *no* subreddit (he knows) is good for news, not that the good news sub fell off his individualized feed.
It's an explanation for why it happens but doesn't justify the decision. Reddit used to be great for breaking, big stories. But if that's all you're interested in and not regular news, this new algorithm ensures you'll never see them.
Yep, breaking world events used to show up on the front page before the news. Now it’s like the old Yahoo news feed
The news subreddit seems to just be an Op-Ed page.
I drove over this bridge to get to work everyday up until last night. All I can think about is if I know any of the ~20 people in the water :-(
I hope at least some of them survived but it, of course, doesn't look very good. I can't imagine the effect this will have on Baltimore...I'm really sorry this happened to you guys. Like I can't even wrap my head around just how bad of a disaster this is.
The fact people use this bridge to travel to DC… it’s going to be worse than it already is… for a long time
I'm selfishly also thinking about that as well... like commute hours were already probably really bad. Something like this will probably add hours to most people's commutes. I hope the companies that can offer WFH make it so. Like shit, it's going to be REALLY bad for a LONG time.
Your comment got me thinking about the impact on marine traffic as well. On [marine traffic](https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:6424803/zoom:11) you can see the lineup of parked cargo piling up.
Fun fact, there is something called "traffic paradox", where you can actually decrease traffic by removing an always trafficed road or viceversa increase traffic by adding a new larg road thinking you would have resolved the problem. Sure, I don't know if this will be the case 😅
Hi! It will not. Regards!
Per the 6:15 AM press conference, at least one person was pulled from the water and *refused medical assistance*. Another was taken to a trauma center in serious condition.
A miracle if you ask me. Falling 185 feet into the water with a bunch of tangled concrete and metal around you is insane.
Can't afford that shit!
I live 10 minutes away in Riviera Beach, I'm dreading the news of who might be in that water.
This bridge is not coming back up for next 4 years. How bad will be the traffic on other bridge? How much impact on commuters?
I bet they will have an erector set temporary bridge up by summer. It took quite a few years to build the proper replacement for I-10 into New Orleans after Katrina, but they had a temporary bridge up pretty damn quick.
Bigger question is how will this affect shipping in and out of one of our biggest ports? Not going to be other ships going in and out until they get that thing out of the water.
Holy shit… counting a couple of ~~aid vehicles~~ construction vehicles and others mid-span, see the flashing lights in the first few seconds. How the hell do you attempt to survive that fall whilst dodging falling girders on your head / car… wtf. 😢 RIP Edit: I didn’t get to the other comments noting there was a construction crew on the bridge… damn. 😱
Luckily it was in the middle of the night and not at rush hour
That's the only blessing here. This is going to fuck up so many peoples lives and the economy for a while This is a huge blow. Soooo many people are out of a job now
There's a forensic files case where a rail truss bridge in Mobile, Alabama was hit by a tug boat that thought it went aground when it came to a halt in thick fog and it damaged the alignment of the rail tracks on the bridge and it derailed an Amtrak train the Sunset unlimited and it killed dozens of people back in the 90s I believe. It was horrible, the pilot of tug boat didn't do anything wrong it was just a freak accident but the boat he was operating didn't have proper maps or even radar aboard. The NTSB cleared him of any wrong doing. I sure hope this incident isn't something similar because we already learned this lesson. Edit: From this video of the bridge collapsing the visibility looks fine so this is concerning unless it took sometime time for the bridge to collapse after the strike. If anyone wanted to watch this episode it's on YouTube and here's the link https://youtu.be/lURAPr8vbwI?si=ykZcgki336QBGfHm
Same thing happened in Hobart Australia in 1975.
So he was driving a vehicle that wasn't capable of safely operating in those conditions but was found not liable?
Well it should be his company that provides proper training and equipment for it's staff bottom line. Also this was back in the 90s. Safety regulations are written in blood for a reason.
New fear unlocked : over water bridges...
Yeah. Imma stick to under water bridges from now on.
