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…
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.
That is a very interesting point I hadn't considered at all. Price is an obvious point, but I hadn't considered hazmat.
It does make me wonder how hazmat traffic is handled around Amsterdam. I think they are allowed in some tunnels here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_(Balt...
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.
[0] PDF page 10 (print 17): https://www.dot.ga.gov/PartnerSmart/Public/Documents/publica...
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...).
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.
Unfortunately, nobody who knew it would happen today warned anybody.
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Road_Tunnel#2001_coll...
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?
I don't know, but I suspect we don't hear much about all the times power is lost at moments that are less than the worst.
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.
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.
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.
However, please learn that ambiguity in informal speech/writing is substantially different from errors in formal edited speech/writing, and different responses are appropriate.
In the context of formal writing (e.g., an academic or industry paper, book, etc.) we should expect almost all ambiguity to be edited out, and not allow for inferences in either direction; i.e., your complaint would be valid.
However, in casual speech/writing (e.g., SMS, social media comments, non-formal emails, etc.) it is common and not serious to leave IMPLIED components in the conversation. It is certainly acceptable to ask for clarification such as "did you mean to imply that some area was made entirely inaccessible by that event?". But it is inappropriate to accuse someone of being dead wrong by leaving out the implication.
The request for clarification should result in the speaker/writer saying "ya, I did mean to imply XYZ, not PDQ, thx for pointing that out." — mutually and efficiently finding the truth. The accusation, especially continued insistence on the accusation being the one true correct way, is the way to start an argument trying to establish dominance.
It might also be worth noting that your class of people — those familiar with the Baltimore area — should have been MOST able to recognize that "not directly" was the inferred meaning, since you know it's not linking an island to the mainland. That you chose the hostile "j'accuse — you are wrong!" form of discussion rather than the collaborative friendly "btw, you did not mean to imply that the bridge linked to an island" (and continued to insist on the hostile approach) tells us all that this is more about your emotional state and/or approach to human interactions than about the ambiguity itself.
Have a great week
Random ship hits a bridge.
Shakes fist at sky "the government".
It sounded much more like a common trope, "the do-nothing government just lets things fail, doesn't take action until something fails".
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?
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.
I know they exist, and perhaps after this they'll exist a bit more.
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.
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.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/as-residents-leave-balti...
>“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.
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.
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.
Couldn't see tug-boats.
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.