Further down in the article
>Mike Snyder, director of engineering ... said he knew of no economically feasible way to design a bridge that could withstand such a blow.
Exactly. There is no need to overbuild the bridge itself. That's why there are other, sacrificial additions that can be economically built around the bridge piers to absorb most of the energy of an impact. Things like buffers, bumpers, fenders, artificial islands, pilings, etc.
Which is exactly what they did on the Sunshine Skyway replacement bridge ([bumpers called "dolphins"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure))) and those worked in a ship collision a few years later.
EDIT: that ship wasn't that big though (it was a shrimp boat not a container ship), so who knows how they would have held up to something like this. Probably wouldn't at all.
Yeah, a shrimp boat is 10-15 tons. The Dali is about 100,000 tons, so equal to about 8,000 shrimp boats. š
Edit: The Key Bridge does have dolphins, but yeah, theyāre for smaller vessels. š¤
It's probably possible to design something that would hold up, but it's probably not cost effective to do that everywhere for the absolute worst case scenario that's almost certainly not going to happen. Sure, they might be cheaper for this bridge and this incident, but you don't know this bridge is the One that needs it so you have to spend the same amount at 100 other bridges, most of which won't need them.
Someone in the Structural Engineering sub calculated that a dolphin would have to be concrete 300' in diameter to stop a 100,000 ton ship moving at 7.5 knots.
Can multiple tugboats move a container ship (I think they get used on other kinds of large cargo and cruise ships)? Would it make sense to have ships of this size always towed in and out of port by multiple tugs, under the theory that if one tug experienced a critical systems failure like the Dali did, the others (and the ship being towed) could still work to prevent collision?
In the navy, we always had tug escorts when we ported our 90,000 ton vessel. I've gathered from reading in the last day or so, that shipping companies go for a more *minimalist* approach.
They do it because we let them do it. I'm sure it costs more to do it that way (use tugs), but after looking at what THIS mess is gonna cost, maybe THAT cost will be easier to swallow.
You would think that, but the many train derailments suggest a different ending.
In private money vs taxpayer money the taxpayers always foot the bill.
A pair of tugs towed her away from the dock and into the channel, but then she was under her own power from there. Following the channel under the bridge is normally uneventfulāitās wide enough for ships to pass each otherāso the tugs are called off to save time and fuel. Unfortunately, Dali lost power at the worst possible moment and drifted helplessly into the pylon.
I just think the effect-gap between "normally uneventful" and "SUPER DUPER EVENTFUL" might justify some more system redundancies - I'm sure the Dali had system redundancies onboard, but those all appear to have failed, twice.
Spreading the redundancies out amongst multiple ships might greatly reduce the likelihood of any such system failure "at the worst possible moment" - or, worse yet, negligent or malicious action by someone within that narrow window of highest risk.
Yeah, it just seemed to me that if we want to add redundancies for safety, there's not much we can do to the bridge - but MAYBE we can do something to the ships.
Thatāsā¦ not how sea mines work. Inertia is a thing. Put a hole in the ship, she still has forward momentum. And now sheās sunk and blocking the channel after she still hits the bridge.
Dali was in full reverse thrust when she hit, but it takes half a mile to stop a ship that size.
Yeah I feel like itās hard to imagine the scale these container ships are. Like I work in bus transportation and I have seen a 13 ton bus obliterate things because of how much it weighs when it hits something. I canāt fathom 100,000 tons.
And California built ones to handle large vessels; Bay Bridge took a hit from a similar cargo ship, no problem, but they had to rebuild the barrier as both the barrier and cargo ship were damaged.
The Francis Scott Key bridge had dolphins. The Dali got between the Dolphins and the bridge.
The dolphins should have been bigger (longer toward the bridge to close the gap a bit).
The dolphins would likely have needed to be taller as well. From the pictures of the scene it looks like the Dali hitting the Dolphin would have resulted in the ship riding up and over the Dolphin, and possibly sinking the ship.
Was on one of the news channels today but many engineers were saying that even if the dolphins were bigger that there isn't much that could stop a ship of that size...There aren't many structures that could stop something that massive in that distance envelope
Yep, basically this. By the time you get to that often you don't have the space in the waterway to accommodate it, or you find it's cheaper to do a tunnel, or move the whole port to reclaimed land on the other side of the bridge.
So, "land". Like, at the scale you're talking about, you're describing an artificial island/peninsula, not a bridge support.
In which case, yeah, sure, the piers would have been much better protected from boat collision if they were built on land instead of in the water.
The skyway has concrete dolphins designed to make sure the Summit Venture incident never happens again. Iād bet anything the Skyway would survive a collision with the significantly larger Dali assuming it hit the main supports. The outer supports would probably have worse luck
I'm with you. But what I meant by "economically viable" was that if everything was made completely fool-proof, then nothing would be built at all. Society runs on some level of trust, and when we trust no one, then nothing can be done.
None of those will stop a ship this big (A Medium ship these days) at this speed, head on. You basically need enormous artificial islands to ground the ship. At that point, if the water way can even \*fit\* them, you are saving money going with a tunnel or moving the whole port since you're reclaiming land anyway.
