Baltimore bridge collapse

Correct! And blah boy doesn't know how change a flat tire either.

So the black box “malfunctioned” during the bridge strike?? Wtf

For a very brief time, it lost ONE piece of data while the NTBS was still able to obstain exactly what was happening. Be honest with what they really said. Also, DC Draino? That's who you're going to go with here? A dishonest, partisan peddler of misinformation and lies to move an agenda for the right? Come on man. Do better.

It was a clip of the officials in charge of the investigation saying, in their own words, what they've found so far. Important update.

Actually, his question is a good one. It is possible to build a protective system which would have withstood such a collision. It is also possible to design a bridge that does not have a single point of failure.

Certainly the engineers who designed this bridge understood that it had a single point of failure and that a large ship could take it out. I have to assume it was either too costly or otherwise impractical to implement more robust solutions. I am sure we will find out more about this as the investigation unfolds, and I'm looking forward to it.

This bridge is fifty years old. Container ships (the heaviest ships that come into ports like Baltimore) are roughly four times the weight they were then, and they're faster.

I imagine it was probably built to withstand at least some version of the collisions possible then; it's nowhere close to being able to handle an impact like this --with, say, six times the energy it was engineered for.

The same is surely true for most of the bridges in the country, and the world.

Is it plausible it could be retrofitted to withstand something like this? Yeah, maybe.

It would be one hell of a massive and expensive project. Is it realistic that we're suddenly gonna do that for every bridge in the country? Not remotely.

Better, safer, more redundant control-systems, safety-measures, maintenance oversight, and emergency protocols for the ships are a vastly more logical and sane solution than some fantasy of trillions of dollars of instant reconstruction of every bridge there is.

But as usual, because we're *morons*, we'll allow unmonitored corporate interests to violate all of that to save themselves a few millions, and then watch like imbeciles when that leads to billion-dollar incidents like this one.

(And then some idiot will scream, Why wasn't the bridge built better??)

It's a lot easier to regulate a single bridge that you have full control over than it would be to regulate all of the ships from all over the world that pass beneath it.

Agreed, it's not reasonable for all bridges to be retrofitted, but now is a great time to re-evaluate this particular bridge and determine whether or not it warrants additional protection when it is rebuilt. From what I understand, this disaster represents billions of dollars of loss, and preventing this kind of loss and damage to vital infrastructure may very well be worth the additional cost.

Well, obviously, since this bridge has been completely destroyed now, you can entertain all kinds of options for its replacement.

Even if you can rebuild it robust enough to withstand this kind of impact, that obviously doesn't touch the problem with the hundreds of similarly vulnerable bridges around the country.

Again, though, the expense of trying to make bridges super-robust enough to withstand an impact like this will be so immense you could easily improve the safety-controls for every damn container ship that plies your port for the cost of 'fortifying' one single bridge.

And 'regulating all the ships' really ain't that hard. You make serious rules, you set up serious regimes of enforcement and inspection and penalty, and you tell the shippers if they want to serve your port, they have to follow the freaking rules.

Does that raise your costs a little? Of course. VASTLY less than the multi-billions it'll cost to rebuild this freaking bridge --let alone making it robust enough to deal with this kind of thing.

(For reference, the recently-completed Cuomo bridge in NY cost about $4 Billion.

And I doubt it would've held up against this collision either.)

A clip posted a by an idiot. Use a better source.

Just replying in general…..as a geotechnical engineer who specializes in bridge foundations, it’s crazy to see that virtually no one actually understands the situation. The talking heads “asking questions” are idiots. They’re asking meaningless, stupid questions.

Weak bridge gets hit by gargantuan ship and deck goes pop. As a freshman civil engineer I could understand that.

All this conspiracy stuff is such a waste of time and energy.

A decade to replace the Baltimore bridge??? Hope not.

Maybe if an actual builder was in charge of the country, it would get fixed faster.

thelibertydaily.com

America's Industrious Spirit Is Gone: It Could Take Longer to Rebuild the Baltimore Bridge Than It Took to Build the Entire Transcontinental Railroad - 🔔 The Liberty Daily

Will Kessler, Daily Caller News Foundation

(DCNF)—The effort to rebuild the recently collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge near Baltimore, Maryland, could quickly turn into a years-long quagmire as a result of environmental red tape under the Biden administration, expert...

Link:thelibertydaily.com/americas-industrio...

The transcontinental railroad was built by immigrants ... so it was built faster. Rs want "Americans" to build the new one so it will take far longer, and cost a lot more, because few "Americans" are will to do that dirty job.

The Empire State building was built in 8 months. We can't build anything like this bridge in the same time frame?

If we had a world war - that bridge, if crucial to American success, gets built in 5 months max.

The people who fell off the bridge were ALL migrants ... the people you want to deport.

The Empire State building was built in 1930 .... 94 years ago. Good finding any of them still alive to "get the job done" because younger Americans are soft and lazy.

It is certainly a reasonable question to ask that after the Sunshine Skyway Disaster (which is relevant unlike the I-35 collapse which is not) why were all major bridges that span port access not retrofitted with "massive dolphins" if the piers were in the water. Most other East Coast ports do not have this narrow an entry (Savannah has piers on land, Philadelphia's narrowest bridge on the approach has a center span 400 longer, both Norfolk and Charleston don't have any bridges at all on approach). In the grand scheme of costs and how much the Federal budget is, this would be pretty small amount of money.

Sally...you're such a dweeb that you can't even make a point which is a good one correctly. The point that the ESB was built remarkably fast is a good point when measured against current construction time for virtually anything. However it was not built in 8 months. Start to finish was 1 year and 45 days or 13.5 months.

You are absolutely ignorant about how American construction workers operate. The skilled labor is thinning out as they age. Younger people do not want those jobs.

Definitely a question which needs to be addressed. As is typical, commentary is to the extreme in terms of the number of bridges this could happen to even if, for various reasons some listed above, it is unlikely to happen. How about addressing the most vulnerable and work back.