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A fake bridge collapse? Nope.

Published on 43 Comments on A fake bridge collapse? Nope.

A sign of the times: Last night I saw a post on Twitter that displayed a video of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore collapsing. I did a quick check of a couple of news sites and saw nothing about it, so I assumed it was some kind of AI joke and moved on. Needless to say, I was wrong. It just goes to show that this whole AI deepfake thing cuts both ways.

I hope this incident doesn't spur a huge new round of moaning about America's failing infrastructure. This was not some ancient, crumbling bridge. It was built in 1977 and a piece in the Washington Post this morning makes it crystal clear that no bridge in the world can withstand a direct hit from a huge cargo ship traveling at speed. It was just a tragic accident.

43 thoughts on “A fake bridge collapse? Nope.”

  1. painedumonde

    I've already heard people grumbling it could've been avoided. Fully loaded over a 100,000 tons at eight knots and loss of power (unsure of the full extent of the casualty)...

    I guess it could've be avoided...in bizarro world.

    2. Ken Rhodes

      There was another factor that exacerbated the problem: It was the peak outflow on a full-moon outgoing tide. A huge cargo ship without power in a tidal flow like that carries an unimaginable amount of kinetic energy with no way to direct it.

      To accentuate the helplessness of the situation, there were TWO well-qualified pilots aboard--a Baltimore harbor pilot and a Chesapeake Bay pilot. They couldn't do anything about the impending disaster, but they did send a warning as soon as they knew of the power loss, so the bridge operators were able to clear the bridge of all "civilian" traffic.

    3. rick_jones

      Some bridges have structures, not sure what they are called, in “front” of the pylons/towers. Ostensibly they would preclude a ship hitting the support towers.

      Did/could this bridge have them?

      1. J. Frank Parnell

        The structures are called dolphins. It would take a large dolphin to stop a 100,000 ton ship at 8 knots.

        It seems like there should be greater attention to redundant backup systems to keep steering and propulsion online. Stories of ships losing steering are not all that uncommon. Usually they can just drop anchor and call a tug, but not if the tide is running and they are approaching a bridge.

        Airliners typically have triply redundant electric power: at least two engine powered generators or one engine powered generator and an auxiliary power unit, backed up by a last straw drop down air turbine to keep critical control systems going.

        1. rick_jones

          Thanks. The Wikipedia article for the bridge has some pictures showing at least a few present. Of course from my armchair I thought they looked rather small, and wondering if they were perhaps “code” back in the 70s when the bridge was built and also wondering how much larger ships have become.

          1. KenSchulz

            Commenters in the WaPo have stated that the vessel was built to New Panamax dimensions, 3x the size of the older locks. It apparently had already drifted obliquely and struck/passed the dolphin at an angle beyond design limits.

        2. KenSchulz

          USN destroyers and cruisers have multiple power plants and multiple generators; they must of course survive battle damage. Given that even adrift, modern civilian container ships have enough kinetic energy to do billions of dollars of damage to port facilities, bridges, etc., some cost/benefit studies of redundancy would be advisable.

    4. Crissa

      Well, perhaps they shouldn't be going that fast in a channel without backup power.

      Also, the bridge did not have a modern level of pier defense; more crash barriers may not prevent it, but they can reduce it.

  3. Kalimac

    I don't read Twitter, so I saw the news late at night on the Washington Post web site. So I believed it, the WA Post not being a random Twitter troll, even though no other news sites I read had a reference to it until way in the morning.

    1. KenSchulz

      “Lights go off and it deliberately steers towards the bridge supports,” [accused rapist Andrew] Tate wrote on X
      The lights went off because power was lost, and thereby also the ability to steer the ship.
      Idiot.

  5. kahner

    "It was just a tragic accident."

    Let's not jump to conclusions. Sure, no bridge could withstand the impact, but we have no idea what the root cause was and whether it has deeper systemic roots in poor regulations, lack of ship maintenance, failure of some automated safety measures etc etc. Let's see what the investigation determines.

    1. DButch

      Well, no catastrophic damage to the BRIDGE, anyway. I'm not so sure the SHIP would have come out all that well...

    2. DButch

      The video I say showed three apparently complete power outages. Two as the ship approached the bridge support and one the instant before the catastrophe. Not clear whether that was just taking out all the lights (everything went black as far as I could tell) or if power was also being lost to steering. I suspect the investigators are going to have to do a lot of analysis.