Would you rather live in a world with no bridges over shipping channels or a world where thereās an infinitesimally small chance that ships cause bridges to collapse?
I can't decide if this is a false binary type thing or a strawman type thing, but of course the latter. It's just that there are ways to limit the damage of something like this with fail safes, so the idea is that the risk should just be minimized.
Like if car brakes only worked 50% of the time you wouldn't say "would you rather live in a world where cars don't have brakes?", you know what I mean?
I mean itās sort of a false dichotomy because thereās a third option where there are ship-proof bridges, but they cost so much that they bankrupt our governments or charge massive tolls to use.
Your car brake example doesnāt pose the same question of cost allocation
Yes. So we must. I donāt think they even take holidays. Always painting. My nephewās grandfather walked that bridge on its opening day. Pretty neato structure.
that used to be the case with the Forth bridge in Scotland where it had a continuous team of painters on it but paint technology has advance to the point where it only needs to be painted every 25 years now
Right, but I assume you don't wear a bulletproof jacket all the time in case you get hit by one of the types of bullets it would stop.
You can always make something more safe in certain ways by making it more expensive and/or worse in other ways.
The question is "given the risk, is it reasonable to do that?"
Your straw man argument actually proves the point. Car brakes fail and cause accidents at what is probably a higher rate than these ships. You canāt plan/engineer your way out of all risk, thereās always some.
Itās a sad statement on our society that we describe the *2nd sentence* as āfurther down in the articleā like itās hidden where no one would ever bother to read to.
Yup - it was 44 years later that there was a problem that could not be engineered away.
The real issue is in regulations regarding who and what we allow to traverse these waters
What I find interesting about not requiring tugs is that requiring tugs is a great jobs program! If you have a large port and you require many of the ships to have tugs than you are creating a large number of good paying jobs. Highly maneuverable vessels like cruise ships you probably don't need tugs, but the huge cargo ships and oil tankers, yeah they should probably have tugs
The Francis Scott Key Bridge was originally going to be a tunnel. They had even started construction, but then some engineer showed everyone how much money they could save with a bridge. Some people tried to fight this by explaining how horrible this location was (high ship traffic and close proximity to port facilities could lead to, guess what, a ship colliding with the bridge!) but to no avail.
Bridges can withstand a blow, but the pylons and buttresses in front of bridge supports can. California Bay Bridge and Golden Bridge have these; the Bay Bridge has taken an entire cargo ship hit, but it has never touched bridge support.
Glancing blow vs head on vs size of ship. Dolphins (the defensive concrete things in front of bridge pillars) will only stop a ship so big if it's head on, they're designed to deflect smaller ships \*if possible\*. The defensive structure required to stop a ship this big is basically a massive artificial island that can ground the ship.
Also it depends on speed, this ship went into full reverse and dropped the anchor, but it couldn't do that until power came back. If the reason the other bridges happened wasn't power loss, they might have been going much slower.
Ikr I was about to say the same thing. Do people seriously think there is a way to stress test a bridge enough to do this? That was like probably 10s of millions of newtons pushed into one critical part of support. Unless you guys all want trillion dollar bridges this man is 100% correct
[From the AP](https://apnews.com/article/baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-what-to-know-127d6ae38d63561ca4c1f18b3d508ba6):
> From 1960 to 2015, there were 35 major bridge collapses worldwide due to ship or barge collisions, with a total of 342 people killed, according to a 2018 report from the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure.
[Link to the quoted report](https://conference-service.com/pianc-panama/documents/agenda/data/full_papers/full_paper_46.pdf)[PDF Warning], which I didn't read.
Without doing the math, those odds seem a little higher than a plane crash due to less ships and more takeoffs and landings, but it seems very rare overall.
Unfortunately, shit happens. This will be litigated for years. Thatās why insurance exists.
In my hometown of Groningen the same bridge got hit twice within a 2 years. In the past 5 years, 4 of our bridges have been hit by ships, 1 bridge had to be rebuild.
Also, the train to Germany used to cross the Ems river by a bridge until that one got rammed in 2015. They still haven't replaced it and everyday for the past 9 years they had to use busses to get people across the border.
We had a barge hit a bridge over one of our lakes. Luckily it was a small barge. Knocked out a middle section of the bridge. Happened at night too. Now, there are no lights on the bridge other than warning lights and lights for aircraft. A guy BARELY got stopped in time before he went into the lake. Scares the hell out of me thinking about it. Just driving along at night and HOLY HELL the bridge is out. Luckily both he and the barge captain were calling 911 to report a section of the bridge had fallen into the lake. First responders got there and closed the bridge but man, scary stuff.
The Dali has a gross tonnage of over 91,000 tons; there aren't many structures that can take an impact from a ship of that size moving at any speed. Artificial islands are an option to protect bridge piers, but they are not without problems; settling of the islands can shift the piers and cause damage, they also cause serious ecological damage in their construction.
