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Video: Baltimore bridge struck by boat and collapses (streamable.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/news@lemmy.world
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[–] 21 points 2 years ago (3 children)

At the risk of sounding too Clarke and Dawe, it is very rare that a ship loses power and control, and somewhere it could hit something important, and hits that thing, and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces. It's been there for 46 years, and the Port of Baltimore currently sees an average of 53 ships in and out per month, so about 3.5 big ships under the bridge per day. That's a lot of passages over the years without incident.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    and the thing is apparently so fragile that it just falls to pieces.

    I mean, it just got hit with a hundred thousand ton hammer. That'll do a pretty good number on most structures, I imagine.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    no, this is you speaking my language. we do 'risk assessments' and yeah I guess it's a case of severity*likelihood, where risk is never zero.

    but, no matter what, when the risks 'line up' into a failure mode, holy shit is that failure catastrophic. crazy terrible regardless.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I don't know what the likelihood of this would be, but it's definitely miniscule. I suspect you'd still need safeguards to reduce the risk to an acceptable level, but I'm not sure what exactly you can do once a boat has failed and is going to make imminent impact.

    At that point all you can do is mitigate the fatalities and evacuate.

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