Not that it matters to anyone else, but having driven across that bridge dozens of times with my kids, this is just shocking. It’s one of the main corridors in the area. Thank god it happened in the middle of the night, though that’ll be no consolation to the families of those who may have died.
According to current reports, the Maryland Transportation Authority Police responded to the ship’s “mayday” and stopped traffic in the minutes before the catastrophe, but 6 construction workers are still unaccounted for.
They keep reporting this, and maybe it was because the video was sped up, but it looked like there was still traffic going across until very close to the collision
The last car crossing that I can see clears the span about 1:28:06; the bridge collapses about 1:28:48. That's about 40 seconds of gap between the traffic and the collapse.
I haven't timed how frequently cars are coming, but it seems to be about every 30 seconds or so, which--combined with the time it takes to cross the bridge--is evidence that a bridge closure was effected just before the bridge collapse.
If the police were able to close the bridge just in time, that's a pretty spectacular response. There were only ~5 minutes between the ship loosing power initially and the impact. The police saved lives, and it's only a shame that the construction crew wasn't evacuated in time.
* There was a request to close the bridge when the ship lost power, which went over police dispatch about a minute before the bridge collapse (the bridge collapse is reported at timestamp 1:09 in the audio).
* Someone was able to hold the outer loop traffic at ~0:20 in the audio, as they reported they were already driving along at the time.
* Inner loop traffic is reported stopped at ~0:56 in the audio. I suspect there may already have been a police car there because of the construction on the bridge.
* Between 0:20 and 0:56, the conversation is about pulling the workcrew off the bridge. The police officer blocking inner loop traffic, after reporting stopping traffic, is indicating that he's waiting for a second unit to arrive before going onto the bridge to collect them.
* At 1:09, the bridge is reported collapsed, and multiple officers confirm. There is a question as to which traffic is stopped--the people blocking inner loop traffic are unable to confirm outer loop stoppage, but the person holding outer loop informs them of the stoppage at the end of the recording.
So traffic seems to have been stopped for about 10-50 seconds before the bridge collapse, depending on the exact length of time between someone stopping traffic and radioing in that they did so. From what I can tell, it sounds like outer loop traffic was stopped in time solely by sheer coincidence, while the inner loop traffic may have been existing police presence (for the construction zone) changing posture to a full closure.
Do you know what inner loop and outer loop traffic means here? Are they different sides/directions of the bridge?
And it is tragic how close the police were to evacuating the work crews. I interpret that the officer blocking one entry intended to go on to the bridge but was waiting for another cruiser to block the bridge before he left. A few more minutes and the bridge might have collapsed with no casualties. Though at least an officer attempting a rescue wasn't hurt.
The bridge is part of I-695, which is a beltway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_695_(Maryland). Inner loop refers to the inner lanes (traveling clockwise), outer loop the outer lanes (traveling counterclockwise).
Further clarification: because it is a loop, you can't use cardinal directions ("East bound I695" for instance) to indicate which lane you are talking about.
The optimist's gambler's fallacy says luck is a constant attribute of an individual, and if someone gets lucky they are more likely to have a high luck stat and thus be more lucky in the future. The pessimist's gambler's fallacy says luck is a consumable resource, and if someone gets lucky they consume their luck and are thus less likely to be lucky in the future.
There's a pretty good spanish film named Intacto that has something like this as it's premise: people who survive disasters have "luck" that can be captured/transferred by other people by playing games like russian roulette.
Honestly, that would probably fuck me up for a little while, knowing I was less than a minute away from probably being dead. I hope they're okay, mentally.
There is a semi-truck that enters from the right just before the crash at https://youtu.be/N39w6aQFKSQ?t=299 (4m59s). And some more vehicles that follow after. Doesn't seem like they stopped "all" traffic as is claimed.
Yeah. I was out of town hiking in Wyoming at the time and was told it was the 35E bridge by a passing hiker who relayed the news to me. My mom drove the 35E bridge twice a day. I couldn’t hike out and call home fast enough. I didn’t know anyone who was on the bridge when it fell but I do know many who missed being on it by minutes. Scary stuff.
I remember standing not far from edge of that shortly after it happened (https://www.flickr.com/groups/35w-bridge-disaster/), and still get a little panicky when I'm in slow traffic on a bridge. This event will affect the city, the port, and its people for a long time.
That was my exact thought.
Thankfully, I woke up to messages that my family members were safe and sound.
I hope they find everyone but at this point it seems unlikely.
Growing up my grandmothers house was on the watet across the Bay from Baltimore. This bridge was literally in the backdrop of my childhood. Scary stuff.
Local to the area. This was devastating news to wake up to. I don't know what's wrong with me but seeing this and knowing there were casualties made me cry.
