Mayor says rescue efforts are under way after vessel crashed into Francis Scott Key Bridge, sending vehicles into water
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.
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.
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.
If I had to speculate? Cost savings... The bridge already had a history of cost reductions such as originally being built with a shared approach way which vastly increased the risk of head on collisions.
Possibly but you have to keep in mind this bridge was designed in the late 60s when a lot of the safety regulations that were written in blood hadn't happened yet. The Florida state sunshine skyway bridge collapse wouldn't happen for over a decade after the Francis Scott Key bridge opened.
I suspect there'll be a lot of places taking a good long look at their current chunks of concrete they put around bridge supports and wondering how they'd stand up to the monstrous ships that are now the norm.
This kind of incident may not happen often but it does happen.
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.