A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water.
At about 1.30am, a vessel crashed into the bridge, catching fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the water below, according to a video posted on X.
“All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge. Traffic is being detoured,” the Maryland Transportation Authority posted on X.
Matthew West, a petty officer first class for the coastguard in Baltimore, told the New York Times that the coastguard received a report of an impact at 1.27am ET. West said the Dali, a 948ft (29 metres) Singapore-flagged cargo ship, had hit the bridge, which is part of Interstate 695.
Seven people likely dead so far. What a horrible, terrifying way to go.
I’ve heard it was construction workers filling pot holes.
The bridge at crest is around 185 ft off the water, and footage shows the collapse took about 6 seconds where the cars were.
Imagine doing a mind numbing job in the dead of night and then all of a sudden the floor starts dipping below you. The street lights go out a second or two later, and not long after you’re falling for close to 2 seconds. Then either crashing hard into the concrete below you that just parted the water, having a flood of water hit you shortly after. or just jetting directly into freezing cold water.
How the fuck did this happen?
The investigation report is going to be interesting. While bridges can only take so much punishment, they are usually designed to survive some collisions with their pylons. I wonder what the state of the bridge was, prior to the collapse. If it’s anything like the rest of the infrastructure in the US, it was probably not good. Though, this may also be a case that the designers in the 70’s planned for a collision with a cargo vessel of the times, which were tiny bath tub boats compared to the super container ships we have now. The Dali was built in 2015 she is a 300m ship capable of carrying 116851 tons. That’s a lot of mass for the pylon and it’s barriers to stop.
I’m pretty sure no bridge is designed to survive a collision with a large cargo ship, even a brand new one. It would balloon the cost so much nobody would be willing to pay it.
New bridges are built with protections such as pylons to prevent ships from even getting close to bumping into the bridge after the sunshine skyway bridge collapse of 1980.
In this case I’m not sure it would have mattered. This wasn’t a bump or a glancing blow. There’s not much which will deflect or absorb that much energy head on.
I disagree, the geometry of protection dolphins use would deflect the ship enough to change its trajectory towards the walls of the channel bed where the ship would run aground before striking the bridge even from a head on collision.
What is a geometry protection dolphin?
They are concrete or wooden structures that are piled deep into the ground like fondation foundation pylons on skyscrapers. The geometry part I was just referring to how they are angled in such a way it ricochets the ship away from the structure it’s protecting or towards the channel.
I believe it refers to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)
This makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/inspection/
I think you can look up certain characteristics such as this here, I’ve done it before and exported data into Excel when I was looking into something else. If this isn’t the specific site I apologize, I’m on mobile, but it is publicly available.
Edit: these links may be better:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/element.cfm
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/national-bridge-inventory-system-nbi
https://infobridge.fhwa.dot.gov/Data
https://geodata.bts.gov/datasets/5e58970e89934e818f38772859addf43_0/explore
- in the '70s* planned
- and its* barriers to stop
This is the absolute dumbest shit I’ve seen in a while. And it’s said so confidently, kind of amazing.
Why do you say that?
This structure was hit head on by a laden container ship. Container ships weigh between 50,000 and 200,000 tons depending on size and cargo. There is not a structure capable of being created by man which could sustain that amount of force, head on, and retain its structural integrity.
Buncha armchair idiots think they know more about bridge construction than civil engineers. Gods, this place is just more and more like Reddit by the minute.
Kinda crazy how those same construction and civil engineers are going to be investigating if the normal means of protection for this very foreseeable event was done correctly, because we design things to avoid these head on collisions:
Also, not for nothing but even if they find out the dolphins in place were sufficient based on prior standards…this event will likely update the standards, same as the sun bridge in the 80s. Regulations and best practices are written in blood.
People always forget that deflection exists. I don’t know why that guy is hung up on stopping the ship instead of just nudging it forcefully. If we can figure out a way to deflect explosions and sabot rounds, we can deflect a ship.
