My apologies for the Twitter link. Appears to have happened around 1:30 EDT, judging from the timestamp in the video. Seems unsurprising that Amerikkkan infrastructure is in this dire of a state (at the cost of innocent people’s lives, as usual), but I’d still love to know what the hell happened here. Hopefully the early hour meant that more people weren’t harmed.
Photo of the aftermath:
Prior to the ship hitting the support column, you can see it lose power, then regain power, then thick smoke starts billowing out the top, then it loses power again, and regains power again seconds before contact.
Could the bridge have been engineered to be strong enough to survive an impact by a >100k ton ship? Maybe, but it seems like better backup and emergency systems on these huge ships might be a more practical idea. Obviously we are still very light on information.
I think they usually build artificial islands around bridge columns so ships will run aground before hitting the column itself.
They do if they’re required by law to, otherwise way waste the money on things like preventative safety measures.
the dont have to tho … its a free country !
Yeah, they’re called dolphins They can be seen in the video near power pylons. However none were deemed necessary to protect the bridge itself apparently.
There should be tugs that could at least push it off of a direct collision course
Mr. Musk please invent an AI powered tug to guide these ships that will also say the N word
Well we have the ships and have taught them multiple slurs but we can’t seem to get that other part working
Unless you invent a self driving tug, that’s not really feasible
what? These huge ships are usually followed out of port by multiple manned tugs.
Yeah, but I thought you were suggesting having tugs on standby 24/7 to guard every bridge from potential runaway cargo ships
Not exactly, I’m saying I think it’s pretty routine to have a tug in the area at all times in case of an emergency.
https://www.audacy.com/knxnews/news/local/baltimore-ship-crash-has-one-expert-wondering-about-tugboat
That makes a lot more sense
The bridge could’ve had some dolphins