Key Bridge Collapse Tragedy

[Johnbee]

Horrible thing!
My hopes and prayers are with all the victims and their families.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/photos-video-show-collapse-baltimores-105104138.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall

After all of the facts are gathered (which may take years) a song could come out of this (ala Gordon Lightfoot "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald")

John B

[Ted]

I lived in Maryland for many years, I've been over that bridge many times. Really, it's a low death toll compared to other world events. But I'm weirdly fascinated by this disaster. I would just imagine that a big container ship, with so much money riding on the delivery of those boxes, would have redundant backup systems to prevent it from just losing power (apparently) and drifting into a major bridge, destroying it. It's a reminder that human events are just the net result of humans winging it. All the training, and engineering, and institutional history is impressive. It can give us confidence in stability and persistence of the systems that make the built environment function. But to some extent, it's just humans winging it. And then a giant ship drifts into a bridge.

I once took a ferry (El Condor) from Mahambo to Ile Sainte Marie. There must have been 200 people on board. And it should have been a two-hour trip. But the ship lost power. There was backup power – weaker and slower, but they could operate the ship. It took 4 hours to get to Ile Sainte Marie, and the decks where sloshing with the vomit of 100 people (including my traveling companions) by the time we arrived. Traveling in a country like Madagascar, you take these kind of problems in stride.

But a multi-million dollar cargo ship such as the MV Dali is not a scrappy operation running in a developing country. I'd expect it to be able to get out of Baltimore harbor without smashing into something.

[SteveB]

I'm not qualified to speak on the technicalities or geography of this incident, and having only viewed about a minute of the collision via YouTube, I'm absolutely astonished that there aren't more vessels/boats/pilots involved in getting something of that size safely into port. Is something lacking, or this normal procedure?

[StephenM]

review the in time path of the ship... interesting.