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…
We notice these type of accidents because they’re so rare. 5k+ people die each year because of large trucks on the road, by comparison, boats and bridges are very safe — that’s why it’s allowed.
Because the Port of Baltimore is a very major port, and not allowing ships under it really isn't an option.
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.
>>Because the Port of Baltimore is a very major port, and not allowing ships under it really isn't an option.
It is now a very large port that is completely closed off from the sea.
And two sides of the city no longer linked
The damage from this accident is only beginning.
Even if loss of control of a large container ship was considered in the design of the city, port, and that particular bridge, ships were not even close to the order of magnitude of mass of today's ships.
And, it lost power at almost exactly the worst moment. What are the odds?
EXACTLY!! If it happens often, and they just restart because it's no big deal in the ocean, we wouldn't hear about it.
Of course, it seems that a high(er) frequency of failures should be taken into account for zones where it is critical, such as in port. I just saw a few days ago that a ship docking took out a couple of cargo cranes (sadly, badly injuring a crane operator); didn't seem like a power outage, more of a misjudged steering.
Have you looked at a map of Baltimore? They're very much linked, you just have to drive a little farther. The only issue will be that all the traffic this bridge previously carried now has to reroute to the bridge farther north, so now traffic will be much heavier.
Yes, of course; I made the comment after looking at a map.
The direct or short link is now broken. Everyone must now go around the entire harbor, on roads that will now have 40k more cars every day, instead of directly across it. I wasn't saying that some area was a disconnected island, but that many trips will become more costly or non-viable for years until the bridge is rebuilt.
Perhaps I should have said "no longer directly linked", but thanks for the picked nit.
It's not a nit-pick, you said "no longer linked". They are absolutely linked, you just have to drive around a few more kilometers. You said nothing about the traffic load, you wrote that it was absolutely impossible to cross! ("no longer linked")
Perhaps English is not your first language, or you are not recognizing the difference between casual conversation and formal scientific papers.
This is casual conversation. Writing quickly and colloquially, with the assumption that "no longer directly linked" or "no longer linked as they were 10min before" is inferred, certainly to anyone who has seen a map of the area. It should also be inferred from the sentence alone, as if the link had been to an island, then most writers would have made the much stronger point, saying "completely cutoff from the mainland" instead of the much weaker "no longer linked" (just because one link is broken does not imply that there are no others).
If you want to comment that "I was confused by your meaning and it could have been more clear if you said X" is a perfectly fair statement.
But deliberately taking absolutist definitions in a casual conversation where meanings can be implied / inferred, is an unfriendly, oppositional, if not hostile stance.
In any case, I apologize if you were offended that I didn't include all the qualifiers and assumed they would be apparent to the reader. Have a nice day.
Vertical Clearance for bridges around ports is the method used around the world. Of course, also tunnels. But building tall bridges for access is very common.
Tunnels are far more expensive - the 1.5 mile 4 lane Fort McHenry tunnel was like $750M vs. $140M for the 1.6 mile 4 lane Key bridge, although adjusted for inflation that’s probably more like $750M vs $320M.
The underlying problem here is that automobiles are inherently inefficient so you either get epic traffic jams or have to massively overbuild capacity, forcing the engineers to deliver as many lanes as they can for the budget.
Yes, but there’s a difference between what people will pay in advance to prevent one of many low probability catastrophic failures and what they’ll think was worthwhile for someone else to have paid to prevent the one which actually happened.
Those calculations are really hard: say they had built a tunnel, what are the odds of the same number of people dying in a fire after someone crashes into another car? Would we have needed to spend any money at all if more people had used railroad alternatives to driving and such an expensive bridge or tunnel was not justified on traffic grounds?
> Bids for construction of the proposed Outer Harbor Tunnel were opened in July 1970, but price proposals were substantially higher than the engineering estimates.[11] Officials drafted alternative plans, including a four-lane bridge, which was approved by the General Assembly in April 1971.[12][13]
Why does anyone use fragile asphalt (20 years) for busy roads when engineered concrete lasts 50 or more? Because the better option costs more.
This was a big point of contention when a local town announced it was replacing the failing asphalt on the section with the most traffic with slabs of concrete. [0] People complained about the price. Meanwhile, over a decade on, nearby asphalt laid with the same renewal project is already cracking while the busy main thoroughfare remains undisrupted by road work.
