Re: Full video of ship hitting and destroying the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore

On 2024-03-29 16:21, bud-- wrote:

On 3/29/2024 5:18 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 29/03/2024 06:06, UFO wrote:

>
Out of all the hours it sailed in operation, maintenance checks were all fine
then out of the blue not 1 but 3 power failures, and not out in the middle of the ocean
from harms way...just close enough to a bridge and hit the weakest spot. What a
"fluke"

>
Hardly. Murphy's law can apply IRL. Dirty fuel seems quite plausible.
>
The bridge was *designed* to fail catastrophically if anything hit one of its main supports which is unforgivable on a bridge that is over a waterway leading to one of the busiest Atlantic ports in America.

 Bridges would not similarly fail when you take out a pier for a major span?

On some bridges, only the spans directly supported by that pier fall, not all.

 

>
Most big bridges in first world countries have buffer islands and underwater structures to deflect and/or slow a large vessel to prevent them from impacting any of the key support structures near a live shipping channel. The ship may ground and be damaged and the bridge shaken by that impact but that should be about the limit of what can happen to a properly designed bridge in these circumstances.

 The United States Secretary of Transportation (Buttigieg) has said he doesn't know of any bridge that could withstand a similar hit. Hard to imagine how you could protect from the energy in such a massive ship.

With a massive island, but that reduces the passage for ships, which then have more chances to crashing into it, and impairs traffic.
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Cheers,
        Carlos E.R.