If you do the math, you find that it’s just an astronomical amount of momentum, and there’s no effective defense for a bridge that needs support in more than 30 or so feet of water.
He spent a full quarter of the movie’s budget on that one scene.
https://youtu.be/_lDM1nAmPHI?t=797
The bow is real, the back of the ship is CGI.
You put in sheet piling 50 meters upstream, and you fill the box with rocks. That's state of the art practice, nowadays, but that bridge was 50 years old.
In 1977 (and in 1972, when construction began), vessels of this size did not exist, and certainly were not allowed in the harbor[1]. But over time, they were given authorization, despite the fact that they could collapse the unprotected bridge like a load of toothpicks.
The real crime here is that there was no retrofit to protect the pylons. It was almost certainly considered and rejected due to cost.
[1]: https://logisticselearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Co...
The ship in question here was 10K TEU.
The container vessel in question is tiny compared to e.g. the Seawise giant or Batillus Class.
The smaller VLCCs are dime a dozen and they are 2-3x the weight of the Dali.
Even ports on the US Gulf Coast do not generally have the capability to dock VLCCs.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36232
If Baltimore had been anticipating VLCC traffic in the 70s, then presumably the bridge would have been built accordingly and this incident would not have led to a collapse.
Building a bridge to actually stop the ship is not only infeasible, but it would likely kill (more) people onboard.
"A notable example of dolphins used to protect a bridge is the Sunshine Skyway Bridge across the mouth of Tampa Bay. In 1980, the MV Summit Venture hit a pier on one of the bridge's two, two-lane spans causing a 1,200-foot (370 m) section of the bridge to fall into the water, resulting in 35 deaths. When a replacement span was designed, a top priority was to prevent ships from colliding with the new bridge..."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)
The MV Summit Venture was a 33,900 deadweight tonnage ship. MV Dali was a gross tonnage of 95,128. Nearly 3× as large. It's questionable whether dolphins would have totally prevented such a tragedy.
Yet similarly, expect dolphins to be brought up as a key component of resiliency for any designed replacement bridge.
But note how the main bridge piers are on giant islands much larger than the pier itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)#/media/Fil...
If you really want to make it unblockable you build a bridge+tunnel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge%E2%80%93tunnel
If thems be full, that guy would be illegally parked for far longer.
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What is the traffick-routing-around plan look like? (both sea and land, helicopters cry in lack of TEU)
I would expect they're as close to full as they can get in every trip. They'd be terribly inefficient ways to transport goods otherwise.
Some import products are crazy cheap because cross-planet shipping is basically free because it's the reverse end of a trip carrying valuable stuff. But they mainly applies to ships returning from low development level regions.
Most our exports are bulk not container afaik
Unless ImportYtei.com can get the bills of lading for that ship....
You deflect it. Failing at that, you direct the force into destroying the ship.
Of course, the best solution is no in-water pylons. But that isn’t always feasible.
Nice immovable object you've got there.
You don’t need to dissipate every joule of kinetic energy in the vessel. You just need to redirect it away from the pylon. That horizontal component can be done with bollards and dolphins sufficiently that even a relatively direct original angle should only damage the fenders. From what I see, there were zero such protections around this bridge.
Nothing can protect against a direct hit. But most hits aren’t direct, and those can be redirected without catastrophic pylon failure.
> You put it ahead of the pylon so that even when the dolphin or bollard is destroyed
Dude, seriously? That has nothing to do with what I was replying to.