Baltimore bridge collapses into river after being hit by cargo ship
A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water.
At about 1.30am, a vessel crashed into the bridge, catching fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the water below, according to a video posted on X.
“All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge. Traffic is being detoured,” the Maryland Transportation Authority posted on X.
Matthew West, a petty officer first class for the coastguard in Baltimore, told the New York Times that the coastguard received a report of an impact at 1.27am ET. West said the Dali, a 948ft (29 metres) Singapore-flagged cargo ship, had hit the bridge, which is part of Interstate 695.
Not just Baltimore. This is also a major cargo port. That harbor will be blocked for a long time. Get ready for supply chain disruptions and more rising prices.
I doubt the harbor will be blocked that long, maybe a week or so at most.
That's a crime scene and a death scene. It's not going to go quickly. The good news is that it's a critical roadway and waterway intersection so the feds and state government have motivation to make haste.
Except there is no mystery as to the deaths part. Investigations take a lot of time when there are a lot of questions. The only question here is "why did the boat plow straight into the bridge?". There's very little question how/why the bridge collapsed(it got hit directly by a massive cargo ship). No one's going to question the physics of it. The only question will be "was it captain error or ship error so we know who to fine". Recovering the ship will be part of answering that and the rest will be communication and maintenance logs.
I recently -- in the context of IS being in the somewhat bizzare situation of having to argue with the Russian government that they did in fact commit their terrorist act in Moscow -- linked to an old The Onion satirical video. It dated to a bit after 9/11 and had the Al Qaeda representative being interviewed -- irate at the 9/11 Truther also on the show, who was claiming that the World Trade Center was downed with thermite bombs -- using almost the same phrase:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_OIXfkXEj0
"We flew an enormous airplane into a building, okay? I think it is obvious what caused the building to crumble."
The accident didn't happen in the middle of the navigable channel, so you can maintain the pier and ship while clearing the main span.
As for being a death scene, you likely aren't going to be able to access the site with divers as it is too dangerous.
I saw another article today where they said exactly that. The remaining vehicles are under concrete and its now converted to a salvage mission.
Good luck finding the necessary crane capacity. There are a handful of seriously big cranes in the 7000 tons plus range, but they are Dutch or Japanese, primarily. Wherever they are, they are probably busy and will take ages to get there. While the weight/mass of the bridge is not available online, it surely exceeds the weight limits of cranes currently in existence by far, so the bridge segments need to be cut up prior to removal.
Even if the US spends insane amounts of money, this issue will take quite some time to resolve.
The Left Coast Lifter is in NY and can be on site in about 24-30 hours depending on currents going up Delaware Bay. It can make picks up to approx 1,600 tons, it would laugh at what the Key bridge weighs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Coast_Lifter
At a 1,600 tons limit, one would have to cut the debris into a lot of small pieces. There is no info on the net on how much mass the Key bridge had, but assuming the build and the size, half a million tons is probably not to far off.
It won't come out in one piece, but it can come out in much larger pieces with a big crane. This one specifically was used to build bridges and put in far larger sections than this job would require. Smaller crane barges will work on the smaller pieces simultaneously. They'll clear half the channel (most likely the section away from the Dali) and open it to one-way traffic while they continue clean up.
You're not lifting it out of the way, you're gonna pull it out of the way with a tugboat.
It still is thousands of tons of steel, which will not be pulled that easily. And it is steel that does not swim, but drag along the muddy ground.
You cut it into pieces, add some buoyancy things. Naval operations can be impressive. Hell the Navy probably already has stuff to do this exact thing in case of war and a bridge out of Port gets destroyed. You don't want your Navy blocked in. You also don't need to move it far to get shipping back.
The "cut into pieces" will be interesting. There are a shitload of large pieces, and everything is under tension. The links between the pieces are rather large, and a good amount of them are under water. That's going to be serious work.
Feels like an army corps of engineer training exercise, especially after Biden committed to help rebuild. Be really interesting engineering coming out of both the cleanup, rebuild, and post accident analysis.
Cleanup will probably be Navy, rebuild will be civilian. Analysis is simple, ship lost power and hit the pier. Ships that size not sure you can do much.
I get the distinct impression that you have zero engineering knowledge or experience.
Or I'm trying to keep it concise.
Well, in that case you're being too vague because I have no idea what you are talking about.
not the original commenter, but they used some buoyancy things to lift a section of the titanic, obviously thats very different, but i think they are like large bags that can be filled with air to lift incredible weight underwater.
You mean the 14,000kg "big piece" that required two separate attempts to retrieve (by the same guy who piloted the doomed Oceangate sub)?
The floation bags were only necessary because the piece was on the bottom of the ocean beyond where any crane could reach. In some respects this seems to make the bridge cleanup a bit easier, but it wasn't the floatation bags that caused the first attempt to fail, it was the weight of the piece itself making it hard to capture with the class of tugboat they were using.
The second attempt succeeded only because they used this massive tugboat:
While the weight of the Key Bridge is not publicly known, it is likely thousands of times more massive than The Big Piece. For comparison the Golden Gate Bridge has a similar length of 1.7 miles (to Key Bridge's 1.6 miles), 6 lanes (to the Key Bridge's 4), and weighs 382,000,000kg. Assuming the Key Bridge only weighs half of what the Golden Gate does, it would weigh about 13,500 times more than The Big Piece. On top of that it is collapsed into a tangled mess and needs to be cut into pieces small enough to remove while it is underwater.
The resources needed to make this happen are going to be insane. It is going to take months before there's enough clearance to safely let more cargo ships through safely.
yeah, i dont know enough about marine salvage to comment anything worthwhile, but it certainly will be interesting to see what they do, and how fast.
I think we all know someone who was forced to buy TP on ebay in the early pandemic.
This could send us right back there. Doesn't much matter why stuff can't move from A to B, prices will increase and people will take the opportunity to profiteer.
No. I don't know anyone, aside from Internet memes.
Do they ship much toilet paper by boat?
You can clear the debris in a week or two. It will take multiple years to build a new bridge.
The AP article says the exact opposite, that it is in fact not a major cargo port.
Port of Baltimore is top ten in the US for international trade. It falls to top 20 when domestic shipping is included, but it's absolutely a major port.
Vehicles from Europe coming via ROROs come to Baltimore primarily. This will impact them as diverting to Jacksonville or Savannah is going through take a lot of landside logistics to figure out.
If I'm not mistaken, it's Brunswick, not Savannah, that is Georgia's major port for automobiles/ROROs. Savannah is bigger overall, but that's due to other types of cargo.
This article mentions Brunswick having a goal of surpassing Baltimore, which is #1. I guess this disaster makes that more likely...