It's a huge amount of mass that was in motion. Who is disagreeing that it could take out a bridge? Also, bridges aren't usually designed to take so much force from that angle.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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People are claiming it was a terrorist attack and such. Unsurprisingly, mostly on Newsmax and Fox News.
If this were a terrorist attack we'd have had a group release a statement claiming to have been done by them to begin with. The whole point of terrorism is to enact political change through the threat of coordinated acts of violence against the civilian population and infrastructure. These conservative clowns always want to think they're under attack to promote draconian laws to protect our "freedoms".
These conservative clowns always want to think they're under attack to promote draconian laws to protect our "freedoms".
Because they're the real terrorists.
Also they'd do it at rush hour, not at 1:30am.
That doesn't surprise me. I could see something like this being done in a terrorist attack. Of course, I wait for the evidence, and don't speculate wildly and publicly.
It's the whole "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" thing again.
I think it's reasonable to ask questions, explore possibilities, and verify with evidence. What those "news" organizations are doing is beyond irresponsible.
Asking questions is fine. Saying that a boat which you can see on video destroying a bridge didn't destroy the bridge is entering into crazy territory.
When a plane crashes, "did a naked mole rat chew through the control wiring" is generally not a question people ask. Because that's a silly question.
I agree! A lot of people have just accepted that crazy is a fact now, which is itself crazy to me.
I mean… back in the 90’s the news from the other side of the world were kinda iffy, with obvious bullshit like a man in China having an hiccup for 30 years, or another being 200 years old, or the even more laughable idea of a school shooting in the US…
Crazy is normal.
Of course, I wait for the evidence, and don't speculate wildly and publicly.
Yes, but think of the ratings and clicks garnered by speculating wildly and publicly! You’re missing out!
I've seen plenty of people not assuming a conspiracy, but instead believing shitty construction is to blame.
Clearly these people have never tried moving furniture before. It's not moving fast, but once things start going wrong a couch can and will easily push you through drywall.
People on the internet got tired of being COVID experts and Ukraine experts and Israel experts and have moved on to bridge experts.
I've played polybridge. I can confirm that if a ship touches a bridge anywhere then it will break.
Look, everyone criticized me for choosing those minors as part of my interdisciplinary studies major, I'm going to enjoy this moment.
Andrew Sex Trafficer Tate said it, and people are parroting him.
But aren't people saying that almost all saying they intentionally steered the boat into the support not that it was controlled demolition or something?
People are saying both.
Not everyone even begins to comprehend the relationship between mass, motion, momentum and energy between a failed education and never having to use it in decades.
A fully loaded 1300' ship, that weighs an absolute fuckton, drifts into a concrete and steel post holding up a heavy ass bridge. Said support column is engineered for holding up the heavy bridge and is not designed to be run into by a heavy ass ship. The heavy ass ship hit the column at 1:30 in the morning, aka it was dark out. Not sure why it's too much to comprehend to these people that the simple explanation is that someone fucked up real bad.
The ‘someone’ is likely the management company cheaping out on repairs and maintenance, since as of now it seems like the captain of the ship did everything they could to stop it from happening (dropping anchor, trying to steer but being unable to from the power outage), but there’s only so much you can do about that amount of mass in motion.
If an absolute fuckton is 100,000 tons, then yes, it indeed weighed an absolute fuckton.
Also the ship lost power, they radioed for tugs a minute and a half later, started dropping the anchor a minute after that. Radioed a mayday a minute after that. If you look at the video you can see smoke coming out of the exhaust indicating they were trying to get the engines going again. Just before hitting the pier you can see the ship started turning away, but it was to late.
Every indication is that it's an accident. But conspiracies are going to spread because it's what people like I guess.
Have you seen americans argue about 9/11?
Avoid watching Americans argue whenever possible, including myself. 😅
People are saying this?
You can see the boat crumpled the bridge like a piece of foil. It can obviously do it.
People are crazy. People claim planes didn't hit the twin towers.
And in both cases, there are the "the planes/boat didn't do it alone" people.
