Board 8 > Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore just collapsed.

(+) Yeah! (+)

FFDragon posted...

Thanks. I'm just kind of having an existential crisis right now. That bridge just was Baltimore.

Yes, this is how I feel as well. When I was still working, I would go over that bridge daily. It was one of those structures that was just a given that it would always be there. Its a weird feeling, like a part of home is missing now. I cant help but wonder if this empty feeling is similar to how people in New York must have felt after the towers collapsed. Different situation obviously, but just that visual of something massive in your city being gone now.

FFDragon posted...

Oh my God I drove over that yesterday morning

Legit first person I thought about as well, glad you're physically safe but I can't imagine how devastating this is. Like my thoughts go towards basics resources like food and water, how are they coming into the city and how much will the delay affect price? How easy is it for trucks to get through now? Related to that, how bad will supermarkets get? Of course billions will be lost and jobs that can be work from home are gonna spike if possible but something like this has to impact everything.

Underleveled posted...

One of the biggest concerns with the closure of the Washington Bridge that I haven't seen mentioned here is how it will affect emergency vehicles. Not sure if there are hospitals on both sides of the Key Bridge.

This scares me too. I don't know the city like that, but I've been around hospital closures before and that is its own nightmare.

Glad you're okay FFD! Hope the other people you know and love are okay too, and I know "okay" is carrying a lot of weight given the situation but I'm glad you're safe.

Glad you're okay, FFD.

This is such a board 8 thread, with so many regulars checking on the ppl we knew from the area, and then immediately we have an expert in bridge engineering showing up to enlighten us about the issue.

Holy shit

Glad youre safe but god fucking damn

That's insane. I drive over bridges for work weekly and having to think how much more I'd have to drive if it was out is crazy.

Hope everyone is okay.

thx thx all

Yeah I knew we had a concrete expert (dante), but didn't know we had actual bridge expert until now!

Kinglicious posted...

How easy is it for trucks to get through now?

The key bridge was the main route for anything hazmat, including even things like propane. They absolutely can not go through the Harbor or Ft McHenry tunnels, or most parts of the city proper, so they are going to have to go the long, long way around.

... Damn. That's potentially a massive spike on the price of goods. Food, oil, water. At least most of the cold is over but just basic needs are gonna get hit hard and it just compounds.

Man, that's terrifying. RIP to the victims. I hope the government can give some aid in alleviating at least some of the economic and social impact in the following years.

One of my friends put everything into a lot better perspective than I've been able to:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3bff303b.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e46e506f.jpg

FFDragon posted...

Yeah I knew we had a concrete expert (dante), but didn't know we had actual bridge expert until now!

Feels kinda weird being called an expert in anything when I'm not some renowned engineer, not gonna lie lol. Though I guess compared to the average person, this is true.

Might be something of a sidebar, but I've also been in the center of this type of thing before - I work for the Georgia DOT and was on the team that designed the fix for the interstate bridge that collapsed in Atlanta when a homeless person started a fire under the bridge that had a ton of PVC conduit stored underneath it. Obviously not the same situation or the same cause, but I've experienced what it's like when all the fingers turn around and start pointing at you lol. So I'd just advise that once the emotions wear off and people begin to look for someone to take responsibility, make sure that you take news stories and things you hear from people with a grain of salt and try to react proportionately to the news that comes out and is verified. Because it can get rough out there lol.

The conspiracy theories are honestly the easy ones to deal with, they ranged from GDOT doing it on purpose to funnel money to a contractor (which is wrong, but at least plausible) to GDOT doing it to kill poor people and cut them off from each other as a first step in the rich forming a new world order. It's ridiculous that they gained traction at all, but they were easier to combat.

Local media was honestly the biggest issue and created misinformation (probably unknowingly) due to just not knowing enough about the topic and racing to be the first one to get the story out. There was one channel that was really interested in painting us as grossly negligent (more than we already were for storing the damn PVC under the bridge) and tried to use stuff from inspection reports of the bridge to simultaneously say that we were negligent in maintaining the bridge, and that we aren't inspecting well enough because we said it was in good condition yet it collapsed. When the reality is they didn't understand how to interpret inspection reports (and that no bridge is going to survive an hours-long chemical fire), but the people that heard their reporting didn't know that so people constantly went after us over what they heard on the news. Another channel claimed that we were just taking the rubble from the bridge, wrapping it in reinforced fiber material, and just putting the bridge back up like that with no other remediation. Which to this day I do not understand how they could have in good faith thought that's what we were doing, but we had to do a ton of PR just to convince people we weren't idiots after that. My personal favorite was when we got the bridge opened faster than we said we would, then everyone pivoted from "DOT's going to take years to fix this it'll take forever they're so dumb" to "No, no, no, that was too fast, this bridge can't be safe."

All that to say that I hope everyone's able to be careful with what's reported and advise people they know to do the same. These high profile collapses always follow the same pattern, and this one appears to be no different.

In this case I think it's obvious the problem was with the ship not with the bridge at least. There are people who will think bridges need to be able to survive a (super rough napkin calc) 3 megaton force, equal to 150 Nagasaki bombs exploding at once. But I don't think that idea will last.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1772619621457154389

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1772638319744029052

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1772636845869814153

don't worry, they've already begun and I'm fuming

If it's any consolation, I have been seeing near universal disdain for this horrific reporting even from the right. I'm sure Newsmax will be pushing forward because that's literally the only reason they exist, but Fox will probably back down hard.

Didn't we already have confirmation that the power just failed on the steering? The conspiracies will probably shift full Boeing to whoever the manufacturer is.

foolm0r0n posted...

In this case I think it's obvious the problem was with the ship not with the bridge at least. There are people who will think bridges need to be able to survive a (super rough napkin calc) 3 megaton force, equal to 150 Nagasaki bombs exploding at once. But I don't think that idea will last.

you're only off by at lesst four orders of magnitude, assuming the ship was completely filled with iron. you can tell because the city is still there

those are some incredibly dumb takes to the point that any rage is wasted, they just want clicks/engagement and will politicize anything, especially in an election year. aka, they're professional trolls.

TomNook posted...

What kind of safety measures are going to stop 165,000 tons of force with that much momentum?

The ships are what need better safety measures, because no bridge pillar is surviving that.

Disagree.

They need to make it so these mega-ships don't go under bridges like this. That's the safety hazard. There's a reason they used to have drawbridges, and probably will go back to here if they can't find another way.

Absolutely mortifying. Certainly makes me scared to traverse any harbor bridge... but thankfully I live nowhere near one. Thoughts and hugs to the friends and families of those who lost their lives.

And my mind immediately went to Stifled and FFD... glad you both are okay!

a drawbridge won't help when they hit the support, unless you want a drawbridge where the support are all over land, which is both insane and doesn't address this at all

I spent two years covering Baltimore's news programs as one of their primary caption writers for WBAL, so this definitely struck me deeply. I'm sure not only is the immediate aftermath going to be crippling for Baltimore, its port and transportation in general, but also the longterm environmental effects could be significant. I'm sure the NTSB will launch an investigation immediately.

President Biden vowed to cover the expenses of rebuilding the bridge, but I can't imagine what the price tag would be, nor the timeframe involved. The sheer scope of that project seems pretty mind-boggling. I'm curious if the funds for this will come from the infrastructure act or what.

BlueCrystalTear posted...

Disagree.

They need to make it so these mega-ships don't go under bridges like this. That's the safety hazard. There's a reason they used to have drawbridges, and probably will go back to here if they can't find another way.

Absolutely mortifying. Certainly makes me scared to traverse any harbor bridge... but thankfully I live nowhere near one. Thoughts and hugs to the friends and families of those who lost their lives.

And my mind immediately went to Stifled and FFD... glad you both are okay!

Think about how many times a day that boats like these travel under bridges with no problem a day. How many times this happens without issue year after year.

This is a freak thing where it appears the boat had a major issue that prevented it from stopping or being controlled properly.

And a drawbridge doesn't help when the boat can't control where it's going and runs into a major support beam.

It's just a tragic, awful series of events that led to this. And if anything, they should be leveling changes to whatever system they used with the boat that malfunctioned like that.

NFUN posted...

you're only off by at lesst four orders of magnitude, assuming the ship was completely filled with iron. you can tell because the city is still there

I used 150k tons (but I see now it was more like 100k tons) moving at 8 knots. Oh and I completely ignored the exponent on the joules-to-megatons conversion... So it's more like 1/150000 Nagasakis. That's more reasonable to expect a bridge to resist I suppose.

PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

Think about how many times a day that boats like these travel under bridges with no problem a day. How many times this happens without issue year after year.

I mean, the problem isn't that an accident is extremely unlikely, it's the fact that it only needs to happen ONCE for it to be a major disaster.

