The company that chartered the cargo ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was recently sanctioned by regulators for blocking its employees from directly reporting safety concerns to the U.S. Coast Guard — in violation of a seaman whistleblower protection law, according to regulatory filings reviewed by The Lever.
Eight months before a Maersk Line Limited-chartered cargo ship crashed into the Baltimore bridge, likely killing six people and injuring others, the Labor Department sanctioned the shipping conglomerate for retaliating against an employee who reported unsafe working conditions aboard a Maersk-operated boat. In its order, the department found that Maersk had “a policy that requires employees to first report their concerns to [Maersk]… prior to reporting it to the [Coast Guard] or other authorities.”
Am I the only one who also would like to look at that bridge?
If you have traffic infrastructure, you want it to be able to either resist accidents and collisions, or that there is protection that will avoid total collapse from a single impact.
Why did this bridge just tossed over like a deck of cards when a single cargo ship ran into it? How many hundreds of those ships sail under it every day? An accident was bound to happen, by sheer chance, and that bridge, any bridge, any infrastructure, should be ready to receive an impact like that, and not immediately crumble.
A New Panamax ship (a type that can go through the new locks built at the Panama canal) has a max tonnage of 120,000. That’s 121,900,000kg. If it’s traveling at only 0.5 m/s, that’s 15 MJ of energy. New Panamax ships aren’t even the biggest types out there.
There’s no such thing as “just a soft bump” with large cargo ships. They hit something, they cause damage.
Yes, and you can still build some foundation around bridge pillars to protect it by either stopping or deflecting incoming ships
Buddy, you clearly do no understand the magnitude of these ships or what 15 MegaJoules of energy is… You cannot “deflect” a ship this size even if a second Pilar of reinforced concrete would magically pop up in front of the bridge
It may in fact be possible to protect bridge supports from ship collisions. Bridges in the San Francisco Bay have some state of the art protections that have worked in the past: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/bay-area-bridge-safety-collapse/3493000/
Ehmm… Not from collisions like this one
From your link:
Shahbodaghlou said Bay Area bridges are engineered to withstand massive earthquakes and even typhoons. But he admits you cannot design for every possibility, like a direct hit from a massive container ship.
The San Francisco bridge is “protected” by the fact the water is too shallow for such large ships… So I guess the answer for Baltimore would be to ban ships this large
From the video I saw, it looked like the ship hit the support nearly straight-on. If they built some sort of underwater pile of rubble to cause ships to run aground earlier, or perhaps bumpers that extend further out to redirect ships, that could potentially work. But yeah, it was basically a head-on collision. An edge case.
