So, one thing about this video that stands out, is at about the 30 second mark, if you watch the ship closely, most of its deck lighting goes out, and that’s just before the ship starts swinging around towards the bridge support. The lighting then comes back on at about the one minute mark.
This morning, I looked at the Maryland bridge data submittal from last year. Took me a bit of sleuthing to find the correct record but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right one. The bridge was not compromised, the major condition ratings of deck, superstructure, and substructure were all 6, at the high end of fair condition. What I was particularly interested in was NBI Item 111, pier and abutment protection. This was coded as 2, meaning in place and functional. So there was navigation protection in place for the pier that was struck, apparently the momentum of this ship far exceeded the design of the pier protection and it took out the pier and the spans it supported with ease.
Engines failures generally involve engine stoppage.
I agree that the large amount of smoke was almost certainly the main engine being put full astern
Oh, yeah! F = MA. Even if the acceleration is only, say 5 MPH, the incredible mass of a ship that large times an acceleration even that small produces an irresistible force.
Terrible news this morning. I hope they can rescue more people.
I’ve heard about ships hitting bridge support piers before. It’s usually not catastrophic. But that was a very big ship.
It is commonly catastrophic if it is a direct hit on the bridge itself by a large ship.
I’m a geographer/cartographer, and I’ve never heard this term!
(Or was it an autocorrection failure?)
I’ve heard there was a harbor pilot on board, as you would expect. The visibility was good enough to make the video clear, so that wasn’t an issue. So what went wrong? Mechanical issue with the ship making it lose control?
Pittsburgh has a bunch of bridges, and at any given time most are in serious need of work.
(This is from PastTense’s post 45 minutes ago – they quoted a source that isn’t definitive yet, but seems to know what they’re talking about).
Princhester later noted that there SHOULD (perhaps) be more than one generator operating…unless there’s an underlying cause that takes them both out, which might be the case here.
It’s a meme that has been going around for a while. Someone posted a picture of something that was for sale and put a banana next to it to show the scale, and that’s all you need to start an internet meme these days. You can buy plastic bananas from Amazon and elsewhere that have “for scale” printed on the sides of them.
Sorry, I missed that excellent post about the loss of power. What an amazing stroke of bad luck.
Wow, I should have known this! Thanks (and to Darren_Garrison).
Nitpick it may seem but no. A marine pilot has the con ie the immediate control of navigation but the master remains in command and can overrule the pilot.
And a Royal Caribbean ship that’s due back on April 4 - they may have to divert also - Norfolk, maybe?
I’ve taken 5 or 6 cruises out of Baltimore and I have no idea how many times we’ve gone under that bridge in our own boats.
It took 5 years to build the bridge ('72-'77) - wonder how long a replacement will take?
The Francis Scott Key Bridge was a continuous throught truss bridge which requires tension and load-balancing for stability and structural integrity. The advantages of this are less material and longer spans but it does mean that loss of a single support or integrity of a span can result in catastrophic loss of stability and complete collapse as seen here.
The modern container ship is an order of magnitude greater in tonnage than even a ‘Sixties-era. This ship, Dali, had a Gross Tonnage rating of over 95k MT and a 10,000 TEU capacity, so it was large even by container ship shandards and presumably almost fully loaded with a lot of momentum even at slow speed and slack tide.
That is correct, and they often have a very small crew, typically less than a dozen people (plus any passengers). Ocean-going commercial ships are supposed to be maintained to an acceptable standard but part of the ‘advantage’ of being foreign-flagged is that ships are often not maintained (or maintenance and crew training records are falsified), and while the US Coast Guard has the right to board and inspect the integrity and maintenance records on any commercial vessel operating in US coastal waters and navigable waterways, they rarely do so for a lack of resources and personnel. Being in a narrow navigable waterway, the vessel should have had two pilots on the bridge as well as crew standing by for muster in case of fire or collision, but frankly if there was a loss of steerage (from engine failure, loss of shaft or screw, bottoming, et cetera) it would be virtually impossible to recover control without the aid of several large harbor tugs.
Stranger
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You do not want to anchor both ends of a ship/boat “for stability”. You want it to be able to freely stay pointed into the wind as the wind shifts so that the wind and waves hit the bow instead of the beam (side). This minimizes how much the boat rolls in heavy weather, reducing the odds of capsizing at anchor.
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It’s not really feasible for a boat to anchor itself fore-and-stern. Once you’ve set one anchor, you’re kind of stuck in position, but you can’t really set an anchor and have it be effective by simply dropping it into the water while you’re stationary. That is, if you set your bow anchor, and then wanted to set a stern anchor, you’d need to be able to keep reversing a whole bunch, drop the stern anchor, then power forward again to actually have the stern anchor set (dig in to the bottom and hold). That would take (at the very least) a whole lot of extra line to even allow the possibility of maneuvering that far, and a fair amount of luck to not have either anchor come loose while you maneuver.
Side note, very small boats sometimes do set fore-and-aft anchors, in tight protected anchorages where boats need to not swing to avoid hitting each other - but those anchors are small enough to plop in a dinghy and motor/row around. For a cargo-ship sized anchor (and its chain) you’d need a small tugboat. -
You really really never want to drop lines in the water on purpose at the stern - you risk fouling the prop and/or rudder. For that reason alone, it’d never be used normally - only as a last resort emergency brake.
You could have stern anchors for an “emergency brake” but it would be a fair amount of weight and space (anchors, chain/line, winches, lockers) for an extremely niche use-case: maybe helping you stop one boat length sooner. Realistically, it takes many boat lengths for a ship to actually come to a stop (decide to drop anchor, let it pay out till it hits bottom, wait for the ship to actually lose all its momentum). If you’re worrying about a margin of one length, you’re hosed already. In my opinion, there are probably better “returns on investment” for improving overall safety by investing the same amount of resources elsewhere.
Looking at satellite images to refresh my memory, the Key Bridge’s dolphins are pretty tiny. They look pretty substantial when you’re right there at eye level with them on a small sailboat, but a 100,000-ton cargo ship isn’t even going to notice. Likewise, the actual bridge supports have a concrete wall permitter that’s probably a couple feet thick but that’s still meaningless to a 100,000-ton ship.
TBH I’m a little skeptical that even the fortifications pictured above on that bridge in Tampa would do anything against a 100,000-ton cargo ship going sideways at exactly the wrong time.
They don’t use Tug boats in Baltimore harbor? Safely guide in the ships?