OT: Baltimore bridge replacment

There’s already talk of replacing the bridge (which was undoubtably an elegant structure), but surely at the mouth of a very busy shipping port a tunnel would make much more sense?

Tim

Or build some sort of island surrounding the supports?

There are already two tunnels, but further inland, nearer to Downtown Baltimore (and Edgar Allen Poe's gravestone). There was talk this morning about the fact that the bridge was designed and built before more stringent protections became mandatory, so any replacement bridge would need to be constructed up to modern, better, requirements.

I worked in Baltimore for a few months, and liked it. But this was some years ago, places change. I never used the bridge, it was not on any of my normal routes. Now, if you want a bridge in the area, try:

Which raises the question, are British bridges vulnerable to similar events?

Are any UK container ports upstream of bridges? Are the boats that do go under major bridges big enough to destroy them?

If you have a few billion dollars to spare, sure :-)

We only have a few big estuaries. The Severn is probably the biggest with the M4 going over it.

But I dont believe it has piers in the navigable channel

My only impression of the place came from The Wire, which was supposed to be quite accurate as of 20 years ago.

That's quite a detour ...

Harwich & Felixtowe are our biggest but are clear to the seaward side. We have the M25 QE2 Bridge with ports upstream, don't know if any are container ports.

I never saw The Wire, but when I lived in the US, there was a very good TV series called: 'Homicide, Life on the Street'. I don't know if it made it over here, it was excellent.

Yeah, you wouldn't use it to cross from one side of Baltimore to the other. But it gets a lot of traffic just travelling through it to experience it. It is quite something.

On 26 Mar 2024, Jeff Gaines wrote

Looking at satellite images, I think the QE2 towers are probably too close to the shoreline for a ship to hit them -- any ship big enough to do collapse-threatening damage would run aground before reaching them.

Interesting that the ship involved in Baltimore has form:

According to Vessel Finder the weather was fine at the time, and the incident was reportedly blamed on the ship’s master and pilot onboard."

Especially as the next upstream crossing is a tunnel.

Does the Pope have a pointy hat ?

You don't know the nature of human roulette, if you cannot guess the answer to this.

Can you see the trend at work here ? Make a hole of size "X", someone makes an item which is "X minus one foot". This is just human nature. We're not happy unless we're spinning that roulette wheel. If you redesigned this and made it "2X", the next ship through would be "2X minus one foot".

By the time the next bridge is to go up, the estimate of ship height or ship width, is off by a factor of 2 or 3.

Look at some of the cruise ships, for inspiration. There are likely lots of ports they're not welcome, due to their size.

If there was no bridge or piers to strike, they'd have a draft too much for the channel, run aground at low tide, strike the sides of the channel, in short, "they would find a way...". Look at the Suez Canal.

Paul

Be interesting to see what happens this time, the vessel had reported to the port authorities that it was not under command.

"The vessel experienced a loss of power before ramming the bridge. A mayday call was issued shortly before the crash.

The call, alerting authorities to the ship’s power outage, allowed officials to rush to limit the number of cars travelling over the bridge,"

How about the Forth, the Humber, the Clyde and, even the Thames and there's also Milford Haven at the mouth of the Cleddau

A look at the geological map of the area shows that the mouth of the estuary is, unsurprisingly, composed of fine silt and sand. Not the best material to try to tunnel though.

I was surprised that there appeared to be no starlings, especially as the navigation markers a short way upstream of the bridge have quite large ones. I doubt they would stop a container ship at speed, but they might have deflected it away from the actual support pillar.

Other people seem to describe them as dolphins, I've never heard of either term used in that sense before.

Those aren't navigational markers, but transmission poles for HV cables, they do happen to have red beacons on top, probably for the benefit of planes?

"Dolphins" are the answer

See

I was _not_ surprised by the Financial Times headline:

"The Baltimore bridge disaster: what happened and who will pay?"