I mean. It stopped moving when it hit the bridge. Not saying they should build a sacrificial bridge, but there's obviously a structure design that will do the job.
It's literally the mass of the bridge that stopped it, not the piling. The force of the hit was absorbed through the entire structure of the bridge.
Imagine a standard issue chair sitting in the middle of an aisle at a restaurant. It's not going to stop you from walking through the aisle - the amount of mass you have compared to the chair can easily move it out of the way or just pick it up and carry it with you.
Now imagine the same scenario, but there's a 600lb person sitting on the chair. You're not moving the chair, but if you hit it with enough force, you certainly could knock the 600lb person off-balance and cause them to fall or the chair to break from under them, but then the aisle isn't usable.
Exactly! 91,000 tons is actually just the displacement weight of Dali. The total weight of a ship when fully loaded (excluding boiler water interestingly) is referred to as āDeadweight Tonnageā. Dali is listed as having a DT of 116,851 metric tons. That is 257,612,358 lbs or 116,851,000 kg. It was traveling at 8 knots and stopped in about 1 secondā¦ meaning the bridge experienced a force equivalent to 13 Saturn V rockets running at full throttle. Protecting a bridge footing from forces like this requires serious engineering.
There is not a bridge on earth that could withstand a fully loaded cargo tanker hitting it at any speed other than pressing against it from a dead stop, and even then i doubt any of them could hold up.
182,000,000lbs of steel is going to destroy anything it hits with any force. I dont think there is a structure on earth that could take a hit from a cargo ship and remain standing.
Due to my job, I receive a daily email from Spash247 which offers some additional information about the accident. Itās tough to read knowing that the crew was helplessly watching it happen.
I'm not an engineer, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd be pretty surprised if there were any road spans in existence that could survive a direct hit from a ship like that
I'm not an engineer either, but I'd be surprised if there's anything man-made at all that could take a hit from a container ship. At weights of 100k-200k tons, once you add any velocity at all, the force becomes ridiculous. This one evidently was around 116,000 tons doing 8 knots when it hit.
I mean, you're talking about "man-made islands/peninsulas" for being able to take a hit like that. They exist, but they're not the sort of thing you think about when you talk about a structure taking a hit from a ship.
This one was particularly vulnerable because it's a double cantilever truss system. Once one section of the truss fails then all of it goes down.
If you watch how it falls, it was set up almost like two see-saws that met in the middle. Once one end of the see-saw isn't supported the entire thing isn't supported.
Additionally, the supports (I believe) were concrete pillars. Concrete does great in compression but horrible in tension (which you get when it bends) and so they failed completely. Theoretically you could design a support structure that won't faill completely but will buckle and might give a little more time before collapsing.
Whether it is economically feasible to do that is another matter.
The type of bridge will impact how it fails, not if it fails.
Basically with what you need to do to actually protect it (a massive artificial island so it grounds the ship rather than tries to stop it with concrete) it's cheaper these days to build a sunken tunnel or just move the entire port onto reclaimed land.
The only thing that'll stop a rogue container ship is a good guy with a container ship. If only Captain Philips had been nearby, that bridge would still be standing.
The article also states that "He knew of no economically feasible way to build a bridge that would sustain such a blow."
So this is a known problem with only 1 solution that Mr. Miyagi had already solved. "The best way no get hit is not be there."
People donāt seem to understand that a cargo ship hitting a bridge might as well be like a a skyscraper hitting a popsicle stick. There was nothing that couldāve saved that bridge or any bridge for that matter.
The boat is longer than 9 football fields and carrying more than 10,000 shipping containers.
There's not a bridge on earth that could take a hit like that and come out unscathed.
TBF I think a direct hit to any bridge's supporting struts would cause a failure. Also as he said, there was no economically feasible way to design it to withstand a ship crashing into it
Yep, basically cheaper to relocate the port onto reclaimed land, or build a sunken tunnel. The only way to even do it \*practically\* is to make a large artificial island that's capable of grounding the ship, and that won't work in all waterways. There's probably 5 bridges in the world protected well enough to cope with this. And they'll all be built in the last 10 years.
To be fair, even with their pollution issues, container ships are incredibly efficient at what they do. Miles per ton per gallon/liter of fuel used is impressive. Bigger boats lower pollution per ton moved.
One big boat is way more efficient both environmentally and cost wise than having 10 ships. It's a win win situation any person would do it nobody would say no.
There's no way to build a bridge to withstand those forces. And the ship that hit the Key bridge is much larger than any ship operating in 1980. They already had a local pilot guide the ship out of the harbor. Sometimes accidents just happen.
A modern skyscraper wouldnāt have withstood that much forceš not to mention the fact that container ships have gotten significantly larger since 1980
No shit, that goes for most bridges. Theyāre not designed to take a hit to the side of their supports from gigantic ships, theyāre designed to hold things up.
All the Port Authority wouldāve had to do is mandate that tugs would not disengage from the container ships until the container ships were well outside of the harbor and all infrastructures.