It's hard to persuade people that long-term investment is worthwhile.
Mostly to have a hazmat route around the city (HAZMAT trucks aren’t allowed in the tunnels) and because bridges are cheaper than tunnels. They needed a third crossing because the traffic warranted it.
On the news this morning a commentator made it sound like that rule was imposed after 9/11.
It makes sense to me that cargo would be restricted, and it's bizarre that it would be related to terrorism (an additional rule isn't going to prevent an attack...).
In addition to the Hazmat issue mentioned below, tunnels have a bad record when fires break out inside them. E.g. the Kaprun disaster [0] which killed 150 people, and the Gotthard Road Tunnel [1] fire, after which the use of large vehicles was constrained.
The Patapsco is much wider here than at the locations of the two tunnels. It would have been a much bigger and more expensive project to build a tunnel that long.
The Dutch ports of both Amsterdam and Rotterdam have no bridges at all. It's all tunnels. I think that's the best way to go; the least chance of conflict between road and water traffic.
Often in America the government waits for something to fail miserably before engaging in a high effort high cost activity that requires a lot of coordination and public buy-in.
The amount of arm chair quarterbacking here is astounding. Reddit has a more nuanced conversation than HN right now.
A bridge got hit by a container ship at speed and folks here are talking about this like the bridge was not up to standard, or why there was a bridge there at all when they know nothing about the locale. I am not a structural engineer, but I am going to go ahead and guess that not much would still be standing from a direct hit from a container ship. And from observation bridges like this exist all over the world and don’t regularly get struck by container ships.
It was a freak accident.
If we want to point fingers or question things, perhaps if anything the question is why the container ship lost power repeatedly? Was this a known issue before leaving port?
German Wikipedia has an article on ship deflectors. What is says there is that ship collisions were viewed an an inevitable hazard until the 1980 collapse of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa. That was 45 years ago.
> A bridge got hit by a container ship at speed and folks here are talking about this like the bridge was not up to standard, or why there was a bridge there at all when they know nothing about the locale.
You're right, I don't. But I do know there are other locales where they seem to explicitly avoid bridges crossing heavy ocean traffic.
But that's what you do with random events -- create policies to prevent them from happening, lowering the incidence rate and minimizing damage once it occurs. Which is exactly what government and laws are all about.
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 which should get to stay and the container ships which have to move.
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 east of the port area. To the west, everything is tunnels. And the largest ships don't even come close to the city center, but dock at the Maasvlakte out at sea.
For both cities, ports have constantly moved closer to the sea.
You don't even need to run it as a tunnel the entire way through - Chesapeake Bay has vehicular traffic routed through a combination bridge/tunnel, using tunnels to span the two major shipping channels crossed by the complex.
>“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?”
I lived in the NOVA area for more than a decade and each visit to Baltimore (every few years) was more depressing. Of course, that's anecdotal but I'll stand by it.
Maybe they felt it was off-topic? Industry has been moving away since the 1950s. Today I read that container traffic has increased over the past couple of years.
It is hard not to feel a sense of tragedy if you know something about the place. It is written all over the city. The blocks and blocks of boarded up row houses speak for themselves. Now they are tearing them down. Maybe that is for the best, but it doesn't seem like a win.
To be able to reach the port. You could argue that such bridges shouldn’t be built in front of ports, but the public also doesn’t like having to drive long detours, and the likelihood of an incident like this one is very low.
I think the whole ship went dark for a moment. That may have had an impact on the rudder, and then some strong current and/or wind, pushing it sideways.
Was watching CNN around 6AM EDT, they had a reporter on scene who mentioned wind "whipping across" the harbor. This was in reference to the potential survivability of the freezing cold water, but it seems likely it could have been a factor in pushing the ship off course as well.
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.
When has "nothing will happen as long as we can carefully navigate our massive vessels around these critical pillars" ever been a trustable safety measure? Over the long term shit like this will happen if it the possibility that it happens is not excluded by other measures.
This is a public bridge 5 years in the making and who knows how long in planning, and people have been extremely lucky that it collapsed at 3am and not in the middle of the day. It doesn't matter at all how unlikely this is in a given time frame if the impact if it happens at any point in time is catastrophic.
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.