Video: Baltimore bridge struck by boat and collapses

Woof... Found a map of the area, and yeah, you can route around the collapse, but the next closest crossing is a ways away...
- Oof.... the traffic is gonna be hellish there for the foreseeable future.
- Now imagine shipping traffic! Lots of deliveries not happening this week!
  
  Dundalk and Sparrow's Point is basically all distribution centers now.
- And the tunnels (I-895 and I-95) forbid things like propane, so if you have some of that, you're off to the west side of the Baltimore Beltway, which is already extremely busy. Good luck with that!
  (Relatively local person here who travels around Baltimore frequently. I've used the bridge that collapsed on several occasions to avoid the tunnels while carrying propane.)
- Except if you’re carrying HAZMATS it’s even worse, they’re not allowed in either of the tunnel crossings, so all that traffic has to reroute aaaaaaall the way off your map via the western half of 695.

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.
- Lol, that's not how capitalism works.
  
  Yeah, it is. They cost other rich people money too.

Lights on boat began to flicker before incident, suggesting some sort of power failure. Steering a full size car without power steering is possible, but spoiler, steering a huge container ship ain't.
Someone commented that exhaust increased noticably as well, possibly because pilot put ship in reverse after losing power (with prop walk veering the ship into the support).
All just people talking on the Internet at present, but "asleep at the wheel" isn't necessarily what happened.
- Given how "easily" the bridge fell... Why aren't ships that size required to 100% be escorted by tugs???
  
  At the risk of sounding too Clarke and Dawe, it is very rare that a ship loses power and control, and somewhere it could hit something important, and hits that thing, and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces. It's been there for 46 years, and the Port of Baltimore currently sees an average of 53 ships in and out per month, so about 3.5 big ships under the bridge per day. That's a lot of passages over the years without incident.
  
  Cause then we would have to hire more people to tug all those ships in and it would be less efficient.
  Not very profit margin of you to suggest that.
  
  Politics.
  "More tug jobs? Not on my watch!"
  
  Why aren't ships that size required to 100% be escorted by tugs???
  They likely were, but there are limits on how fast even a group of tugs can influence a ship many times their size/weight/mass.
  The laws of physics still apply.

Roughly 20 people are still missing. Water is almost 0 degrees. I think this will be the death toll.
I also wonder how TF this happened.
- The temperature in the river was about 47 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) in the early hours of Tuesday, according to a buoy that collects data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
  Edited to add:
  Replies seem to think that I think 8°C water isn't cold or dangerous. I don't think that.
  
  https://westpacmarine.com/samples/hypothermia_chart.php
  Loss of consciousness is expected to occur within 30-60 minutes and death is expected within 1-3 hours at those water temps. I would assume none of the victims were wearing personal flotation devices, so rescue of anyone else seems highly unlikely.
  
  I’ll wear a t-shirt outside for 10 minutes when it’s 47 degrees outside. But 47 is a whole new level of cold when it’s water.
  I have a little pond in the yard, so I occasionally have to reach in there throughout the year. Right now it’s close to that 47F mark, and it’s like past “this is cold” to “this hurts!”
  
  Water temp of 47 can be lethal very quickly.
  Water cools the body about 25 times faster than air of the same temp. A diver in 70-degree water may go blue in the lips even with a wetsuit. 47 degrees will have your body going numb super quickly. Then you lose dexterity and start having muscle cramps all over. You lose the ability to swim away or even tread water.
  It's bad.
  
  8 is pretty close to zero.

It is likely to disrupt shipping in a major US port. This will have repercussions throughout the economy until the port is fully reopened.
- That bridge was also part of I-95, a major northeastern transit corridor. That will also be majorly impacted.
  
  https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Atlanta,+Georgia/Bangor,+maine/@39.22529,-76.645258,11z/data=!4m8!4m7!1m2!1m1!1s0x88f5045d6993098d:0x66fede2f990b630b!1m2!1m1!1s0x4cae4b46101129bd:0x4d0918b0a7af7677!3e0
  It looks like long-distance traffic would normally take the remaining bridge over I-895 rather than over I-695, though I suppose it'll be more congested now due to more traffic having to pass over it.
  
  Not exactly. If you're traveling I-95, you might take this if you're carrying hazmat and can't use the tunnels. Or you could go on the other side of the beltway (which I imagine many do, because it avoids the tolls for the bridge). Unfortunately, the west side of I-695 has more traffic than this side.

Usually, this would be deleted for not being a news article.
OP, please link to the link below, and I'll let it stay.
https://lemmy.world/post/13553444
- Im sorry, i wasnt aware of that rule. I just wasnt seeing a video up on here at the time so i grabbed one off the live stream to post for others to see. I posted the link you gave in the description instead of the main url so people can still quickly pull it up. If theres a problem still ill do what i can to change it, or you can go ahead and delete this post since there are now more videos and such up online.
  
  Nope. You did great. Our rules state that a post must contain a link to an article. Keeping the video as primary, and adding a link as the comment suffices. We usually don't give the warning, but I felt that your post added good context for the news surrounding the breaking news.

Holy crap! That went down way more quickly than I expected.
- That went down way more quickly than I expected
  Id say it fell at roughly the speed of gravity.
  
  My point is that it didn’t collapse it pieces. It just fell straight down with seemingly no structural resistance.

I feel like the whole thing shouldn't have come down as easy as it did...
Edit: Nevermind, I didn't realize how large this ship actually is.
- I don't think integrity after getting a support annihilated by a massive ship is a reasonable design objective. You'd need way more supports and structure, at least doubling the weight and cost of the structure, I'd guess maybe 4x. As far as stress tests go, getting one of your two supports knocked out is an extremely stressing condition.
  
  I learned recently that in engineering there’s a saying that anyone can build a bridge that will stand, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.
  Which seems dark, but bridges are built on budgets while adhering to aesthetic, material, and site/traffic (on, under, and sometimes over) requirements.
  And besides, that ship was between 210 to 257 million pounds, traveling at whatever speed it was going. I’m not a physicist, but I recon that’s enough force to knock down a bridge. (As evidenced.)
  
  getting one of your two supports knocked out is an extremely stressing condition.
  Bridges need therapists too!
- That old way of thinking has no place in 2024.
- if you ever made a bridge out of toothpicks in school, the lesson is how much force it can hold straight up and down. Something super heavy whacking at its side while also dead on nailing one of the major support structures.... yeah thing crumbled like toothpicks
- Baltimore Truthers, already?
  
  I took it as less of "gubment did it" and more "holy shit that bridge seems shoddy as fuck"
- It's not just that the ship is as big as it is. A ship half it's size could have done it too. Bridges like this are very strong in the way of supporting their deck. But the way they achieve it is by spreading the weight out over a very large area. Interrupt that and the whole thing comes down.
- "Thicc boats can't break steel beams."
- the whole thing shouldn't have come down as easy as it did
  Like jet fuel to a steel beam?
  (Is it too soon if I was an eyewitness?)

Welcome to Baltimore (bawlmore, for the locals). A local here, it's so devastating.

Will be interested to read the NTSB report on this one. I bet the pilot is still shitting his pants.

Lights on boat began to flicker before incident, suggesting some sort of power failure. Steering a full size car without power steering is possible, but spoiler, steering a huge container ship ain't.
Someone commented that exhaust increased noticably as well, possibly because pilot put ship in reverse after losing power (with prop walk veering the ship into the support).
All just people talking on the Internet at present, but "asleep at the wheel" isn't necessarily what happened.

This has been a plainly difficult production.
- What would you rate this on the scale?
- Brick Immortar has a video to make.

Russians did it!
- Sailing a ship is way more precarious than it may seem at first and if you're not careful small mistakes can snowball.
  I doubt this was anything more than a incredibly regrettable mistake.
- I read it was a ship from Singapore, idk what they have against us though. Probably russian assets taking revenge for the concert shooting.
  
  I would argue this wasn't planned. If you want to cause damage, why do it in the middle of the night? Not sure how full this bridge is during rush hour, but I would imagine quite a lot more than it was when it collapsed now.
  
  I think they drank Russian vodka in the hold of the ship - thus the Russians are to blame!