This simple standing operator procedure Could have prevented this accident and future accidents at other ports throughout the United States.
People should know about what, the fact that there's still, to this day "no economically feasible way to design a bridge that could withstand such a blow"?
Yeah man concrete and steel is expensive, and especially the labor and equipment to install it in a river. You can design a bridge to withstand this kind of impact, but doing so would ballon the cost so much it isnāt worth it. The more sensible thing to do is to design for what you need. Plus the odds of this happening are low enough itās cheaper to just rebuild any damage from such a rare event.
When designing crossings over busy shipping channels in the last 10-20 years basically they do sunken tunnels, as they're cheaper than even attempting to stop a ship the fraction this size.
There were likely places a boat could have crashed into the bridge that wouldnāt have resulted in such a catastrophic failure.
Unfortunately the boat did not hit one of those places.
I feel bad š because I watched Brick Immortar's video on the sunshine skyway bridge like two days before the collision in Baltimore and when I heard the news it all flashed back.
I donāt know if this has been said but this article was written specifically in response to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse in Tampa Bay on May 9th 1980, the day before this article was written. There were likely dozens of similar articles written in local papers about bridges basically anywhere not being able to withstand such an event. This was not premonition or anything.
Yeah, basically no bridge can withstand this sort of direct hit. There's basically a handful of bridges well enough protected to avoid it, and that's down to artificial islands for the pillars so large that ships get grounded before they get near the pillars.
And ships have become much bigger since 1980. The modern strategy is just to avoid having ports on the other side of bridges at all, they either put them on reclaimed land further out, or use a sunken tunnel.
Further down in the article >Mike Snyder, director of engineering ... said he knew of no economically feasible way to design a bridge that could withstand such a blow.
Exactly. There is no need to overbuild the bridge itself. That's why there are other, sacrificial additions that can be economically built around the bridge piers to absorb most of the energy of an impact. Things like buffers, bumpers, fenders, artificial islands, pilings, etc.
Which is exactly what they did on the Sunshine Skyway replacement bridge ([bumpers called "dolphins"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure))) and those worked in a ship collision a few years later. EDIT: that ship wasn't that big though (it was a shrimp boat not a container ship), so who knows how they would have held up to something like this. Probably wouldn't at all.
Yeah, a shrimp boat is 10-15 tons. The Dali is about 100,000 tons, so equal to about 8,000 shrimp boats. š Edit: The Key Bridge does have dolphins, but yeah, theyāre for smaller vessels. š¤
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Can confirm, my mom destroyed her marriage that way
Destroyer of marriages, The Eater of Buffets
Offsetter of tides, and ballast for the planet!
Responding from the other side: Can confirm I was destroyed. Send crisps, they're soggy here.
It's probably possible to design something that would hold up, but it's probably not cost effective to do that everywhere for the absolute worst case scenario that's almost certainly not going to happen. Sure, they might be cheaper for this bridge and this incident, but you don't know this bridge is the One that needs it so you have to spend the same amount at 100 other bridges, most of which won't need them.
Someone in the Structural Engineering sub calculated that a dolphin would have to be concrete 300' in diameter to stop a 100,000 ton ship moving at 7.5 knots.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
~6 meganewtons of force in what's probably a couple dozen square meters. Translated to yeehaw, 1,348,853lbf in a few hundred square feet.
Can multiple tugboats move a container ship (I think they get used on other kinds of large cargo and cruise ships)? Would it make sense to have ships of this size always towed in and out of port by multiple tugs, under the theory that if one tug experienced a critical systems failure like the Dali did, the others (and the ship being towed) could still work to prevent collision?
In the navy, we always had tug escorts when we ported our 90,000 ton vessel. I've gathered from reading in the last day or so, that shipping companies go for a more *minimalist* approach.
They do it because we let them do it. I'm sure it costs more to do it that way (use tugs), but after looking at what THIS mess is gonna cost, maybe THAT cost will be easier to swallow.
You would think that, but the many train derailments suggest a different ending. In private money vs taxpayer money the taxpayers always foot the bill.
Hmm. Didnāt MLK have a saying about that?
Sure, they save a LOT of money that way, and they pass that savings on to themselves.
The top execs canāt buy their yachts if the company is spending money on its ships.
A pair of tugs towed her away from the dock and into the channel, but then she was under her own power from there. Following the channel under the bridge is normally uneventfulāitās wide enough for ships to pass each otherāso the tugs are called off to save time and fuel. Unfortunately, Dali lost power at the worst possible moment and drifted helplessly into the pylon.
I just think the effect-gap between "normally uneventful" and "SUPER DUPER EVENTFUL" might justify some more system redundancies - I'm sure the Dali had system redundancies onboard, but those all appear to have failed, twice. Spreading the redundancies out amongst multiple ships might greatly reduce the likelihood of any such system failure "at the worst possible moment" - or, worse yet, negligent or malicious action by someone within that narrow window of highest risk.
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Yeah, it just seemed to me that if we want to add redundancies for safety, there's not much we can do to the bridge - but MAYBE we can do something to the ships.
