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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

It is worth observing that this bridge seems to have 2 pylons and one of them collapsed. The failure seems comprehensible after that - you can see in the video how the balances came apart, there is nothing to hold the left side up so it falls and then remainder of the bridge tried to rotate around the remaining pylon and failed.

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It's no surprise that the entire bridge collapses after a pylon collapses. What surprises me is that the pylon collapses. I'd expect those to be extremely solid, with tons of padding. But with ships getting bigger and bigger, I guess there's a limit to what you can account for.

Ships are hundreds of thousands of tons in weight and the momentum acts as a force multiplier. Plus it hit the pylon dead center, which is the worst case scenario. It’s not terribly surprising.

I think there’s also an underlying expectation that any competent ship captain would at least be able to see that they’re on a collision course with the pylon well ahead of time and be able to compensate. Which obviously didn’t happen in this case.

There is another video where we can see two power outage occurred. Ship was uncontrollable but with enormous amount of inertia.

I'm sure captain tried to do anything he can to avoid collision.

The trajectory of the ship seemed near perfect right up until just before the bridge where I suspect it experience it's mechanical issue.

Interestingly, a surprising number of ship-ship collisions occur due to an unnecessary last minute evasive-action manoeuvre between ships that weren't actually on a collision course in the first place. There's a whole section devoted to this in the outstanding book 'Normal Accidents' by Charles Perrow.

Case of, they are built strong, but not that strong.

A container ship has huge inertia, I don't think any bridge could be built to take a direct hit like that.

Container ships of yesteryear are also many times smaller than modern ships.

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