Lisa's Reverse Vampires.
It was full of cargo at the time, right?
Even without it, it would have pulverized that bridge.
Yeah it was over 100,000 tons going at around 8 knots. Not exactly high speed, but think of the momentum of something that's 100,000 tons.
Oh yes... Right here on Lemmy some person said they should just drop some heavy concrete blocks near the bridge bases to stop the ship ...
No, they said they should add them to deflect the ship away from the pylons.
Fenders are common on modern bridge designs and work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_protection_systems
Were you the person who was downvoted for constantly arguing that nothing could be done despite being given lots of information otherwise?
We MUST construct additional pylons.
Nope, I did argue that it was not as easy as someone was claiming (dropping "heavy blocks")
Only one person replied with a link, but their very link said no protection would stop this specific accident
PS: you should also read your links. They are not super detailed in that wiki article but nothing there detour, much less stop, the ship that knocked down the Baltimore bridge
Seems like those are to deflect canoes and pontoon boats, maybe a small pleasure craft or fishing boat. Not a fully loaded cargo ship. I don't see anything that could have prevented this short of using tug boats to navigate the channel. The boat lost power and drifted into the bridge. Nothing short of a land mass was going to stop it once it lost power.
No it does not seem like that.
These systems are designed to protect bridges before a ship hits it.
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-baltimore-bridge-collapse/
Look at what the fucking engineers are all saying, it all boils down to “We would expect to see measures in place to redirect the ship because a bridge cannot survive a direct hit.”
The bridge was built in the 70s and nobody wanted to spend the money to update the safety measures to protect from modern cargo vessels.
"From the photos I can see what appears to be a solitary dolphin-type structure on each side of the two main piers. If so these look to be inadequate to deflect anything other than small vessels. I do not know what measures were planned or installed when the bridge was opened in 1977, but the sizes and weights of cargo vessels have increased enormously to the present with the globalisation of container sea transport.”
I see what you mean. Very cool site. Thanks for sharing. I hope the fediverse is used to marshal actual expert, similar to how this site does it, but more crowd sourced, like Wikipedia. Anyhow, seems like the bridge should have been replaced in addition to deflection devices.
The very article you linked, from the first of the experts, states, “There was no way to protect the bridge, even if there was a warning system in place. If a ship like this collides on with any bridge it may take it down.”
Each expert after basically says the same thing. Even with extra protections using modern technologies, a head-on collision from a boat of this size and weight would destroy almost any bridge, and there is no practical fender system to effectively deflect a ship of this size. Most suggestions are that a more modern bridge would simply have a wider channel, but a modern bridge with modern fenders and plant of dolphins would not have stopped a head-on collision like this. And a wider channel wouldn't matter if a boat if this size still ran directly into one of the (wider spaced) direct supports.
Other experts here note radar and sonar protections and lighting, none of which would have mattered here because the problem is the Dali lost power and navigation, which is what caused them to run directly into the bridge pylon. The pylon could have been made out of neon lights: they couldn't turn. I don't think you're taking into account just how massively heavy this ship is.
That says there is no way to stop a head on collision, which is true. Hence why you divert the boat before it hits the bridge structure.
As I have already mentioned and as many of the other professionals in that site point out:
“It is almost impossible to design a bridge pier to withstand this kind of impact. Therefore, we tend to design impact protection measures to prevent it from happening instead.
And
“From the photos I can see what appears to be a solitary dolphin-type structure on each side of the two main piers. If so these look to be inadequate to deflect anything other than small vessels.
And
I do not know the history of this bridge, but it looks like an old bridge that was designed neither for ship impact nor had any ship impact barrier to avoid the problem.
And
”I do not know what the arrangements were for this bridge but major bridges over shipping lanes must have substantial protection for piers or columns. These protections are either in the form of structural protections like ‘sacrificial dolphins’, which are made of steel and embedded in the seabed to stop or divert a ship. They can also be in the form of artificial islands; these are for very large ships and mean the ship will never reach the bridge pier itself. If piers are not protected adequately then they are vulnerable to ship collision. Clearly the protection of the piers in this instance was inadequate.