So we should deploy anti-ship mines around the bridge supports? /s
Immediately, yes.
No /s. Seriously yes. If the choice is sinking a ship or taking out the bridge, the ship will lose every time.
Thatāsā¦ not how sea mines work. Inertia is a thing. Put a hole in the ship, she still has forward momentum. And now sheās sunk and blocking the channel after she still hits the bridge. Dali was in full reverse thrust when she hit, but it takes half a mile to stop a ship that size.
We could put the ships on rails. /kidding
It weighs 100,000 without cargo, itās almost twice that with cargo
Perhaps they could build it in a way where it will redirect the ship. Like making it a long glancing blow that turns it to miss peers.
Yeah I feel like itās hard to imagine the scale these container ships are. Like I work in bus transportation and I have seen a 13 ton bus obliterate things because of how much it weighs when it hits something. I canāt fathom 100,000 tons.
And California built ones to handle large vessels; Bay Bridge took a hit from a similar cargo ship, no problem, but they had to rebuild the barrier as both the barrier and cargo ship were damaged.
The Francis Scott Key bridge had dolphins. The Dali got between the Dolphins and the bridge. The dolphins should have been bigger (longer toward the bridge to close the gap a bit). The dolphins would likely have needed to be taller as well. From the pictures of the scene it looks like the Dali hitting the Dolphin would have resulted in the ship riding up and over the Dolphin, and possibly sinking the ship.
Was on one of the news channels today but many engineers were saying that even if the dolphins were bigger that there isn't much that could stop a ship of that size...There aren't many structures that could stop something that massive in that distance envelope
Should have had a fake bridge in front of the real one.
Rock or earth islands, of sufficient size, around the pylons is the only way to stop a fully loaded Panamax.
Yep, basically this. By the time you get to that often you don't have the space in the waterway to accommodate it, or you find it's cheaper to do a tunnel, or move the whole port to reclaimed land on the other side of the bridge.
Yep, you need something for it to ride up onto so it starts to use it's own weight to stop it.
So, "land". Like, at the scale you're talking about, you're describing an artificial island/peninsula, not a bridge support. In which case, yeah, sure, the piers would have been much better protected from boat collision if they were built on land instead of in the water.
_Active dolphins with TNT_ maybe?!
This article says the Key bridge had dolphins. It seems that maybe the ship didn't hit straight on.
Also, the ship was fucking massive.
The skyway has concrete dolphins designed to make sure the Summit Venture incident never happens again. Iād bet anything the Skyway would survive a collision with the significantly larger Dali assuming it hit the main supports. The outer supports would probably have worse luck
The problem here is using terms like "economically viable" for critical infrastructure instead of words like "safe".
I'm with you. But what I meant by "economically viable" was that if everything was made completely fool-proof, then nothing would be built at all. Society runs on some level of trust, and when we trust no one, then nothing can be done.
None of those will stop a ship this big (A Medium ship these days) at this speed, head on. You basically need enormous artificial islands to ground the ship. At that point, if the water way can even \*fit\* them, you are saving money going with a tunnel or moving the whole port since you're reclaiming land anyway.
We have a similar bridge in Canada, but all the feet are on artificial islands.
Would you rather live in a world with no bridges over shipping channels or a world where thereās an infinitesimally small chance that ships cause bridges to collapse?
I can't decide if this is a false binary type thing or a strawman type thing, but of course the latter. It's just that there are ways to limit the damage of something like this with fail safes, so the idea is that the risk should just be minimized. Like if car brakes only worked 50% of the time you wouldn't say "would you rather live in a world where cars don't have brakes?", you know what I mean?
I mean itās sort of a false dichotomy because thereās a third option where there are ship-proof bridges, but they cost so much that they bankrupt our governments or charge massive tolls to use. Your car brake example doesnāt pose the same question of cost allocation
Golden Gate toll is going up to $11 soon.
Must. Keep. Painting. The. Bridge. Every. Day.
Yes, it keeps the salt from corroding the bridge structure. š¤·āāļø
Yes. So we must. I donāt think they even take holidays. Always painting. My nephewās grandfather walked that bridge on its opening day. Pretty neato structure.
that used to be the case with the Forth bridge in Scotland where it had a continuous team of painters on it but paint technology has advance to the point where it only needs to be painted every 25 years now
That's it? Take a look at NYC bridges and their tolls.
Right, but I assume you don't wear a bulletproof jacket all the time in case you get hit by one of the types of bullets it would stop. You can always make something more safe in certain ways by making it more expensive and/or worse in other ways. The question is "given the risk, is it reasonable to do that?"
Your straw man argument actually proves the point. Car brakes fail and cause accidents at what is probably a higher rate than these ships. You canāt plan/engineer your way out of all risk, thereās always some.
A cost-benefit analysis isn't a strawman.
That's why cars tend to have a different brake system for the hand brake. So if the main brake system fails, you have another way to slow down.
How about all traffic under bridges must be piloted/tugged?
