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Comment by mixedmath | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if I would expect any bridge to survive being struck by an enormous container ship.

The container ship "unluckily" maneuvered between the protective barriers. About 4 more protective barriers would have stopped this collapse.

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No bridge survives being struck by a container ship. That's why barriers are erected around critical points. There already were barriers, they just weren't complete coverage for some reason. (EDIT: Maybe the older 1970s era design of this particular bridge wouldn't allow more protection to be placed. Obviously this situation calls for a full investigation / lessons learned kind of thing, as part of the new bridge building process)

Older bridges no, but newer bridges should absolutely. The Bay Bridge was struck in 2007 and came away mostly unscathed due to earlier efforts to prevent catastrophic damage in that scenario;

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosco_Busan_oil_spill

Though the Maryland accident looks like it struck it dead on - just a massive amount of energy to absorb.

'The Bay Bridge' refers to something else in this part of the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_Bridge

Hacker News:California::Internet:USA

It's assumed that everyone comes from California unless proven otherwise.

In my defense, the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge is older and carries more 4x more traffic than the "other" Bay bridge! But yeah, given that the Chesapeake one is just down the road from the bridge that collapsed, I get the confusion.

> SF-Oakland Bay Bridge is older

In a Bridge of Theseus sort of way. The entire Eastern span is very new, a lot of the approaches have been rearranged, and major components of the Western span has been replaced over the years. But I guess none of this affects the age of the bridge, at least in Wikipedia’s estimation :)

This is why I come to HN, for Ship of Theseus references.

Glancing blow of the Cosco Busan was a big deal but it wasn't a direct impact. Different order of the magnitude of forces that impact. Not comparable.

Yes. Dolphins and protective features for this sort of scenario are more standars now.

A lot of bridges have their pilings set on mini islands, terrifically reinforced piles of stone and concrete that extend for quite some distance around the actual support. I don't know why some are built without that, it always weirds me out seeing the spindly legs going straight into the water, and this is why.

Edit to add: Check out Fort Carroll, precisely such an artificial island just a few hundred yards away in the very same harbor. It was built in the 1840's as a military position to defend the harbor, and has fallen into disuse. Now just imagine if the bridge sat on a couple of those, instead of the foundations it had. Ship would've barely dented the wall.

Civil engineering is very complex and doesn’t go off of feelings. I’m sure the type of soil and rock that the bridge is built on inform such decisions.

There is this other thing that’s very complex- getting budget from the local government to fix something

I would and furthermore I think there is a massive bias at play - if the exact same disaster happened in China there would be jokes about bridges made of Chinesium.

There is an expectation that a disaster happening in the west in a result of unforeseeable act of god, but in China it will be a result of corruption or shoddy workmanship.

Whereas in reality maintenance standard in the west have fallen but in the east they improved.

So now this bias protects responsible decision makers from legal consequences - no one went to prison for grenfell disaster, postmaster scandal or the Boeing debacle.

> Whereas in reality maintenance standard in the west have fallen

In the context of this incident, are you saying that we _previously_ used to go around retrofitting our 50-year-old bridges with more modern defenses, and then at some point since then we stopped doing this? Obviously if we're talking about new construction, it stands to reason that standards have only _increased_, but this was an old bridge built to old standards. So which standards have "fallen" to result in this disaster specifically?

Literally, yes, someone is responsible

> 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition. Unfortunately, 178 million trips are taken across these structurally deficient bridges every day

That doesn't answer the question I asked regarding the specific claim that maintenance standards have fallen.

For example, it's possible maintenance standards never changed and the old bridges simply got older and more exposed to risk as the years went on.

Well everyone involved in the design of this bridge is long dead.

> I'm not sure if I would expect any bridge to survive being struck by an enormous container ship.

Not a container ship, but an abandoned bulk carrier ship: https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2022/11/14/po...

That bridge survived with little damage, and was reopened the following day after small repairs (https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2022/11/15/te...).

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