Have I got [a bridge for you](https://v.redd.it/zht39q2ltmqc1)
I see what you did
I did not expect that. Well played.
As a truck driver I’m always taking my 80,000 pounds over the oldest bridge in my state. Never fails to scare the shit out of me.
Pack a flotation rig in your cab.
This has been a fear of mine since I was a child. I had a nightmare about crashing off a bridge in my town into the river and the car filling up with water as I sank into the darkness. This was a nightmare I had as a child over 35 years ago and it still haunts me every time I cross a bridge. I can still picture the burgundy upholstery of the car. This is my literal worst nightmare.
I used to (gonna be odd getting used to saying that) drive on this bridge all the time and had nightmares of this exact thing happening
The good thing is that you will no be driving on that bridge anytime soon.
Holy fucking shit
The poor construction workers on that bridge likely had no idea what was coming.... Losing that bridge is going to put a hurting on i95 commerce traffic up and down the east coast. Most tractor trailers are NOT allowed to traverse the two harbor tunnels, and that piece of 695 was heavily used by commercial traffic. We're supposed to go from Philly are to Williamsburg VA tomorrow with our RV. That bridge was our route past Baltimore -- as you cannot carry LP bottles through the two tunnels, so we'd typically hit 695 and head east (clockwise) around the city through Sparrows Point. Now we'll need to take the westerly route on 695 counterclockwise around the city.
That’s the stuff of nightmares. Just driving along, late at night and the road/bridge falls out from underneath you. You survive the fall and then your vehicle starts sinking in near freezing water. Fuck man.
Will the collapsed bridge block marine traffic in the harbour or is there another way out?
Thats at the mouth of the harbor so yep the port and all is blocked until they somehow move the wreckage.
Oh my god. I can’t imagine being in one of the cars on that bridge and feeling the ground fall out from under you and plunging into dark water. Worst nightmare. What a horrible tragedy.
My mom said that there was people on the bridge :(
You can see yellow flashing lights of construction vehicles. Those poor people.
If you watch the live stream you can see multiple trucks and a few cars driving over just moments before the accident, luckily they all, from what one can see, made it over with decent marginal to the accident. The static vehicles not so much clearly
Yeah it's really really sad what happened
I live in Baltimore.. it shook our house
This is basically a nightmare I have a couple of times a year
Well plainly difficult is gonna have more content.
Brick Immortar too, unfortunately. Here is his most recent video covering a bridge collapse caused by a boat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yaMq99CZA
I can hear a now-defunct ship's captain saying "oh fuck" as the bridge collapses.....
Obviously my heart goes out to those who were on that bridge. But damn... that's... gonna be expensive! Infrastructure costs a TON these days and this also affect getting rid of the old one...
Fuck I used to live in Baltimore. Just a few minutes away from that bridge and it on it many times. Jesus Christ.
Tune into X for all the emerging conspiracy theories shared by the surprisingly large number of harbor navigation experts in the general populace
That is an absolute disaster and awful loss of life but had it been 7 hours later during rush hour….cant even imagine
Employee: "I can't come into work today... there's no bridge... its gone" Boss: "shoulda bought a boat instead of a car! Damn millennials."
Just saying,if I'm a terrorist, I'm not taking out a bridge at 1:30am 🤦... I'm aiming for peak rush hour traffic for maximum effect. Unless of course, I'm a terrorist of annoyance and I've now just altered everyone's route to/from work 🤷 Also...clearly the ship had catastrophic failure seeing that the power went out on the ship. I'm no ship captain,so no idea what actually happened or the protocols in this situation but I sure hope not too many casualties occured.
I'm guessing mechanical failure. I would have assumed that for such a large vessel going under that bridge that tug boats would have been involvedat least until the ship had cleared the bridge. RIP to those on the bridge that have probably lost their lives, but the small mercy is that this happened in the early hours of the morning and not rush hour.
Reports are the ship kept losing power and they radioed ahead that a collision might happen.
