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"Luckily" this was not during rush-hour..
Unluckily it was at night, so an already disorienting situation is going to be harder and any already difficult rescue is going to be hampered further. It will be a miracle if any meaningful % of those who fell in the water survived.
Of course it’s still tragic and awful.
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Judging by the footage with the bridge being over water and the temperature in Baltimore near freezing, I would guess no they are not. The outcome of this is going to be very unpleasant.
I just watched the footage. It's pretty horrifying. The whole bridge collapsed in a few seconds. It's a pretty long drop down to the water. Anyone on that bridge ended up in the water with little/no warning. That drop alone would injure/kill many. And immediately after people would be in cold water still locked in their vehicles. The water there was deep enough to be able to deal with loaded container ships. So, tens…
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A course is set through the middle, side thrusters, rudders, and|or engines fail or falter, and current drifts the ship into the bridge pylon. Ships in water tend to move and keep moving, engines and thrusters work to vector that motion into a desired direction - when things fail motion doesn't cease and courses aren't maintained.
The best quote from Mass Effect: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!
Somehow I find it surprising how completely the bridge collapsed after the damage. I understand that a container ship collision is serious, but you could imagine a scenarios where the bridge slumps or buckles but doesn’t just disintegrate like that. It’s surprising that ships capable of doing this damage were probably regularly driving past it, and its safety as a thoroughfare depended entirely on those collisions no…
When any piece in the chain of those forces breaks, the entire structure loses ability to transfer forces and breaks.
This arrangement is what allows us to build these structures in the first place. There is careful calculations of forces and risks and allowance for margin for error and unexpected events. But, unfortunately, in many cases those do not include ramming things with a large container ship...
Somehow I find it surprising how completely the bridge collapsed after the damage. I understand that a container ship collision is serious, but you could imagine a scenarios where the bridge slumps or buckles but doesn’t just disintegrate like that. It’s surprising that ships capable of doing this damage were probably regularly driving past it, and its safety as a thoroughfare depended entirely on those collisions no…
Not all bridges are this vulnerable to a single impact. This one, opened 12 years earlier, has a different style and mostly survived a cargo ship impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_Bridge_disaster
Somehow I find it surprising how completely the bridge collapsed after the damage. I understand that a container ship collision is serious, but you could imagine a scenarios where the bridge slumps or buckles but doesn’t just disintegrate like that. It’s surprising that ships capable of doing this damage were probably regularly driving past it, and its safety as a thoroughfare depended entirely on those collisions no…
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Why would slumping or buckling but not-quite-collapsing be a functionally better outcome than complete failure? In both cases, the sheer size of the physical changes is going to lead to forces that humans won't survive, so there's no benefit there. In both cases, the bridge is going to have to be completely demolished before rebuilding, so there's no benefit there. A bridge that could stand the loss of a single suppo…
>Why would slumping or buckling but not-quite-collapsing be a functionally better outcome than complete failure? Well for starters, there's a better chance of less (or ideally no) people forced to get their feet wet and go missing or die from drowning or hypothermia.
The broader point is that attempts to blame the bridge designers here are misplaced. It really isn't reasonable to have hoped that they could design a structure that could cope with this kind of failure, within the cost constraints that they had. And cost constraints were a real thing for the designers of this particular bridge.
I had a hunch this was the bridge featured in The Wire s2e1, "Ebb Tide". Classic McNulty; a great season opener. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebb_Tide_(The_Wire)
Greatest tv series ever. And when you rewatch it, you notice new things.
Aside from the new story details I caught and the general great acting, I was struck by how the series captured a the technology transition going on at the time. Payphones and typewriters shift to classic feature phones and PCs with CRTs. Then camera phones enter the picture.
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Modern bridges are required to endure a collision. This bridge might be very old and not sufficiently maintained against current requirements.
It opened in 1977. So, oldish, but not that old. Plenty of far older bridges around than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_(Balt...