Not really. A properly placed charge removes a critical structure and the mass of the structure brings everything down. That’s the beauty of it. We have all probably seen many videos of building demolition and that involves bring down a building with lots of redundancy. Hence the sequence of charges going off. A bridge often has several columns or beams each of which can start a cascading failure. Recall the bridge 10 years ago that was brought down when a truck clipped a single overhead beam.
Engineering such a demolition is not that hard. Shaped charges are used by professionals because they use a minimum of explosives and secondary damage is minimized. Blowing up a bridge could be done with a big dumb sachel charge. A shaped charge is really not needed. But basic shaped charges are not all that hard to design. I’ve watched a guy on YouTube build his own using wine glasses for the shape and legal binary explosives for the charge. I am assuming some terrorist groups have military connections anyway.
How long do you think it would take for a small team to rapidly approach a bridge support on a dark rainy night? Use an inflatable for the small radar signature.
Those building take weeks of prep cutting through all but the bare minimum of support necessary to keep them upright until the final charges are detonated.
I remember Maxim magazine somehow had an entire article around the same time (probably inspired by that) about the easy ways terrorists could do terror attacks with very low skills.
Setting fire to an oil tanker in a critical harbor was one such one.
The department of public works around here can’t repaint a crosswalk without shutting down the whole intersection overnight and bringing in so much equipment and lighting that the place is lit up like the 4th of July, so you tell me.
How is this terrorist squad going to get up from their raft to the bridge spans several dozen feet up to the supports that might conceivably be thin enough for their explosive to have an impact? Note we aren’t talking about seal team six, we are talking a bout a bunch of guys chosen more for the fervor of their belief in the cause, and access to US visas, then their skills.
Suppose that the ship had instead been a LNG carrier.
Do they put any extra consideration into what things are in the path of such ships when locating a LNG terminal?
What sort of destruction might happen if a LNG carrier had hit this bridge and ruptured and ignited? A huge explosion with wide destructive power? Or a more localized, mostly fire incident?
I know it can be on a scale depending on many things. But what is worst case scenario with a LNG carrier rupture and ignition? Keep in mind there are multiple pressure vessels. One ignites/explodes. The next one starts heating up, till BOOM?
Never mind the obvious LNG scenario, as I think you are correct there. But how about a barge full of chemical fertilizer such as was stored and neglected at that port in Beirut? That is a much more mundane material but still had a big, destructive boom.
Exactly. Folks, the Boston bombers had to resort to scavenging ‘’‘explosives’‘’ from fire works and that time some knucklehead tried to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a fucking an acetylene torch!
(If you’ve seen that bridge and know what even a couple of idiots can carry in terms of acetylene gas bottles you know that this wasn’t going to be difficult, it was going to be impossible.)
Cross section of Golden Gate Bridge suspension cable.
Really? I never would have thought it. Ignore ranting lunatics IRL.
It’s a novel idea, and it just might catch on.
Probably true. If it’s a The Onion headline, it’s likely true, or funny, or close to being true. If it’s something written by that misogynist illiterate turd Randall, it’s likely disgusting and vomit-worthy, as most things scrawled or “written” by people like that tend to be.
You’re right. I was thinking there were bridges where the steel columns come right down to near the waterline. But looking at a lot of bridge photos shows that all of them have rather tall concrete structures at the base and the steel starts much higher.
It reminds me of various stories from WWII where a retreating army would try to destroy bridges behind them. Sometimes they would succeed, sometimes not but I was always amazed at how hard it seems. I thought surely they could just place a few explosives and be done with it but nope. It took some work and thought to do it right and often they simply did not have time. Certainly seemed more than a few shaped charges to manage it (and these were generally much smaller bridges than the one in Baltimore).
I have read that Russia has very heavily guarded the bridge. Ukraine has managed some damage to the bridge but I’d think they’d have managed closing it by now. As you suggest, it is not easy.
Bridges are notoriously difficult to destroy with air-launched munitions. Or with artillery fire or even now ground-launched high precision guided missiles. It’s easy enough to damage the decking and slow traffic until road repairs can be made. Wrecking the structure is a much taller order.
Sappers are the successful approach to bridge destruction percentagewise, but that means getting your attack team up close and personal with their bridge. At least conceptually speaking, that’s a lot easier in e.g. Illinois than in e.g. Crimea.
The cool thing about a bridge is that if your sappers or munitions do succeed in creating an overstress / overload situation, the bridge’s own design and mass generally guarantees a catastrophic failure cascade. You’re not going to chip out little hunks from a bridge as you might from a tunnel or fortification.