Francis Scott Key Bridge has collapsed after it was struck by cargo ship

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...tt-key-updates

Ship's track - appears to take a slight turn to starboard, towards the pylon. Even the original track looks very close.

Amazing the ship didnt sink or turn over. Removing the bridge and ship will occupy the salvage people for a while. The design of the bridge looks poor with no protection of the towers against passing ships.

And given that perhaps tugs should have been in attendance?

An engineer speaking on the BBC said that bridge design was prohibited about 50years ago after a similar disaster in the US. Strange they didnt do any remedial work or impose a tug escort to make things safe.

Weren't the I35 bridge in Minneapolis over the Mississippi river and the bridge over the port of Tampa that both colapsed the same kind of bridge design? The sort that if even a small part fails, the whole damn thing fails.

There was a somewhat similar incident in the San Francisco Bay a while back, except that it was the under-the-influence captain of the pilot boat that was to blame. The Cosco Busan hit one of the piers of the western suspension span of the Bay Bridge. There was no significant damage to the bridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosco_Busan_oil_spill

Found the culprit.

The ongoing competency crisis continues...

C4 is saying 500k tonnes of LNG is exported each month to the EU through Baltimore. That will push up gas prices in the UK and EU.

Luckily it's spring, so the impact will be reduced. Given that Baltimore is a major port serving much of the East Coast, the collapsed bridge is going to be removed very quickly from the shipping channel. I am doubtful that European consumers will notice any impact to supply or prices.

The ship looked "very close" because the shipping channel between the bridge supports is quite narrow, bizarrely so in my non-expert opinion. I also predict that the replacement bridge will be a more typical suspension bridge which will allow a much wider shipping channel, so that ships would likely run around before they got close to a main bridge support.

The I35 bridge was an entirely different design of bridge, in a different type of location (narrow river, in a gorge, with no threat from ocean-going vessels), that failed because it was life-expired, poorly maintained, and severely overloaded (by the deadweight of several inches of concrete and asphalt that had been added to the road surface over the decades), so I doubt there is any comparison to be made between the collapse of I35 bridge and the collapse of the bridge in Baltimore.

The main span is (was) 366 metres, do you know how much of that is useable channel - between the dolphins, I guess?

I am surprised, but yes, the distance between the piers was around that - it looked narrower to me. I think the problem was that the piers are in relatively deep water, meaning a ship could hit the piers without running aground, and the deep water made building a defensive bank around each pier, impractical.

I imagine the replacement will be a suspension bridge that has its main towers on the south west river bank and the end of the spit of land extending from the NE river bank, which would be a main span of just over a mile (1.7km), and leave the entire width of the river free of obstructions to shipping, even though the navigable channel would be narrower.