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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thanks for the update. Now I understand about the vehicles  Wow kudos to police for getting there and stopping traffic. This could have been so much worse. It is horrible for the workers though because it seems to be recovery now. I don’t think anyone is going to feel good going over a suspension bridge and seeing a boat near. Of all the things I have worried about..this was not in the kit but is now for sure. I hope there is a mandate for bridges like this to have some of the safety measures the Sunshine bridge in Florida has after their collapse in 1980. Apparently the new bridge has something underwater that forces a boat away if it comes too close to
pilings. This should be retrofitted for all these large suspension bridges.[/quote]

Construction started for this bridge in 1972 and completed in '77, before the Sunshine bridge collapse.  New bridges are built to withstand greater boat impacts (but the Dali really is gigantic - I wonder if newer bridges would have withstood a direct hit like this).  [/quote]

The natural thing is to fixate on the failure of the bridge and there are certainly many lessons to be learned. It sounds like there could have been a few protective “dolphins” to protect the supports,  but the angle of the ship rendered them useless.

The failure that I think we should fixate more on for the future is the ship. That cargo ship was enormous and might have weighed 100,000 metric tons. Or 100,000,000 kgs. It was traveling at 9 knots, or 4.6 m/s. The momentum of that ship was 460,000,000 [b]newton/sec[/b]. The supports would have had to be prohibitively large to withstand an impact like that. 100,000 tons is the weight of an aircraft carrier. I have no idea what went wrong with the power on that ship, but I think it’s more important to make sure those ships have multiple redundant fail safes. [/quote]

Units for momentum is newton-sec (not Newton/sec). [/quote]

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