Reply to Key bridge in Baltimore collapses after cargo ship crashes into it

Forum Index » Metropolitan Baltimore

Reply to "Key bridge in Baltimore collapses after cargo ship crashes into it"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am not going to get the image of the bridge plunging into the water so fast out of my head. It was so, so fast.

To the people suggesting that the bridge was shoddily designed or constructed -- that's like blaming the person who built a house if a semi truck accidentally drove through the living room window. You can't build things that are impervious to catastrophic events. Whatever failures occurred here (and there were likely several) they don't lie with the people who designed and built that bridge. And by the way, those same people will be responsible for rebuilding it, and may have known the work crew who was on the bridge and likely lost lives, so next time perhaps think a little harder before weighing in.[/quote]

The ship weighed ~100,000 tons. It was moving at 9 knots so about 4.5 meters/sec. That gives it a momentum of 450,000,000 newton/sec. Momentum in a collision is largely conserved, so all that momentum was transferred to a single bridge support. I’ll let the bridge engineer tell us how big a support would need to be to withstand that amount of force/sec.[/quote]

Yep.  Container ship sizes have doubled in size in the last 20 years.  They are essentially massive floating cities.  We probably need to rethink port designs completely from being a ‘safe harbor’ to more like save the harbor from these ships and figure out off shore freight loading.

https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/a-brief-history-of-the-shipping-container

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics