This is terrible. But that footage is mesmerizing. Falls just as fast as you think it would.
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Water nerd! 
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In my neck of the woods Marinetraffic is the first app everyone installs and we all watch the local Streamtime Ship Cams (the source of the footage).
We chase freighters and Coast Guard cutters all winter long and share photos.
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So very same, Sugarplum.
7 Likes
Fully loaded that ship weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 tons, based on what I could find. Kinetic energy is 1/2 x mass x velocity^2. Which means that at 6.8 knotts the collision had about the same amount of kinetic energy as a 20-ton semi truck slamming into the bridge support column at the speed of sound.
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They don’t normally drive that fast outside of NJ.
14 Likes
You are Mrs Bale (from As Time Goes By)
and I claim my £5.
ETA: This is horrific. Thank heavens they sent out that mayday.
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FWIW, the last time I remember* something on this scale**, was when a ship hit the Sunshine Skyway near Tampa in 1980. It effectively destroyed the bridge, though I don’t recall the entire span collapsing (different type of bridge).
*for the superscientific value of “what I remember”
**there were collapses in Philly & Wilmington, & Twin Cities, but not with a bridge this big over a shipping lane. Memphis too but the bridge remained.
3 Likes
“the video seems not to show any vehicles present at the time of the collapse”
The ship called MAYDAY when they realized they were unable to avoid the bridge, and the bridge control staff stopped traffic like they are supposed to … it could have been far, far worse.
If you look closely at some of the videos you can see the headlights stop moving onto the bridge before the collision.
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I remember the Tampa bridge crash (my grandparents lived south of St. Petersburg at the time) - when we visited that summer, we had to drive over the remaining span of the bridge to get to their house from Tampa Int’l. It was very creepy seeing the other span a few meters away simply end at the peak of the very-steep apex.
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This is horrible, and yet it could have been so much worse.
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Why didn’t the bridge had concrete island buffers around the pillars? if ships that size crossing a bridge, you have to account for accidents like that, right?
e/
exactly. I dont understand that such a bridge with massive cargo ships under it is not protected against an event like this. I dont get it.
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but the construction crew on the bridge was not notified?
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An engineer was just on the radio discussing that, of three possibilities, the recommended solution was to create barriers to deflect and absorb impact (the others, to have built the bridge to withstand impact or to build the bridge so that impact was not possible were rejected as being impossible in this case).
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Ships are also bigger now than when that bridge was built.
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That is why she rejected the impact-proof option.
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Maybe they were but didn’t have time to get out of there before the ship hit. If there was a work crew up in the trusses or something they wouldn’t have had nearly as much time to get back down and drive to safety as someone who was just crossing the bridge in their car.
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Looks like it has “little” barriers on the approach towards each pier. Either it failed, or the ship got past one.
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Reporting I’m seeing is that the ship lost power. 
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