I worked next door to the church that was shot up in Charleston and felt similarly moved despite not knowing them, never having been inside the building, and not having even been a Christian at the time.
It is a bit strange at some level - not having any true connection beyond proximity but you should probably worry if you _don’t_ at least feel a little something.
Nothing wrong with crying. I cry sometimes. Heck, if I spend too much time thinking about the 343 firefighters who died on 9/11, it will still bring a tear to my eye even after all these years. It's just part of the human condition. Cherish it.
Do you happen to know how they stopped traffic? Are there warning lights at the ends of the bridge? I have seen bridges of this sort but they are fairly rare.
I'm wondering if that's how they stopped almost all of the traffic. Flip a switch, most people stop, a couple of assholes blow through the caution and FAFO.
Based on comments elsewhere two police cars were able to block traffic with mere seconds before the impact. There was a construction crew on the bridge repairing potholes so the police may have already been nearby related to that.
The container ship "unluckily" maneuvered between the protective barriers. About 4 more protective barriers would have stopped this collapse.
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No bridge survives being struck by a container ship. That's why barriers are erected around critical points. There already were barriers, they just weren't complete coverage for some reason. (EDIT: Maybe the older 1970s era design of this particular bridge wouldn't allow more protection to be placed. Obviously this situation calls for a full investigation / lessons learned kind of thing, as part of the new bridge building process)
Older bridges no, but newer bridges should absolutely. The Bay Bridge was struck in 2007 and came away mostly unscathed due to earlier efforts to prevent catastrophic damage in that scenario;
In my defense, the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge is older and carries more 4x more traffic than the "other" Bay bridge! But yeah, given that the Chesapeake one is just down the road from the bridge that collapsed, I get the confusion.
In a Bridge of Theseus sort of way. The entire Eastern span is very new, a lot of the approaches have been rearranged, and major components of the Western span has been replaced over the years. But I guess none of this affects the age of the bridge, at least in Wikipedia’s estimation :)
A lot of bridges have their pilings set on mini islands, terrifically reinforced piles of stone and concrete that extend for quite some distance around the actual support. I don't know why some are built without that, it always weirds me out seeing the spindly legs going straight into the water, and this is why.
Edit to add: Check out Fort Carroll, precisely such an artificial island just a few hundred yards away in the very same harbor. It was built in the 1840's as a military position to defend the harbor, and has fallen into disuse. Now just imagine if the bridge sat on a couple of those, instead of the foundations it had. Ship would've barely dented the wall.
Civil engineering is very complex and doesn’t go off of feelings. I’m sure the type of soil and rock that the bridge is built on inform such decisions.
I would and furthermore I think there is a massive bias at play - if the exact same disaster happened in China there would be jokes about bridges made of Chinesium.
There is an expectation that a disaster happening in the west in a result of unforeseeable act of god, but in China it will be a result of corruption or shoddy workmanship.
Whereas in reality maintenance standard in the west have fallen but in the east they improved.
So now this bias protects responsible decision makers from legal consequences - no one went to prison for grenfell disaster, postmaster scandal or the Boeing debacle.
> Whereas in reality maintenance standard in the west have fallen
In the context of this incident, are you saying that we _previously_ used to go around retrofitting our 50-year-old bridges with more modern defenses, and then at some point since then we stopped doing this? Obviously if we're talking about new construction, it stands to reason that standards have only _increased_, but this was an old bridge built to old standards. So which standards have "fallen" to result in this disaster specifically?
> 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition. Unfortunately, 178 million trips are taken across these structurally deficient bridges every day
I don't think that's quite right. People in Dundalk will suffer a fair bit, as will folks in Glen Burnie and Annapolis, but most people are going from DC to Delaware, and go north rather than over the Key bridge.
I think this is most harmful for commuters.
Blocking the Baltimore harbor is brutal although I suspect the passage will be cleared as quickly as possible.
I think 30-35k cars a day cross that bridge. Being local to the area, is is going to make traffic in the entire metro area much worse, and it is already awful.
Or roughly a 3 second headway per vehicle. Given four traffic lanes (two in each direction), that would be a vehicle every twelve seconds per lane, which seems far more reasonable. That's spread out over the day, so peak-hour traffic would be much higher.
Peak capacity for a highway lane is just shy 2,000 vehicles/hour:
Which would put the Key Bridge's maximum capacity at about 192,000 vehicles/day.
For comparison, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge saw about 42.7 million paid toll crossings. As these are metered only in the westbound direction, actual crossings are likely double that, or 85.4 million/year, or about 230,000/day.
(The bridge sees 1/3 the total traffic of all California state-owned bridges.)
