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That's insane. I heard about this on NPR this morning, but I didn't picture the bridge being so big. Glad it was early when there weren't hundreds more people on it.

At least something good will come of it then

To your last comment, ships never just boop. It smothers.

Let's say 100k tons for a ship, and make it long tons to make it an even 100,000,000kg. This ship was moving roughly 4m/s... Thus the kinetic energy was somewhere around 800 MJ. A stick of dynamite is about 1MJ.

I'm pretty sure 800 sticks of dynamite could've fucked that support up pretty good, too, bringing down the bridge deck.

It's more like either you give up on bridges or give up on ships if you are concerned about the two coexisting and breaking stuff in a low speed collision.

At the risk of sounding too Clarke and Dawe, it is very rare that a ship loses power and control, and somewhere it could hit something important, and hits that thing, and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces. It's been there for 46 years, and the Port of Baltimore currently sees an average of 53 ships in and out per month, so about 3.5 big ships under the bridge per day. That's a lot of passages over the years without incident.

Cause then we would have to hire more people to tug all those ships in and it would be less efficient.

Not very profit margin of you to suggest that.

Politics.

"More tug jobs? Not on my watch!"

https://westpacmarine.com/samples/hypothermia_chart.php

Loss of consciousness is expected to occur within 30-60 minutes and death is expected within 1-3 hours at those water temps. I would assume none of the victims were wearing personal flotation devices, so rescue of anyone else seems highly unlikely.

I’ll wear a t-shirt outside for 10 minutes when it’s 47 degrees outside. But 47 is a whole new level of cold when it’s water.

I have a little pond in the yard, so I occasionally have to reach in there throughout the year. Right now it’s close to that 47F mark, and it’s like past “this is cold” to “this hurts!”

Water temp of 47 can be lethal very quickly.

Water cools the body about 25 times faster than air of the same temp. A diver in 70-degree water may go blue in the lips even with a wetsuit. 47 degrees will have your body going numb super quickly. Then you lose dexterity and start having muscle cramps all over. You lose the ability to swim away or even tread water.

It's bad.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Atlanta,+Georgia/Bangor,+maine/@39.22529,-76.645258,11z/data=!4m8!4m7!1m2!1m1!1s0x88f5045d6993098d:0x66fede2f990b630b!1m2!1m1!1s0x4cae4b46101129bd:0x4d0918b0a7af7677!3e0

It looks like long-distance traffic would normally take the remaining bridge over I-895 rather than over I-695, though I suppose it'll be more congested now due to more traffic having to pass over it.

Nope. You did great. Our rules state that a post must contain a link to an article. Keeping the video as primary, and adding a link as the comment suffices. We usually don't give the warning, but I felt that your post added good context for the news surrounding the breaking news.

I learned recently that in engineering there’s a saying that anyone can build a bridge that will stand, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands.

Which seems dark, but bridges are built on budgets while adhering to aesthetic, material, and site/traffic (on, under, and sometimes over) requirements.

And besides, that ship was between 210 to 257 million pounds, traveling at whatever speed it was going. I’m not a physicist, but I recon that’s enough force to knock down a bridge. (As evidenced.)