Everybody take a deep breath… no, wait, that wouldn’t help…
http://news.travel.aol.com/2010/11/01/allure-of-the-sea-misses-bridge-by-inches/
I wonder if they shut down traffic on the bridge? And who insured the passage?
Nitpick: holding your breath will help, since that increases the weight of the ship and lowers it slightly. 
If you watch the video, you can clearly see traffic moving along the bridge.
I was on the Carnival Celebration a few years ago, and getting under that bridge out of Jacksonville seemed impossible, but we made it.
That thing looks more like the Bop Bag of the Seas, a giant sail just waiting for the right crosswind to push it over.
from tv news it sounded planned and calculated. comment was made that increased speed made the ship ride lower.
Nah, they glued a couple of pennies to the bottom to keep it upright.
If your lungs are full of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sf6]SF[sub]6[/6], sure, but if you’re breathing air, holding your breath won’t matter.
Great. If they glued a phonograph arm to the bottom of the pennies, it’ll keep the ship from skipping over the waves.
Just as an inflated balloon weighs more than an empty one, lungs pressurized by a held breath are heavier than exhaled lungs. In practice, of course, the amount of excess weight due to a held breath is too small to make a difference. But this is Straight Dope, where pedantry is a virtue.
Cruise ships sure have gotten ugly in the last few years.
This was also done in Oct 2009 by her sister ship, “Oasis of the Seas”:
Holy crap. 225,000 tons. That’s a lotta steel. And stuff.
I realise that the engineer’s know what they are doing.
When you have 225,000 tons of ship moving at 20 knots, thats a heck of a lot of water displaced. Does this create any “pressure” on the bridges’ feet? (I guess tides create more pressure, but still…)
Half of that weight is alcohol.
Two thousand seven hundred staterooms?? :eek:
Heh.
The other half is cheesecake.
Man, you’ve got to have a shitload of faith in your calculations to do something like that. “We can make it under that bridge, but only if we’re going at full speed. Let’s kick this pig!”
Actually, all that up there looked like emergency vehicles to me. A couple of them were moving out of the possible impact zone.
That’s what I thought at first, too, but I watched it again and it looks like the lights are all moving. What looks like flashing lights is just the strobe effect as they move behind the vertical slats of the bridge railings.
Only from the outside. The folks who pay get MUCH better scenery.