191–200 of 1001 posts
small blessing it happened late at night, so hopefully the casualty numbers are low...
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"but could you call it well-engineered" If it is still standing after 1000 years, I would say yes. You cannot build a bridge out of stones with bad engineering - it would collapse under its own weight. edit: does "well engineered" now means over engineered to some?
"If it is still standing after 1000 years, I would say yes" but what if they included far more material in areas where it wasn't needed, skimped on other areas and it fell down tomorrow? It's almost a philosophical question, and it's true that the bridge builders happened across a solid design by accident. But I think the true definition of engineering has to encompass a level of efficiency through design, calculatio…
But then one must make clear: necessary for what.
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Already roughly 75 edits since the collapse.
It makes me wonder what goes through someone's head when one sees a mass casualty event like this, and your first instinct is to rush to Wikipedia to change the article to past tense ('was' a bridge).
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Not unlikely? Can you point us to all the other times this has happened? You must know of several given your knowledge of how obviously likely this is.
It's not especially common, but the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa Bay is a famous example. Similar circumstances - it collapsed after being hit by a ship.
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“Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.” And in practice only bridges that "barely" stand are economically viable
> only bridges that "barely" stand are economically viable That really depends on what is counted as part of the economy and who is doing the valuing.
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If bridges and container ships indeed do not go together (something I don't necessarily agree with), you probably want to take away the public bridge and continue to let ships go by. This is economically speaking for the area. Car traffic is just not very efficient in the comparison between the two. Edit: of course there are a ton of other solutions here as well. I am disagreeing with the parent that it is the cars w…
You can have smaller container ships. Or have the port outside the bridge. Or indeed replace the bridge with a tunnel, or a better bridge. Amsterdam has no bridges at all crossing the IJ on the west side (where sea-going ships come from) and only a single bridge on the east side (though there's often talk of adding another). Everything is tunnels. Rotterdam has bridges (including the famous Erasmusbrug), but only eas…
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/as-residents-leave-balti...
>“There’s a lot of people staying [in those cities] and we want to be sure they’re not left with an excess of infrastructure that’s impossible to maintain,” he said. “So what do we do about it?”
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On a long enough timeline we all get rammed by a container ship. I would be interested to know some calculations with factors like: expected bridge lifetime, chance of being rammed per year, cost of making supports strong enough plus an extra safety margin to survive maximum ramming force, cost of having major commercial shipping route unusable for an extended period.
Bridges only last for roughly 50 years. Considering such collisions are rare enough to make the news as a memorable event you can workout for yourself that the odds are quite low over a bridges lifespan. They are designed to withstand smaller boat impacts because they occur relatively frequently, but cost vs benefit on rare events that are difficult to mitigate is quite different.
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…
Most bridges nowadays (say last century) depend on a careful balance of forces that are transferred through a chain of members in tension and compression. 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 fo…
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It is worth observing that this bridge seems to have 2 pylons and one of them collapsed. The failure seems comprehensible after that - you can see in the video how the balances came apart, there is nothing to hold the left side up so it falls and then remainder of the bridge tried to rotate around the remaining pylon and failed.
It's no surprise that the entire bridge collapses after a pylon collapses. What surprises me is that the pylon collapses. I'd expect those to be extremely solid, with tons of padding. But with ships getting bigger and bigger, I guess there's a limit to what you can account for.
A container ship has huge inertia, I don't think any bridge could be built to take a direct hit like that.
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Already roughly 75 edits since the collapse.
What impressed me was that it looks like openstreetmap shows the bridge as down already. https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/39.2144/-76.5279
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/149163336#map=15/39....
> Bridge collapse after being stuck by container ship - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/maryland-b...
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/149162713#map=18/39....
> Tag bridge as destroyed and ruins
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/149168397#map=14/39....
* https://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=15/39.2182/-76.512...