And
Bridges in shipping lanes are sometimes designed with strong, stout piers, or additional protective structures around the piers to prevent ships from coming into contact with the bridge structure. It doesn’t appear that the Key Bridge had either of these features
That's basically what a "dolphin" is and you can build them arbitrarily large. The only reason this bridge wasn't retrofitted with adequate protection was money. As with any large-scale disaster, there are multiple failures that lead to the incident. The boat is clearly to blame, but so is the bridge protection system.
I've seen videos of much smaller ships running aground, and they manage to win against the earth itself for a considerable distance before they stop. Some rebar and concrete pylons aren't going to cut it.
Idiots... You don't have to "bring down the bridge"with the ship - the ship just had to help one key support fail enough to collapse and then the bridge will bring itself down from the stress.
Bunker fuel can't melt steel arches.
Captions log how the fuck did we crash into water and floating towards a fucking bridge
Hey it's XianJaneway
Used to follow her back on twitter.
Is she on mastodon?
For anyone who is as interested in this as I am, the NY Times has done a really good set of illustrative examples of both the size of the Dali (a Neopanamax) and also of various bridge "bumpers" and other deflective measures, for those of us who cannot easily visualize them.
How Fenders Might Have Protected Against Bridge Collapse - NYTimes
archive link
The Dali Is a Big Ship. But Not the Biggest - NYTimes
archive link
I have to add that honestly, given the size of the Dali, all the efforts to stop it that were attempted, including the dropped anchor that did not even slow it, IMO the only barrier sample shown in the first article that might have kept the ship from hitting the bridge support would be the rock islands and numerous concrete bollards surrounding the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa -- and that bridge only got them after it got hit. The one shown in the picture is the rebuild of the one that got hit and collapsed, killing 35 in 1980. Hence the massive protective features.
How far the bow of the Dali was vertically above the waterline when it hit, and how far the bow was horizontally from the hull at the waterline when it hit, are questions I have not yet seen answered. So it is entirely possible that the the angle on the bow of the Dali between the deck and the waterline would have presented a protrusion that might have simply sailed over any water-based protections, and that plus the sheer size of the ship would have resulted in the same outcome even with such measures in place.
I honestly don't know, and don't pretend to. And certainly the protection that is never installed is going to fail 100% of the time, which is where govt (city, state, and fed) screwed up no matter which way you slice the rest. But I do not think it's nearly as simple a question as it's made out to be, nor that just any old bridge fender or bumper currently in use would have been able to keep the bow of the Dali, or any equally supersized ship with a protruding bow, from completely destroying the Francis Scott Key bridge support as it did.
Just saw another great article in the same series, here's a gift link (article unlocked):
Force of Ship Impact Was on the Scale of a Rocket Launch - NYTimes
This one deals with the sheer amount of force involved in the Dali pylon strike, estimates ranging between 12 million and 100 million newtons. It's absolutely fascinating for geeks like myself, not that there's anyone else like that in this community, no, of course not:
Our lowest estimate of how much force it would take to slow the Dali, if it were fully loaded, is around 12 million newtons, about a third of the force it took to launch the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo moon missions.
And our higher-end estimates, reviewed by several civil engineering experts, suggest it is realistic to put the force of the impact with the pier at upward of 100 million newtons.
The article then goes through a number of equations, tables and illustrations, then concludes:
Our own calculations are also an oversimplification. We don’t try to account for the ship’s rotation, the angle of the collision, and exactly how and where it collided with the pier (a smaller force applied in the wrong place can be more damaging than a large force applied elsewhere). The container ship would have also dragged a sizable amount of water with it, which would add its own momentum.
But the point is: Even the widest reasonable range is on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of newtons — a mind-bogglingly large force, by any estimate.
Well worth the read, for anyone interested.
I always just imagine looking down the 100m track and doubling or tripling that. Or in this case, if you've been to one before, looking down a quarter mile drag strip.
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