Like, I feel this way about nuclear power. A nuclear power plant is extremely safe, and when properly run shouldn't have any major accidents that would lead to a devastating meltdown. But what if, across decades of use, there's some people who run it who shouldn't be and they make mistakes (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl), or some freak accident or disaster eventually occurs (Fukushima)? Then what? You have a colossal disaster that you can't take back. If you have something that's going to be running for years and years eventually something is going to go wrong, and if that something is a thing that is going to be so absurdly damaging, that's when you need to start having the conversation about if it's worth doing at all. I don't like the idea of simply going, "Well, we don't have to worry about a grave catastrophe negatively impacting thousands of lives and costing us billions of dollars as long as a very unlikely accident doesn't occur within a 40-year time frame". Like, that's long enough for it to happen.

a drawbridge can't really help this situation, bridge is way too long and the issue is that it hit a specific structure dead on. like it could've gone anywhere hundreds of meters away but it happened to hit this specific point that was critical to it holding any structure whatsoever. if you're looking for some kind of 'safety' on this the first thought would be a physical, dense blockage directly in front so that it can slow down/stop a ship in this situation. a more bureaucratic solution would be tight regulations over the waters a set distance from the bridge but i don't know what that could look like or what's already there. and finally for reconstruction you could try to have other areas be more structurally isolated/segmented so you'd get a partial collapse in the worst case but there's way better people in this topic who can talk about how feasible that is (surprisingly and thankfully).

based on how important the bridge is to baltimore the ships absolutely need to go under, it's essential transport. just a question of what can be done to make this kind of freak occurrence happen even fewer times and not as catastrophic.

Wanglicious posted...

based on how important the bridge is to baltimore the ships absolutely need to go under, it's essential transport. just a question of what can be done to make this kind of freak occurrence happen even fewer times and not as catastrophic.

Yeah. I understand that due to so many reasons that you can't just NOT have shipping containers travel under the bridge. It's still so uncomfortable to think about that it could JUST happen though. Even if it was a one-in-a-million chance, how many millions of ships pass underneath that each year?

I'd be interested to know what safeguards there WERE in place already before the collapse. How many things had to fail in order for this to happen?

Grand_Kirby posted...

If you have something that's going to be running for years and years eventually something is going to go wrong, and if that something is a thing that is going to be so absurdly damaging, that's when you need to start having the conversation about if it's worth doing at all.

You always have that conversation, whether it's a $10 thing that's gonna last 5 minutes or a $10 billion thing that's gonna last 5 decades, and it's about expected value (% chance times cost). That's what engineering is all about.

We know how much cost, death, pollution, radiation Fukushima/Three Mile/Chernobyl caused, and it's far less than what fossil fuel plants cause (per unit of energy). That makes it easily worth it, even if modern plants didn't reduce the risks by orders of magnitude, which they have.

It's way more dangerous to say that 1 big catastrophe is too scary, therefore we can't do it, and instead have to stick with the thing that's 10x worse overall but it's distributed daily so we don't notice (frog in boiling water). Whether it's 1 big event or 10000 little ones, the planet and people and economy still die just the same. The only thing that's saved by the 10000 option is human sanity. There is value to that but it doesn't outweigh the cost.

Grand_Kirby posted...

Yeah. I understand that due to so many reasons that you can't just NOT have shipping containers travel under the bridge. It's still so uncomfortable to think about that it could JUST happen though. Even if it was a one-in-a-million chance, how many millions of ships pass underneath that each year?

I'd be interested to know what safeguards there WERE in place already before the collapse. How many things had to fail in order for this to happen?

this approach i think is more fair, basically going too far in the other direction will end up hurting millions of people in way too many ways to count (food, gas, oil, transport, employment, air quality due to more cars, etc) because of concern of a freak situation. if there's a 100 ton boat floating along a port city that means the place is also receiving 100 tons of materials and there's no feasible way of doing this on land. so transport will continue no matter what and while you can try to minimize the dangers (another bureaucratic check could be more strict safety checks for any large transport) but you need a functional city and a way to get goods to different areas on land. to some extent the city could throw in a bunch of ferries to try to ease the transition but it's not going to be an easy decade.

Grand_Kirby posted...

I mean, the problem isn't that an accident is extremely unlikely, it's the fact that it only needs to happen ONCE for it to be a major disaster.

Like, I feel this way about nuclear power. A nuclear power plant is extremely safe, and when properly run shouldn't have any major accidents that would lead to a devastating meltdown. But what if, across decades of use, there's some people who run it who shouldn't be and they make mistakes (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl), or some freak accident or disaster eventually occurs (Fukushima)? Then what? You have a colossal disaster that you can't take back. If you have something that's going to be running for years and years eventually something is going to go wrong, and if that something is a thing that is going to be so absurdly damaging, that's when you need to start having the conversation about if it's worth doing at all. I don't like the idea of simply going, "Well, we don't have to worry about a grave catastrophe negatively impacting thousands of lives and costing us billions of dollars as long as a very unlikely accident doesn't occur within a 40-year time frame". Like, that's long enough for it to happen.