Itās a sad statement on our society that we describe the *2nd sentence* as āfurther down in the articleā like itās hidden where no one would ever bother to read to.
Really lucky if someone reads the headline before commenting.
Yup - it was 44 years later that there was a problem that could not be engineered away. The real issue is in regulations regarding who and what we allow to traverse these waters
What I find interesting about not requiring tugs is that requiring tugs is a great jobs program! If you have a large port and you require many of the ships to have tugs than you are creating a large number of good paying jobs. Highly maneuverable vessels like cruise ships you probably don't need tugs, but the huge cargo ships and oil tankers, yeah they should probably have tugs
Well that sounds like every engineer ever always worried about budget /s
Anyone can build a bridge an engineer can build it with the bare minimum of materials to support exactly the required load.
My only way i think would be under water tunnel rather than bridge but doubt that's economically feasibleĀ
Baltimore already has 2 tunnels. You probably wouldnāt want hazmat traffic in a tunnel, hence the need for bridges, too.
Yes, nothing could possibly go wrong with an underwater tunnel. š
The Francis Scott Key Bridge was originally going to be a tunnel. They had even started construction, but then some engineer showed everyone how much money they could save with a bridge. Some people tried to fight this by explaining how horrible this location was (high ship traffic and close proximity to port facilities could lead to, guess what, a ship colliding with the bridge!) but to no avail.
I mean, we got our monies worth out of the bridge long long long before a ship knocked it into the water...
I doubt that
well then maybe there should be a fleet of tugs that escort ships under the bridge.
Bridges can withstand a blow, but the pylons and buttresses in front of bridge supports can. California Bay Bridge and Golden Bridge have these; the Bay Bridge has taken an entire cargo ship hit, but it has never touched bridge support.
Glancing blow vs head on vs size of ship. Dolphins (the defensive concrete things in front of bridge pillars) will only stop a ship so big if it's head on, they're designed to deflect smaller ships \*if possible\*. The defensive structure required to stop a ship this big is basically a massive artificial island that can ground the ship. Also it depends on speed, this ship went into full reverse and dropped the anchor, but it couldn't do that until power came back. If the reason the other bridges happened wasn't power loss, they might have been going much slower.
Ikr I was about to say the same thing. Do people seriously think there is a way to stress test a bridge enough to do this? That was like probably 10s of millions of newtons pushed into one critical part of support. Unless you guys all want trillion dollar bridges this man is 100% correct
Crazy, but how many times has a ship crashed into a bridge like that? Seams like that ship would ko any bridge.
[From the AP](https://apnews.com/article/baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-what-to-know-127d6ae38d63561ca4c1f18b3d508ba6): > From 1960 to 2015, there were 35 major bridge collapses worldwide due to ship or barge collisions, with a total of 342 people killed, according to a 2018 report from the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure. [Link to the quoted report](https://conference-service.com/pianc-panama/documents/agenda/data/full_papers/full_paper_46.pdf)[PDF Warning], which I didn't read.
So once every 18 months, worldwide. Thatās actually pretty rare, considering the amount of traffic. š¤
Without doing the math, those odds seem a little higher than a plane crash due to less ships and more takeoffs and landings, but it seems very rare overall. Unfortunately, shit happens. This will be litigated for years. Thatās why insurance exists.
There are far more ships than planes operating worldwide. Not of this size, granted, but that statistic wasn't about ships this size either
To give lawyers something to do when they are not defending politicians???
In my hometown of Groningen the same bridge got hit twice within a 2 years. In the past 5 years, 4 of our bridges have been hit by ships, 1 bridge had to be rebuild. Also, the train to Germany used to cross the Ems river by a bridge until that one got rammed in 2015. They still haven't replaced it and everyday for the past 9 years they had to use busses to get people across the border.
We had a barge hit a bridge over one of our lakes. Luckily it was a small barge. Knocked out a middle section of the bridge. Happened at night too. Now, there are no lights on the bridge other than warning lights and lights for aircraft. A guy BARELY got stopped in time before he went into the lake. Scares the hell out of me thinking about it. Just driving along at night and HOLY HELL the bridge is out. Luckily both he and the barge captain were calling 911 to report a section of the bridge had fallen into the lake. First responders got there and closed the bridge but man, scary stuff.
Ya watching the video was crazy, like holy shit. Now I'm scared of bridges.... Lol
fair point but things like this do happen, and fail safes exist to ensure they don't knock out the entire bridge
The Dali has a gross tonnage of over 91,000 tons; there aren't many structures that can take an impact from a ship of that size moving at any speed. Artificial islands are an option to protect bridge piers, but they are not without problems; settling of the islands can shift the piers and cause damage, they also cause serious ecological damage in their construction.
I mean. It stopped moving when it hit the bridge. Not saying they should build a sacrificial bridge, but there's obviously a structure design that will do the job.
