A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water.
At about 1.30am, a vessel crashed into the bridge, catching fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the water below, according to a video posted on X.
“All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge. Traffic is being detoured,” the Maryland Transportation Authority posted on X.
Matthew West, a petty officer first class for the coastguard in Baltimore, told the New York Times that the coastguard received a report of an impact at 1.27am ET. West said the Dali, a 948ft (29 metres) Singapore-flagged cargo ship, had hit the bridge, which is part of Interstate 695.
I’m pretty sure no bridge is designed to survive a collision with a large cargo ship, even a brand new one. It would balloon the cost so much nobody would be willing to pay it.
New bridges are built with protections such as pylons to prevent ships from even getting close to bumping into the bridge after the sunshine skyway bridge collapse of 1980.
In this case I’m not sure it would have mattered. This wasn’t a bump or a glancing blow. There’s not much which will deflect or absorb that much energy head on.
I disagree, the geometry of protection dolphins use would deflect the ship enough to change its trajectory towards the walls of the channel bed where the ship would run aground before striking the bridge even from a head on collision.
What is a geometry protection dolphin?
They are concrete or wooden structures that are piled deep into the ground like fondation foundation pylons on skyscrapers. The geometry part I was just referring to how they are angled in such a way it ricochets the ship away from the structure it’s protecting or towards the channel.
So why on earth didn’t the bridge have these?
If I had to speculate? Cost savings… The bridge already had a history of cost reductions such as originally being built with a shared approach way which vastly increased the risk of head on collisions.
So in their effort to save money, they got 6 people killed and now have to spend presumably much more on a whole new bridge…
A. It did, just only a few and the investigation will probably reveal not enough based on giant ships these days.
B. It was built before the Sunshine bridge collapse in 1980 so before the standards were updated.
I believe it refers to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)
This makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!
I suspect there’ll be a lot of places taking a good long look at their current chunks of concrete they put around bridge supports and wondering how they’d stand up to the monstrous ships that are now the norm.
This kind of incident may not happen often but it does happen.
I imagine a lot of places may wonder about this and then kick that can down the road until someone does actually collide with their bridge.
!remindme 40 years.
A bridge is quite different to a pylon though.
Literally a block of concrete embedded in the sea floor.