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Video: Baltimore bridge struck by boat and collapses
(streamable.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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To your last comment, ships never just boop. It smothers.
Let's say 100k tons for a ship, and make it long tons to make it an even 100,000,000kg. This ship was moving roughly 4m/s... Thus the kinetic energy was somewhere around 800 MJ. A stick of dynamite is about 1MJ.
I'm pretty sure 800 sticks of dynamite could've fucked that support up pretty good, too, bringing down the bridge deck.
It's more like either you give up on bridges or give up on ships if you are concerned about the two coexisting and breaking stuff in a low speed collision.
While using energy to measure the destructive power of a collision is... not great, OF COURSE no bridge pillar can withstand a direct collision with cargo ship that size (although I don't think it would necessarily be unfeasible to build the pillars on artificial concrete islands ? Depending on currents and topology, it might just be very expensive).
There are also ways to mitigate risk (many of which surely are already implemented) around critical infrastructure. Slower speeds, backup generators, and for instance in Suez they have tugboats as well. They had one high-profile incident recently but they have way more traffic in a way more challenging environment.
Whether it makes economic sense to implement new safety measures in Baltimore I suppose depends on how likely such a collision is determined to be. Maybe it was a freak accident. Maybe with the amount of modern shipping traffic it's bound to happen every few decades, and the risk/reward calculations should change to accommodate mitigation strategies.