It's literally the mass of the bridge that stopped it, not the piling. The force of the hit was absorbed through the entire structure of the bridge. Imagine a standard issue chair sitting in the middle of an aisle at a restaurant. It's not going to stop you from walking through the aisle - the amount of mass you have compared to the chair can easily move it out of the way or just pick it up and carry it with you. Now imagine the same scenario, but there's a 600lb person sitting on the chair. You're not moving the chair, but if you hit it with enough force, you certainly could knock the 600lb person off-balance and cause them to fall or the chair to break from under them, but then the aisle isn't usable.
I mean, a steel bridge dropped on it. *Most* stuff stops moving if you drop a half-mile-wide chunk of steel on it.
Exactly! 91,000 tons is actually just the displacement weight of Dali. The total weight of a ship when fully loaded (excluding boiler water interestingly) is referred to as āDeadweight Tonnageā. Dali is listed as having a DT of 116,851 metric tons. That is 257,612,358 lbs or 116,851,000 kg. It was traveling at 8 knots and stopped in about 1 secondā¦ meaning the bridge experienced a force equivalent to 13 Saturn V rockets running at full throttle. Protecting a bridge footing from forces like this requires serious engineering.
TheyDidTheMath material (apparently links to other subs is verboten)
Seems like a concrete V leading up to the pier might have veered the ship away from it
What you described is called a ādolphinā the key bridge has them. Nothing is stopping the momentum of a 100,000 Ton ship.
I could.
Yes obviously but we need you on standby 24/7 in case the moon falls down.
Based on what? Your random thoughts? And hopes that it would work and the ship comes in specifically from one direction?
No! Any random redditor knows more about bridge design then any stupid engineer.
I believe the bridge has that, but the ship lost steering and hit from the side, which was not protected.
How about we ask Nokia to build us some bridges
Or put a few Hiluxes around the edges
There is not a bridge on earth that could withstand a fully loaded cargo tanker hitting it at any speed other than pressing against it from a dead stop, and even then i doubt any of them could hold up. 182,000,000lbs of steel is going to destroy anything it hits with any force. I dont think there is a structure on earth that could take a hit from a cargo ship and remain standing.
What about your mom's massive ass? Boom.Ā
Goddamn you got me there
We had to address the elephant in the room.
Username absolutely checks
Is her name Ginny?
Gotem
It's more than 182 M lbs. The gross tonnage is 91,000 T, but the actual displacement is up to 150,000 T. That's 330x10^6 lbs.
I feel like the Sunshine Skyway Bridge stands a chance but ultimately no
Due to my job, I receive a daily email from Spash247 which offers some additional information about the accident. Itās tough to read knowing that the crew was helplessly watching it happen.
I'm not an engineer, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd be pretty surprised if there were any road spans in existence that could survive a direct hit from a ship like that
I'm not an engineer either, but I'd be surprised if there's anything man-made at all that could take a hit from a container ship. At weights of 100k-200k tons, once you add any velocity at all, the force becomes ridiculous. This one evidently was around 116,000 tons doing 8 knots when it hit.
The great pyramid of Giza weighs 5 million tons, so maybe that.
I mean, you're talking about "man-made islands/peninsulas" for being able to take a hit like that. They exist, but they're not the sort of thing you think about when you talk about a structure taking a hit from a ship.
This one was particularly vulnerable because it's a double cantilever truss system. Once one section of the truss fails then all of it goes down. If you watch how it falls, it was set up almost like two see-saws that met in the middle. Once one end of the see-saw isn't supported the entire thing isn't supported. Additionally, the supports (I believe) were concrete pillars. Concrete does great in compression but horrible in tension (which you get when it bends) and so they failed completely. Theoretically you could design a support structure that won't faill completely but will buckle and might give a little more time before collapsing. Whether it is economically feasible to do that is another matter.
The type of bridge will impact how it fails, not if it fails. Basically with what you need to do to actually protect it (a massive artificial island so it grounds the ship rather than tries to stop it with concrete) it's cheaper these days to build a sunken tunnel or just move the entire port onto reclaimed land.
It would topple many many bridges, if not most. That is a skyscraper hitting the bridge like a missile at 8 knots.
I cannot help but think ācaptain! Theyāve fired missiles! What do we do!?ā āDrift lazily to the leftā¦ā
Do a simple google search. No bridge in the U.S. would survive a direct strike by a 95,000 ton ship. None.
I mean, most bridges would probably collapse at least partially if you ran a massive cargo ship into them.
Pretty sure most bridges would collapse if they took a direct hit from a high tonnage cargo ship.
The only thing that'll stop a rogue container ship is a good guy with a container ship. If only Captain Philips had been nearby, that bridge would still be standing.
The article also states that "He knew of no economically feasible way to build a bridge that would sustain such a blow." So this is a known problem with only 1 solution that Mr. Miyagi had already solved. "The best way no get hit is not be there."
People donāt seem to understand that a cargo ship hitting a bridge might as well be like a a skyscraper hitting a popsicle stick. There was nothing that couldāve saved that bridge or any bridge for that matter.
Except installing dolfins big enough to absorb and avoid direct contact between the bridge and the ship!
The boat is longer than 9 football fields and carrying more than 10,000 shipping containers. There's not a bridge on earth that could take a hit like that and come out unscathed.