Yeah also just the basic concept of sacrificial parts and things designed to wear. The derailleur hanger on your bike, crumple zones in cars, plastic gears in your KitchenAid mixer - lots of engineering practices are designed around shunting failure to a particular piece or in a particular way, to avoid otherwise catastrophic or very expensive damage.
Oh my god! No way! They’re going to investigate and learn from a rare event! That’s shocking!
We study things all the time. Your extrapolation that an investigation means something was preventable is evidence that your higher brain function has been damaged.
You: "There is not a structure capable of being created by man which could sustain that amount of force, head on, and retain its structural integrity.
Actual engineers in the linked article: literally describe how to build secondary structures to deal with giant ships and prevent head on collisions on bridges.
I know you stopped responding but I’m piling on because I’m apparently in an impish mood:
Sherif El-Tawil, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of Michigan with expertise in bridges, said if the Key Bridge had been built after those updated standards from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials were put in place, the span could still be standing.
“I believe it would have survived,” El-Tawil said.
From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/how-key-bridge-collapsed-baltimore/
Because of a contradictory ass like yourself.
I live not five minutes away from the Key bridge and the sound of this woke me up last night. My GF takes this bridge to work every day. Driving through the city now for her every morning is going to be fucking awful.
I watched it on the news last night all the way from Australia and I said ‘man they just fucked that whole cities traffic up for a long time’.
Yeah, IIRC it is the route for hazmat trucks. Gonna fuck with a lot of businesses down the line for a bit too.
As an aside, they used to have a rave down in the park under the west side of the bridge a decade or so ago, and it was always awesome being on the beach stage looking at that bridge at night and as the sun would come up.
The construction workers that died is fucking awful. The traffic situation won’t be great, but at least she’s alive with a job to go to.
That’s the ship that hit the bridge. It’s still there as I write this, but there are a bunch of tugs on scene right now.
Marine traffic can show you all the active AIS contacts in real time.
Found a photo of the bridge on it.
Seems normal.
At least it happened in the very early AM hours when traffic was low and there were no visibility problems, unlike the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
The fact that it was early morning probably saved hundreds of lives, from what I’m reading
That sounds like a traffic armageddon around Baltimore for the next few years…
Not just Baltimore. This is also a major cargo port. That harbor will be blocked for a long time. Get ready for supply chain disruptions and more rising prices.
I doubt the harbor will be blocked that long, maybe a week or so at most.
That’s a crime scene and a death scene. It’s not going to go quickly. The good news is that it’s a critical roadway and waterway intersection so the feds and state government have motivation to make haste.
Except there is no mystery as to the deaths part. Investigations take a lot of time when there are a lot of questions. The only question here is “why did the boat plow straight into the bridge?”. There’s very little question how/why the bridge collapsed(it got hit directly by a massive cargo ship). No one’s going to question the physics of it. The only question will be “was it captain error or ship error so we know who to fine”. Recovering the ship will be part of answering that and the rest will be communication and maintenance logs.
Good luck finding the necessary crane capacity. There are a handful of seriously big cranes in the 7000 tons plus range, but they are Dutch or Japanese, primarily. Wherever they are, they are probably busy and will take ages to get there. While the weight/mass of the bridge is not available online, it surely exceeds the weight limits of cranes currently in existence by far, so the bridge segments need to be cut up prior to removal.
Even if the US spends insane amounts of money, this issue will take quite some time to resolve.
The Left Coast Lifter is in NY and can be on site in about 24-30 hours depending on currents going up Delaware Bay. It can make picks up to approx 1,600 tons, it would laugh at what the Key bridge weighs.
At a 1,600 tons limit, one would have to cut the debris into a lot of small pieces. There is no info on the net on how much mass the Key bridge had, but assuming the build and the size, half a million tons is probably not to far off.
