Biden said the federal government would rebuild the bridge.
In my opinion, that’s probably the fastest way to get that done but I wonder if the government than goes after the shipping company.
This is from a Newsweek article this morning but I have no idea how it applies to the tragedy. He was talking about larger container ships and losing containers at sea.
Synergy Marine Group’s founder and CEO Rajesh Unni had warned about the dangers that the existing infrastructure posed back in April 2021 when he told Bloomberg, “Traffic on the seas is different from what it was 10 years ago.”
“How do we adapt as an industry?” he asked. “It’s convenient to blame the captain, but we need to look at how the port infrastructure needs to change, how ships transit.”
I dont know; it was pretty clear in 1972 that future ships would get bigger and more massive. and supertanker were already a thing, the Idemitsu Maru was build in 1966;
ah yes. port infrastructure.
A lot of fretting about how the current generation of US ports won’t be deep enough, and won’t have enough cranes to serve the newer hulks. And how it will cost billions to upgrade.
and? it was the bow which crashed into the pillar, and we dont know whats actually in those containers. I would guess a full loaded Idemitsu Maru collision would have a similar catastrophic effect on that bridge. I stand by it; even in 1972 they should have accounted for such an event.
Tuesday’s crash was at least the second in just over a month in which a container ship hit a major road bridge, raising questions about the safety standards of increasingly large ships and the ability of bridges around the world to withstand crashes.
The crashes have also raised questions about whether more ships should be required to be ready to drop anchors quickly during port emergencies, and whether tugboats should accompany more vessels as they enter and leave harbors.
There has not been a final report on the Guangzhou incident, and investigators have barely begun to look at what happened in Baltimore. But ship collision barriers are standard around the support piers of bridges over major waterways like the entrance to Baltimore’s harbor. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York City, for example, has massive barriers of concrete and rocks around the bases of the piers that support it.
It was not immediately clear how old the barriers are around the piers that supported the bridge in Baltimore. The bridge was built almost half a century ago and designed before then. Vessels have become considerably larger in that time.
Before I watched the video, I thought “how can they tell the ship lost power?” Then I watched it. Oh.
A few jobs back, I worked in thermal power generation - mostly converting waste heat at industrial sites into steam, then steam to electricity. The more useful staff often had a marine engineering background - keeping the power on is a big deal while at sea, and these people had stories of nightmares and miracles far from anyone’s home. None of them had stories about incidents in port like this, though.
In that street view, you can see the Verrazzano-Narrows pier and it’s surrounding barrier. If you pan left, you can also see a huge ship. I’m not sure I would place a bet on the barrier stopping the ship from compromising the tower. The wider span between piers and shallows near the piers probably provide better protection. After all, a ship that’s grounded isn’t going to hit the pier.
If a ship impact compromised an entire pier of the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge, that bridge would collapse for the entire span too. The road deck is hanging from cables, without the pier the cables would slack and everything fall.
They look like they’re designed to deflect a head on impact. While this impact kind of snuck in from the side. Some of the aerial photos show the ship just slipping past that barrier up front.
It does feel inadequate. For instance, a ring of the barriers present instead of just two. Far enough apart to get a maintenance vessel through but close enough to prevent a larger one. Maybe eight, ten, or twelve barriers in a circle.
They’re overlooking the fact that in addition to Guangzho this happened only a few days ago in a Turkish port. I remember seeing the video and thinking I wouldn’t see something so crazy and movie-like in a long time…
It’s not a particularly tricky spot. It’s a dead-straight shipping lane of the kind ships navigate all the time. This really is a freak accident, possibly made worse by a panicked response.