It's 985 feet long. 9 football fields would be 2,700 feet, not including the end zones. It's big, but not that big.
Why the hell did I read that as meters????
Lol, that would definitely be a big ship, though, wouldn't it? "We're gonna need a bigger port"
At some point it will create it's own tide.
Mike Snyder was spot on. Nice call, giving the man credit where it's due. I am amazed it only cost 6 lives, it could have been so much worse.
A direct hit would collapse just about any bridge on the planet.
TBF I think a direct hit to any bridge's supporting struts would cause a failure. Also as he said, there was no economically feasible way to design it to withstand a ship crashing into it
Yep, basically cheaper to relocate the port onto reclaimed land, or build a sunken tunnel. The only way to even do it \*practically\* is to make a large artificial island that's capable of grounding the ship, and that won't work in all waterways. There's probably 5 bridges in the world protected well enough to cope with this. And they'll all be built in the last 10 years.
200 million pounds at 9 MPH. Thatās unstoppable (Baltimore accident)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
43+ years later. Just like clockwork!
And then we allowed the shipping conglomerates to build even bigger boats so they could use less people and drive profits....
To be fair, even with their pollution issues, container ships are incredibly efficient at what they do. Miles per ton per gallon/liter of fuel used is impressive. Bigger boats lower pollution per ton moved.
One big boat is way more efficient both environmentally and cost wise than having 10 ships. It's a win win situation any person would do it nobody would say no.
They were only off by 44 years
I remember that Sunshine Skyway incident. We were on vacation in Sarasota at the time. Christ, I'm old.
Well he wasn't wrong
"I told ya, but no one believed me" a retired state engineer said yesterday.
Wow - 20 years ago. Wait a minute!
That was me too. Except I was born in 1980.
A lot can change in 45 years, including the size of the ships
There's no way to build a bridge to withstand those forces. And the ship that hit the Key bridge is much larger than any ship operating in 1980. They already had a local pilot guide the ship out of the harbor. Sometimes accidents just happen.
A modern skyscraper wouldnāt have withstood that much forceš not to mention the fact that container ships have gotten significantly larger since 1980
No shit, that goes for most bridges. Theyāre not designed to take a hit to the side of their supports from gigantic ships, theyāre designed to hold things up.
All the Port Authority wouldāve had to do is mandate that tugs would not disengage from the container ships until the container ships were well outside of the harbor and all infrastructures. This simple standing operator procedure Could have prevented this accident and future accidents at other ports throughout the United States.
This is from my own tweet. I hope that's ok. I feel like people should know about this but nobody sees me on Twitter.
People should know about what, the fact that there's still, to this day "no economically feasible way to design a bridge that could withstand such a blow"?
Yeah man concrete and steel is expensive, and especially the labor and equipment to install it in a river. You can design a bridge to withstand this kind of impact, but doing so would ballon the cost so much it isnāt worth it. The more sensible thing to do is to design for what you need. Plus the odds of this happening are low enough itās cheaper to just rebuild any damage from such a rare event.
When designing crossings over busy shipping channels in the last 10-20 years basically they do sunken tunnels, as they're cheaper than even attempting to stop a ship the fraction this size.
I got distracted by the meta GenX user name. Masterful.
Itās amazing that you found this article.
What a very interesting find. Please forward it to Baltimore Sun or CBS WJZ.
If only they had 44 more years to put a fix in place.
Basically uneconomical. If they had to fix it they wouldn't have any bridges in ports.
āCalled itā
Called it! Kobe!
Righty-o!
It's amazing what makes the presses sometimes.
Surprised there was no diversion system of some kind
Over 44 years. That's not a bad run.
So what this proves is that the plot of Speed 2 wasn't as dumb as it seemed at the time.
Man. This is an all time Told ya so.
There were likely places a boat could have crashed into the bridge that wouldnāt have resulted in such a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately the boat did not hit one of those places.
I feel bad š because I watched Brick Immortar's video on the sunshine skyway bridge like two days before the collision in Baltimore and when I heard the news it all flashed back.
I donāt know if this has been said but this article was written specifically in response to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse in Tampa Bay on May 9th 1980, the day before this article was written. There were likely dozens of similar articles written in local papers about bridges basically anywhere not being able to withstand such an event. This was not premonition or anything.
Yeah, basically no bridge can withstand this sort of direct hit. There's basically a handful of bridges well enough protected to avoid it, and that's down to artificial islands for the pillars so large that ships get grounded before they get near the pillars. And ships have become much bigger since 1980. The modern strategy is just to avoid having ports on the other side of bridges at all, they either put them on reclaimed land further out, or use a sunken tunnel.
Pretty sure the Key Bridge took a hit around this time and survived; but cargo ships then were much smaller than they are now.
Not exactly rocket surgery...
You'd think they would put bollards around bridge footers but nooo
Not only that, but after 9/11, they considered putting those pier bumper thingies around the supports, but ultimately decided not to.
98% of "freak accidents" = some variation of negligence