Thanks. I'm just kind of having an existential crisis right now. That bridge just was Baltimore.
Oh my God I drove over that yesterday morning
One of the biggest concerns with the closure of the Washington Bridge that I haven't seen mentioned here is how it will affect emergency vehicles. Not sure if there are hospitals on both sides of the Key Bridge.
How easy is it for trucks to get through now?
Yeah I knew we had a concrete expert (dante), but didn't know we had actual bridge expert until now!
In this case I think it's obvious the problem was with the ship not with the bridge at least. There are people who will think bridges need to be able to survive a (super rough napkin calc) 3 megaton force, equal to 150 Nagasaki bombs exploding at once. But I don't think that idea will last.you're only off by at lesst four orders of magnitude, assuming the ship was completely filled with iron. you can tell because the city is still there
What kind of safety measures are going to stop 165,000 tons of force with that much momentum?Disagree.
The ships are what need better safety measures, because no bridge pillar is surviving that.
Disagree.Think about how many times a day that boats like these travel under bridges with no problem a day. How many times this happens without issue year after year.
They need to make it so these mega-ships don't go under bridges like this. That's the safety hazard. There's a reason they used to have drawbridges, and probably will go back to here if they can't find another way.
Absolutely mortifying. Certainly makes me scared to traverse any harbor bridge... but thankfully I live nowhere near one. Thoughts and hugs to the friends and families of those who lost their lives.
And my mind immediately went to Stifled and FFD... glad you both are okay!
you're only off by at lesst four orders of magnitude, assuming the ship was completely filled with iron. you can tell because the city is still thereI used 150k tons (but I see now it was more like 100k tons) moving at 8 knots. Oh and I completely ignored the exponent on the joules-to-megatons conversion... So it's more like 1/150000 Nagasakis. That's more reasonable to expect a bridge to resist I suppose.
Think about how many times a day that boats like these travel under bridges with no problem a day. How many times this happens without issue year after year.I mean, the problem isn't that an accident is extremely unlikely, it's the fact that it only needs to happen ONCE for it to be a major disaster.
Yeah. I understand that due to so many reasons that you can't just NOT have shipping containers travel under the bridge. It's still so uncomfortable to think about that it could JUST happen though. Even if it was a one-in-a-million chance, how many millions of ships pass underneath that each year?
based on how important the bridge is to baltimore the ships absolutely need to go under, it's essential transport. just a question of what can be done to make this kind of freak occurrence happen even fewer times and not as catastrophic.
If you have something that's going to be running for years and years eventually something is going to go wrong, and if that something is a thing that is going to be so absurdly damaging, that's when you need to start having the conversation about if it's worth doing at all.You always have that conversation, whether it's a $10 thing that's gonna last 5 minutes or a $10 billion thing that's gonna last 5 decades, and it's about expected value (% chance times cost). That's what engineering is all about.
Yeah. I understand that due to so many reasons that you can't just NOT have shipping containers travel under the bridge. It's still so uncomfortable to think about that it could JUST happen though. Even if it was a one-in-a-million chance, how many millions of ships pass underneath that each year?
I'd be interested to know what safeguards there WERE in place already before the collapse. How many things had to fail in order for this to happen?
I mean, the problem isn't that an accident is extremely unlikely, it's the fact that it only needs to happen ONCE for it to be a major disaster.sure, but if in both cases you make the status quo optimal system worse than the colossal fuck up over large timescales, you've just completely lost
Like, I feel this way about nuclear power. A nuclear power plant is extremely safe, and when properly run shouldn't have any major accidents that would lead to a devastating meltdown. But what if, across decades of use, there's some people who run it who shouldn't be and they make mistakes (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl), or some freak accident or disaster eventually occurs (Fukushima)? Then what? You have a colossal disaster that you can't take back. If you have something that's going to be running for years and years eventually something is going to go wrong, and if that something is a thing that is going to be so absurdly damaging, that's when you need to start having the conversation about if it's worth doing at all. I don't like the idea of simply going, "Well, we don't have to worry about a grave catastrophe negatively impacting thousands of lives and costing us billions of dollars as long as a very unlikely accident doesn't occur within a 40-year time frame". Like, that's long enough for it to happen.
this approach i think is more fair, basically going too far in the other direction will end up hurting millions of people in way too many ways to count (food, gas, oil, transport, employment, air quality due to more cars, etc) because of concern of a freak situation. if there's a 100 ton boat floating along a port city that means the place is also receiving 100 tons of materials and there's no feasible way of doing this on land. so transport will continue no matter what and while you can try to minimize the dangers (another bureaucratic check could be more strict safety checks for any large transport) but you need a functional city and a way to get goods to different areas on land. to some extent the city could throw in a bunch of ferries to try to ease the transition but it's not going to be an easy decade.
That's obviously really horrifying for those people, but when I saw the bridge collapsing I thought it was a packed bridge full of cars - that would be truly nightmarish.The time it happened at certainly mitigated the death toll considerably.
This is awful, and the braindead conspiracies have already started.
Also the boat called in a mayday ahead of time so access to the bridge was already being cut off. Not sure why the workers werent told to get off the bridge though (or maybe they were but hadnt made it all the way yet?)We'll need to wait until the full investigation comes out, but there probably wasn't enough time. The fact that were still some cars on the bridge even after they closed it means that the time between that and the collapse was very short. And while people driving could make it off in that timeframe, the people who were on foot working on the bridge probably had no chance.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1772619621457154389
don't worry, they've already begun and I'm fuming
ulti and wang are 100% right here it's best to just pretend those nutters don't exist right nowThey follow and signal boost those kinds of people so they're just virtue signalling right now. But yes at this moment they are right.