    1. lower-case

      i'm guessing there's gonna be a booming business in building that sort of protection around major bridges over the next few years

    2. Joseph Harbin

      I saw a similar thread from an engineering student pondering if the lack of "fenders" made a difference. You can see how the bridge in Baltimore compares to others like the Golden Gate.

      My guess: those fenders, or islands, would be good protection against small craft and tugboats. But a cargo ship like the Dali would be nearly impossible to protect against, especially in a near-head-on crash like the one this morning. The Dali is a massive 948 feet long. For comparison, that's a foot longer than the Key Tower is tall. The Key Tower is the tallest building in Cleveland.

      1. lawnorder

        Protection against even big ships can be done, but it's expensive. Rocks are cheap, but by the time you've piled a million tons or so of riprap around a bridge pier, you're talking about fairly serious money.

    3. HokieAnnie

      In the 1970s ships weren't that big and the islands weren't a feature of bridge construction design back then. I've been over that bridge countless times, I was shocked and sad to awake this morning to the sad news.

      1. Bobber

        The Golden Gate Bridge has islands around its towers. People did think of collisions back in the 1930s. This is not to say one of those islands could stop a ship of that size.

        1. rick_jones

          Not to say that it would react “well” but I wonder if a suspension bridge with metal towers would react differently than a truss bridge on concrete towers.

  7. The Big Texan

    Oh, there's plenty of folks on the fever swamps of Melon Husk's Twitter saying it is fake, it's a conspiracy, a false flag operation, etc.

  8. different_name

    Yeah, lots of cluelessness about this, including from people who should know better.

    Someone I work with claimed "well-built" bridges are able to withstand this. Turns out their mental model for the ship was comparing it to being hit by a semi. So only off by a factor of 5000 or so.

    Add that to motivated reasoning and worse, and now you have the clowns at Fox tying this to immigration, gender law and whatever else.

    Turns out the human brain can't withstand a bridge failure, either.

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      I was reading the comments in a YouTube aerospace piece and was surprised to see people blaming wokeness and diversity for all of Boeing's problems. If it was only old white guys still in charge things would be fine. For the wingnuts wokeness and/or diversity are blamed for any and all of society’s problems.

      1. DButch

        Well, if the old white Boeing engineering guys had still been in charge, they might still be doing well. But the old white McDonnell-Douglas guys were very much more into stingy bean counting and considered engineering to be a distraction. They even mentioned that as the reason to move their HQ to Chicago. Dominic Gates at the Seattle Times has done a lot of articles on this.

  10. cyrki

    A few thoughts from Baltimore. Local folk have done a good job shutting down the terrorism meme. Probably because there are a lot of watermen who looked at the video and saw that the ship was in distress before it rammed the bridge. There are cement pylons protecting the bridge's vertical supports. No bridge of the Key's design is going to be able to take a direct hit from a megalith like that ship. The ship did put out a Mayday call, and the quick thinking bridge folk stopped traffic. There were very few cars left on the bridge when it fell. There was a crew working to repair pot-holes on the bridge deck. They are the ones the divers are trying to recover.

    The short-term effects: this closes the Port of Baltimore until the huge chunks of metal can be pulled out of the sealanes. Baltimore is one of the busiest ports on the East Coast. Long term effects: it also means that all trucks and vehicles carrying hazardous materials, that used to travel up the coast via the Key Bridge, will have to go a longer route around the Baltimore beltway. That's going to snarl up traffic here for several years.

    1. lawnorder

      Paying out claims is part of doing business for insurers and reinsurers. They need "casualties" to persuade other possible customers that there is a real risk that they need insurance against. if there were no risk, nobody would buy insurance.

  12. jeffreycmcmahon

    Somehow I picked up the notion that BNO News is a shady quasi-right-wing organization, I don't remember why, but can somebody tell me if that's the case or not?

  14. pipecock

    Why is complaining about failed infrastructure off limits? I live in Pittsburgh which is just fucked by it. A bridge literally collapsed during rush hour traffic just a few years ago, and even more annoying another bridge near my wife’s job was shut down for failing inspection over a year ago. They’re STILL not doing anything to fix it and it’s a major thoroughfare that is fucking traffic up like crazy all around it.

    1. KenSchulz

      Complain all you want, it’s a free country. Just don’t treat this as an example of ‘failed infrastructure’. What failed was the ship’s power, which rendered it uncontrollable. Drifting with the current and outgoing tide, it possessed hundreds of megajoules of kinetic energy, which had to go somewhere when it ground to a stop against the bridge. The energy went into destroying the support structure.

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