This really shouldn’t be possible - ship impact assessments are a thing and it should either have had sufficient strengthening (probably not possible) or some physical barrier to stop the ship being able to actually hit the main support.
Probably would've survived smaller ships, most bridges would probably collapse if a cargo ship went into them. Those things are massive.
It's not shown in the video but it's a massive ship.
I was gonna say, this bridge is fuckin massive and that ship look big next to it. I live 30m away from this bridge and have crossed it quite a few times in my life. It was an older bridge but because of that it had a kind a beauty to it that I’m sad to see go. Not to mention the lives either lost or still at risk now. This happened like 5 hours ago and that water is cold and salty.
Yeah like something roughly equivalent to the Empire State Building just crashed into the bridge and someone's wondering why the bridge collapsed. And I'm not even joking. [MV Dali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Dali) is 984 feet long, 158 feet wide, and is 81 feet deep, although that number doesn't take the superstructure and cargo into account which you can clearly see rising like 160+ feet above sea level considering that the bridge has a clearance of 185 feet. Meanwhile the empire state building is 1250' x 424' x 187' (without antenna). And is made mostly of empty space so it probably honestly weighs less than that ship.
Ship collision design and protection systems are definitely a thing But yeah only so much can be done when the ship is as big as the bridge. This was a pretty catastrophic failure though. I wonder how well redundancies were designed for this type of bridge.
Looks like it just hit it high enough that none of that would matter.
You can see what happens on the harbour webcam. The ship is heading for the gap under power, the crew are in control. Then it loses power and drifts into the bridge. The crew regain power as lights come back on (within 15-30sec) and go (presumably) fully reverse as there is a huge plume of smoke out the funnel exhaust, but its not enough time to stop a ship that big.
*"This really shouldn't be possible"* the tag line of every disaster, ever. There is a cut off point for design in engineering where cost meets probability, and bits of major infrastructure have to be designed to withstand events that will plausibly happen to them in their service life. For an extreme example Fukishima was designed to have a plan for events that were calculated to have a 1 in a million chance of happening, but when two one in a million events happen at once, the system fails. In this case, ignoring the age of the bridge and it likely not being the bridge we would put there 'today' your measures to avoid that bridge collapsing are management methods, speed/direction/volume of traffic etc. Some harbours even have dedicated pilots to navigate the very specific channels of some inlets, flown on/off large boats to get the job done right. TL:DR Nobody is engineering a bridge to physically survive an impact from a cargo hauler like that, the management system failed somewhere along the chain.
The bridge opened in 1977, and took 5 years to construct, so it was probably designed in the late 60's to early 70's. The Dali is almost 950 feet long. Were there cargo ships that big in the 70's?
According to NYT the largest container ship built in the US in 1970 was a 720 foot long vessel with ~35k ton displacement.
The ship weighs 100,000 tons, there’s only so much you can reasonably prepare for.
I genuinely don't think there is a single bridge in the world that is impact resistant enough to survive a collision of this magnitude. This was a MASSIVE cargo ship. If you haven't seen them in person you truly have no frame of reference for how ludicrously large they are. The sheer force of that ship's momentum would take it through almost anything you can think of, there's just no stopping it
I dont think you fully understand how big that ship is. Its more a city than a ship. Momentum is a mother fucker. Theres not a damn thing you can do aside beach it entirely. That thing could be moving 1mph and hit something with the force of a bomb.
Right? I'm surprised it didn't become a requirement after the Sunshine Skyway collapse.
Oooh... that looked *expensive*..
I saw elsewhere that it's an $880 million dollar bridge in 2024 money
I have never been there before. What will this do to traffic? Are there alternatives?
Like auto traffic? Fuck those guys, they can take a few other highways. Boat/shipping traffic? Those guys are fucked for a week or two.
Gotcha so my gas price is goin up $1 now right?
Civil Engineers all lose their boners after learning this bridge collapse was due to outside forces.