799
Baltimore bridge collapses into river after being hit by cargo ship
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
799 points (99.5% liked)
News
23622 readers
3417 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm just glad it happened in the dead of night and that the ship sent a mayday several minutes before it happened. State Police were apparently able to close the bridge and clear most of the traffic (it's 1.6 miles/ 2.6 kilometers long) off of it before it collapsed. It's sad that there were still construction workers and some cars still left on it, though.
Crazy. Even with the mayday I'm amazed they could get police in position fast enough.
Maryland has the MTA police (tunnel rats) who are in charge of the toll roads (originally just the tunnels but it's expanded) so I'm sure there there MTA cops lurking about. Thank God they jumped to action.
According to WP, it was still pretty quick. They had about two or three minutes from loss of power to collision. That had the pilot assess the situation, call a mayday and request the bridge be closed, dispatch to order the cops to act, and them to act. Then it had to take time for the bridge to clear.
One cop said on the radio that as soon as he got the traffic shut off, he was going to go evacuate the bridge workers, which obviously they didn't have time to do, but that was still quick. I would not have expected that to have happened so rapidly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_collapse
Hopefully police told the people to evacuate their vehicles
Unfortunately, it would've simply been faster for them to drive to either end of the bridge. The Maryland Department of Transportation had already closed the bridge. The only traffic left on the bridge was the traffic that got through before the closure, but everything happened so fast I don't think they had time to get off the bridge.
One article I read said that the mayday call, the bridge closure, the collision, and the collapse all happened in the span of about two minutes.
I'm so confused why a mayday wasn't sent out earlier though. Like they had to have known collision was imminent.
And weren't there local authorities on board that were guiding them through the waterway?
They lost power, dropped anchor, and called a mayday. By the sound of it the pilot probably did everything perfect. But whatever caused the power loss and engine failure is gonna be looked at very closely.
I think new procedures for having tugs hooked up until ships are entirely clear of port may be on their way - even if they're mostly just escorts unless the ship's engines fail.
There's gonna be a lot of pointing fingers and yelling, but hopefully in the end things will be safer than they are today. From the sound of it we got really lucky on the "lives lost" side of things.
Prolly something like:
"Aww nah, theres no need m8, I'm sure we'll figure something out"
I've heard the same thing with another issue
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/effects/