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Video: Baltimore bridge struck by boat and collapses
(streamable.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Holy fuck! It took the whole thing down! That shipping company is going to be sued into oblivion
There were people on it! Not a whole lot of cars since it happened a couple hours ago. But there were around 50 people working on it at the time. Its so devastating.
That's insane. I heard about this on NPR this morning, but I didn't picture the bridge being so big. Glad it was early when there weren't hundreds more people on it.
Most likely a lobbying bailout. Kickbacks will then be given to the executives. Only the unfortunate victims shed tears.
Will probably take a couple of insurance companies down too!
At least something good will come of it then
I'm thinking there will be many more parties to that lawsuit... Foremost insurers. And their re-insurers.
However right now it looks like this ship suffered a mechanical failure, so if I had a business in ship building/maintenance you bet I'd be calling everyone in the company to get confirmation that that ship was not on our customer list. And if it was I'd already be in an all-hands meeting with engineering and legal.
If I was in charge of whichever government entity is in charge of maritime traffic, I'd be discretely asking why the fuck boats big enough to bring a bridge down by slowly booping into it were allowed to be boating under the bridge. I would refute responsibility of course... but some maritime traffic rule changes might happen down the line.
To your last comment, ships never just boop. It smothers.
Let's say 100k tons for a ship, and make it long tons to make it an even 100,000,000kg. This ship was moving roughly 4m/s... Thus the kinetic energy was somewhere around 800 MJ. A stick of dynamite is about 1MJ.
I'm pretty sure 800 sticks of dynamite could've fucked that support up pretty good, too, bringing down the bridge deck.
It's more like either you give up on bridges or give up on ships if you are concerned about the two coexisting and breaking stuff in a low speed collision.
While using energy to measure the destructive power of a collision is... not great, OF COURSE no bridge pillar can withstand a direct collision with cargo ship that size (although I don't think it would necessarily be unfeasible to build the pillars on artificial concrete islands ? Depending on currents and topology, it might just be very expensive).
There are also ways to mitigate risk (many of which surely are already implemented) around critical infrastructure. Slower speeds, backup generators, and for instance in Suez they have tugboats as well. They had one high-profile incident recently but they have way more traffic in a way more challenging environment.
Whether it makes economic sense to implement new safety measures in Baltimore I suppose depends on how likely such a collision is determined to be. Maybe it was a freak accident. Maybe with the amount of modern shipping traffic it's bound to happen every few decades, and the risk/reward calculations should change to accommodate mitigation strategies.
Lol, that's not how capitalism works.
Yeah, it is. They cost other rich people money too.