151–160 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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As long as people are still in the water, I would be reluctant to use it for political gains, but you do you.
Last thing was not perfect.
Oh, this makes me feel bad for Baltimore. Only bad news seem to come out of this town. Its reputation -- both domestically and internationally -- is mostly informed by The Wire, Freddie Gray/BLM, a dysfunctional city government, the 2019 ransomeware attack, the spoiled batch of J&J Covid vaccine... and now this. It's a real shame. It's a good place.
Hopkins is huge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks! So why are huge—ass container ships allowed to navigate underneath fragile public bridges with single points of failure? The not unlikely worst case is that the ship is out of control for some reason…
Vertical clearance for ship traffic might have been the reason this kind of bridge was built in the first place. Otherwise, something lower and more causeway-like might have been sufficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks! So why are huge—ass container ships allowed to navigate underneath fragile public bridges with single points of failure? The not unlikely worst case is that the ship is out of control for some reason…
Edit: of course there are a ton of other solutions here as well. I am disagreeing with the parent that it is the cars which should get to stay and the container ships which have to move.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! So why are huge—ass container ships allowed to navigate underneath fragile public bridges with single points of failure? The not unlikely worst case is that the ship is out of control for some reason…
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.
Not that it matters to anyone else, but having driven across that bridge dozens of times with my kids, this is just shocking. It’s one of the main corridors in the area. Thank god it happened in the middle of the night, though that’ll be no consolation to the families of those who may have died.
Edit: Maybe I'm just tired and need more sleep.
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…
You could try to avoid collisions with barriers, or make the bridge fail differently (only a few spans), or make it tolerant to a single support failing. But you need a pretty beefy steel beam to survive a direct hit by... Uh... 200,000t(??) traveling even at a slow jogging pace. (And then it transfers the energy into the rest of the bridge, which will very much not like it). I guess we can be happy failure like this…
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…
Check out Brick Immortar (it’s a pun) on YouTube for some in depth videos on past container ship collisions with bridges and how newer bridges are engineered.
It's pretty similar to this one.