Bridge in Baltimore Collapses – IOTW Report

Bridge in Baltimore Collapses

31 Comments on Bridge in Baltimore Collapses

  1. Apparently the ship was losing power intermittently and had no control as a result. You can see that they got the engine going again full bore just before impact and were probably trying to slow down.

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  2. This is a transport logistics disaster!
    That’s a MAJOR transport route for the east coast.
    There are alternates, but they are already overwhelmed with traffic. The west side beltway 695 has massive reconstruction efforts already underway that are seriously impeding traffic.
    The 95 and 295 tunnels were already a constant traffic mess.

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  3. Nice bridge you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

    Probably poor maintenance due to DEI. Meanwhile in the Mediterranean , we are building an elaborate pier so we can give free stuff to the terrorists.

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  4. I dunno… after Moscow, this event seems to be mighty suspect. Video shows the ship going lights out just before striking the bridge. i would think a vessel that large would have backup power sources galore. And it happens at the very worst possible moment in its voyage.
    Holding judgement, praying for the victims, but it smells pretty fucky to me.

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  5. @Tony
    Look at the aerial view. That ship was MASSIVE and completely overloaded with cargo containers. The basic physics of it is F=MA – the forces of the impact were way more than that pier was ever designed to withstand. It’s a truss bridge, which relies on all those beams above the road interacting amongst themselves to be in compression to support the weight. Any disturbance of the loading on those beams immediately stresses the joints in ways they were never engineered to withstand.

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  6. I read that there was construction going on at that time (1:30 AM) so the traffic was minimal. You can see the construction trucks with flashing lights. I pray for those construction workers who obviously fell with the bridge.
    If it had occurred during this mornings rush hour hundreds of people would have perished.

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  7. This is going to be a problem for years to come. I wonder how much in emergency infrastructure spending the democrats are going to insist we need to do immediately. This will probably be good for at least another trillion on the deficit and fund all kinds of additional boondoggles that only benefit urban democrats.

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  8. Jethro
    TUESDAY, 26 MARCH 2024, 9:17 AT 9:17 AM

    You are correct. I actually read the Wikipedia story after I posted my comment. I didn’t realize it was the ship hitting the support columns that caused the collapse. You would have thought there would be better impact protection for such a critical structural component. Or maybe pilot tugs .

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  9. @Jethro:

    The basic physics of it is F=MA

    There wasn’t much acceleration going on there. Respectfully, wouldn’t the useful calculation be
    Kinetic Energy=(mass*velocityΒ²)/2?

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  10. Tony R – I’m no engineer, but I’ve watched enough “Engineering Disasters” shows to know that these folks like to build at the edge of functionality in order to be creative and innovative, and “resilient” is rarely on the agenda. I guarantee that within a decade there will be an episode on this incident and the focus will be on the vulnerability of the piers supporting it. I have seen several bridge collapse episodes in which poor pier construction or poor pier protection were the key factors. Targeted terrorism by democrats is never cited, but that was never the concern it is today.

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  11. God bless and help all those that fell into the river, that they may be safe and rescued.

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  12. The magnitude of a is small, but the mass is Yuge! The integral of force through a distance equals energy, which in this case equals the kinetic energy of the ship, one half MV squared, assuming the ship comes to a complete stop. All is heat.

    Logic. QED.

  13. Just a machinist here, but that bridge did not collapse at logical stress points. When we watched this morning for the first time I told the wife, no Fing way.

    Videos can be doctored. But I just watched one in slow motion that showed charges going off. I’m not sayen that’s what happened. But it does make a lot of sense in regards to the way the thing came down.

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