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.
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.