It won’t come out in one piece, but it can come out in much larger pieces with a big crane. This one specifically was used to build bridges and put in far larger sections than this job would require. Smaller crane barges will work on the smaller pieces simultaneously. They’ll clear half the channel (most likely the section away from the Dali) and open it to one-way traffic while they continue clean up.
The AP article says the exact opposite, that it is in fact not a major cargo port.
Port of Baltimore is top ten in the US for international trade. It falls to top 20 when domestic shipping is included, but it’s absolutely a major port.
Vehicles from Europe coming via ROROs come to Baltimore primarily. This will impact them as diverting to Jacksonville or Savannah is going through take a lot of landside logistics to figure out.
If I’m not mistaken, it’s Brunswick, not Savannah, that is Georgia’s major port for automobiles/ROROs. Savannah is bigger overall, but that’s due to other types of cargo.
This article mentions Brunswick having a goal of surpassing Baltimore, which is #1. I guess this disaster makes that more likely…
holy shit. I’ve been getting alerts about it, but that video is so much worse than I imagined.
Police audio from the event:
It sounds like police got their just in time to stop traffic. One of the officers says that as soon as backup arrives to take over stopping traffic he would go and evacuate the workers; when we get the report that the bridge is gone.
If you watch the stream of the crash, you can see that traffic was flowing just moments before it fell.
I had to find a map, yeah, this is going to be a major cluster fuck in the morning. It’s possible to route around it, but the next crossing is aways away:
Just looking at that map makes me crack up as someone from Ireland. Baltimore is a small town here on the south coast of Cork. Dundalk is up in Northern Ireland. Pasadena is a place in California.
I just think it’s funny when America has random place names taken from elsewhere.
Wait until you find out about Springfield…
You do realize how little that narrows things down.
And there’s a Brooklyn Park in Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and South Australia.
California is down in St. Mary’s County
Cultural appropriation is US culture. The UK and Ireland were just some of the earliest donor countries.
Wow, damn. Unfortunately similar to the Tasman Bridge collapse
May all involved find peace, that’s so tragic.
A portion? That looks like the entire thing dropped.
Everything in camera collapsed, but the whole thing was 1.6 miles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_(Baltimore)
Ah I see!
Why is he listed as “amateur poet” if his work was so famous that we named a bridge after him 130 years posthumously.
Francis Scott Key famously wrote the lyrics for the Star Spangled Banner. But professionally, he was a lawyer. :)
Time for a redundant array of inexpensive bridges?
(computer joke about backups and resilience.)
Or on a more serious note, maybe a tunnel?
So which version of RAIB you thinking? Because obviously, this has to be hardware, can’t do this with software. IMO, RAIB-5 is probably overkill but I think the locals would appreciate it.
I’m thinking RAIB-0. Not one problem there. No problems at all.
Just a Bunch Of Bridge.
I was thinking RAIB 10 . .no need for parity checking.
What sort of cabling, do you suppose?
Strong Cable Support Infrastructure?
RAIB-0 would be interesting enough. Each car split into equal parts across multiple bridges.
They also have a tunnel and other Bridges
There are two tunnels, plus you could go the long way around or on local streets. However there’s a lot of traffic, plus the tunnels have restrictions against hazardous or oversized loads
The Beowulf Bridge.
will this close down one of the biggest ports on the East Coast? how will other ships get by?
Yeah DOT confirmed the port of Baltimore is closed to sea traffic, local truck traffic from port is still active so the closure won’t be felt immediately. But it will be significant the longer it’s closed. 9th largest port in the US.
As soon as the investigation is finished, they’ll get on removing the debris. That area has no shortage of transportation engineering companies. I’m sure people from the governor’s and mayor’s respective offices are already reaching out to line up inspections and eventual bids. Once the investigation is over, their top goal will be getting the port opened up.
Yeah they won’t get by, in bound traffic will reroute to Norfolk, Philadelphia and NY until a plan is in place. I would guess they have the channel open in 2 weeks or less.
That’s gonna cause some delays.
Man I wouldn’t want to be this boat’s insurance.
