It's standard practice in engineering — as well as common sense — to design a system so that it stands up even if something goes wrong. An engine failure on a cargo ship is a foreseeable problem. It should not have been enough to bring down an entire bridge span, as happened on Tuesday, when a ship leaving the Port of Baltimore lost power and plowed into a pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing it to collapse and leaving six people presumed dead. Diagnosing precisely what went wrong in Baltimore will take months or years. I expect investigators will zero in on a few obvious questions. One is why the vulnerable piers of the bridge, which opened to traffic in 1977, were so exposed. The buffers around the piers failed. If the piers had been protected by wider concrete bases or giant piles of rocks or both, the errant ship might not have done the damage it did. If the lack of a thick buffer was intended to save money, it was a costly mistake, though the bridge was designed before the modern era of gigantic ships. It also appears that the ship wasn't escorted by tugboats, which could have kept it on course after it lost power. That would also appear to be a cost-saving decision. I can't judge whether it was a mistake or not, but it clearly needs to be looked into. Damaging collisions between ships and bridges are all too common. There were 35 major ones worldwide between 1960 and 2015, killing 342 people, of which 18 occurred in the United States, according to a 2018 tally by the engineering consultant firm Moffatt & Nichol. As ships have gotten bigger, the damage has gotten worse. I found a 1983 report by the National Research Council that said that vessel collisions are far more frequent causes of damage to bridges than storms or earthquakes. The date of the report tells you that this is a well-known problem. A bridge engineering handbook published in 2000 hammered home the concerns. The stomach-churning video of the Baltimore collapse brings home just how fragile a bridge can be in comparison to a giant cargo ship. It's an irresistible force meeting a very movable object. Steering a cargo ship beneath a bridge isn't easy even when the engine is running. The captain can't slow down too much because the ship needs a certain amount of speed to be steerable. So vessels keep colliding with bridges, bridges keep collapsing and people keep getting killed. Something needs to change. This is a post from The Point, Opinion's blog. Read more here:
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Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Opinion Today: What went wrong in Baltimore?
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