Baltimore Bridge

[Alex]

Dreadful photos of a major bridge collapse in Baltimore, a large container ship collided with it and it just collapsed.  The first thought in my mind was terrorists, but the police have said there's no indication of terrorism.

[klondike]

The ship seems to have only just left port. The video shows it simply heading directly at a bridge support. Difficult to guess a reason. Anybody going into the water is unlikely to survive and there were people working on the bridge as well as any vehicles crossing at the time. It all went down in a matter of seconds after the collision.

[Ruthio]

Dreadful, just dreadful

[Diasi]

From the video clips on the news the bridge structure doesn't look overly substantial.

[Raven]

From the video clips on the news the bridge structure doesn't look overly substantial.

That's my thoughts as well, seemed to come apart very easily.

[Diasi]

Having seen more footage it confirms, to me, that it was a piss-poor construction with supports that resemble wallpaper pasting table supports.

[klondike]

It's managed to survive nearly 50 years. Perhaps they didn't plan on a ship weighing thousands of tons ramming right into a support?

[Diasi]

It's managed to survive nearly 50 years. Perhaps they didn't plan on a ship weighing thousands of tons ramming right into a support?

But that's part of the design & planning, or should be. You can't design things on the basis of "that will never happen".

[klondike]

I doubt many bridges would survive a ship that size hitting a support head on although it certainly went down spectacularly.

[Scrumpy]

The footage I saw was harrowing.. Those poor people on the bridge.. Incredibly sad..

[JBR]

It was suggested that just before the collision, the lights on the ship went out.  That suggests the possibility of some breakdown in systems which may also have made the ship unsteerable or uncontrollable.

That bridge is going to take some fixing, and everything will have to be cleared away before anything can sail into or out of the port.

[Diasi]

It was suggested that just before the collision, the lights on the ship went out.  That suggests the possibility of some breakdown in systems which may also have made the ship unsteerable or uncontrollable.

That bridge is going to take some fixing, and everything will have to be cleared away before anything can sail into or out of the port.

If that was the case there must have been a failure in both systems as I understand those ships are required to have two systems to mitigate the failure of one system.

[klondike]

Whatever safeguards are supposed to be in place it's pretty obvious that they didn't work. Hopefully the inquiry will find out what went wrong. 

[Diasi]

Whatever safeguards are supposed to be in place it's pretty obvious that they didn't work. Hopefully the inquiry will find out what went wrong.

Indeed, it's obvious that a few things went wrong.

[klondike]

I've only read bits but apparently the law requires there to be two pilots. Most videos start at the collision but the first I saw was from well before that. It's impossible to say if it was under power or capable of being steered but it was heading what looked to be directly for the support for quite a while. I'm aware that big ships take a long time to change direction though so can't really guess what went wrong.