sure, but if in both cases you make the status quo optimal system worse than the colossal fuck up over large timescales, you've just completely lost

ie what foolmo said

Wanglicious posted...

this approach i think is more fair, basically going too far in the other direction will end up hurting millions of people in way too many ways to count (food, gas, oil, transport, employment, air quality due to more cars, etc) because of concern of a freak situation. if there's a 100 ton boat floating along a port city that means the place is also receiving 100 tons of materials and there's no feasible way of doing this on land. so transport will continue no matter what and while you can try to minimize the dangers (another bureaucratic check could be more strict safety checks for any large transport) but you need a functional city and a way to get goods to different areas on land. to some extent the city could throw in a bunch of ferries to try to ease the transition but it's not going to be an easy decade.

Couldn't trains get the job done fairly effectively? It'd require a proper rail infrastructure, of course, but that has its own upsides like boosting tourism as well.

Based on the map of the bridge earlier, some places seem pretty much isolated from the mainland. I also honestly don't think most cities in the US are capable of major rail projects without taking at least 10, 20 years, especially if it's (re)making entire transit paths.

I cannot imagine the number of trains it would take to equal that single cargo ship.

And what's the option here?

Moving the port to somewhere less inland and using trains to get everything from that new location to everywhere?

Or keeping the port as far inland as possible and simply not bridging the waterway at all and using trains to make the now-unbridged areas more accessible?

Either requires an incomprehensible amount of effort to solve a problem that can simply be solved by 'letting boats pass below bridges'

Seems like the best option is to avoid ships hitting bridges. If it just needed some more tug boats to avoid the crash, then require more tug boats for things like this.

So what's the death toll looking like?

It sounds like just some workers on the bridge and a few vehicles are all it ended up being? Like maybe single digits or a couple dozen?

That's obviously really horrifying for those people, but when I saw the bridge collapsing I thought it was a packed bridge full of cars - that would be truly nightmarish.

CoolCly posted...

That's obviously really horrifying for those people, but when I saw the bridge collapsing I thought it was a packed bridge full of cars - that would be truly nightmarish.

The time it happened at certainly mitigated the death toll considerably.

Also the boat called in a mayday ahead of time so access to the bridge was already being cut off. Not sure why the workers werent told to get off the bridge though (or maybe they were but hadnt made it all the way yet?)

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

This is awful, and the braindead conspiracies have already started.

I'm going to worry about them trying to find survivors before I concern myself with the whys and wherefores. Besides, they've got people who are going to board the vessel and figure out what went down.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Also the boat called in a mayday ahead of time so access to the bridge was already being cut off. Not sure why the workers werent told to get off the bridge though (or maybe they were but hadnt made it all the way yet?)

We'll need to wait until the full investigation comes out, but there probably wasn't enough time. The fact that were still some cars on the bridge even after they closed it means that the time between that and the collapse was very short. And while people driving could make it off in that timeframe, the people who were on foot working on the bridge probably had no chance.

FFDragon posted...

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1772619621457154389

don't worry, they've already begun and I'm fuming

Clearly they're talking about the wide open border between Baltimore City and Baltimore County, which this bridge was part of.

I really wish I hadn't clicked on that. Just a cesspool of degeneracy and complete lunacy. It's terrifying that people like this actually exist.

Oh that's nothing. I saw multiple relatively famous people straight-up say anti-white racism/DEI is to blame.

ulti and wang are 100% right here it's best to just pretend those nutters don't exist right now

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/5/50b1f4b0.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/29c97309.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/d5fc9249.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/0940fa8e.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/383f1e59.jpg

not sure if any of these are good representations of a Metal Mount Rushmore but the text on the last one is some of the best I think I've ever seen on an AI image, holy shit

Wrong topic, Zen >_>

Glad our baltimore people are safe, also glad we have a bridge engineer on staff who could explain the situation well.

I don't think theres a possible way to have a runaway container ship hit your bridge and survive. at absolute best, you'd have some redundancy in there to have it be a ductile failure, aka "running time", which didn't exist here. The problem there, is I imagine it'd add more piers, which limits ship traffic for a major port (and ironically makes these events more likely, with more targets).

also: north dakota has zero operating commercial nuclear power plants. I realize I'm like 40 posts late but I felt this needed to be said

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1520710e.jpg

@ZenOfThunder Oh my goodness, no one is going to hold this against you but...

FFDragon posted...

ulti and wang are 100% right here it's best to just pretend those nutters don't exist right now

They follow and signal boost those kinds of people so they're just virtue signalling right now. But yes at this moment they are right.

I'm sorry, but reading through this than seeing Zen's post made me laugh pretty hard.