The company that chartered the cargo ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was recently sanctioned by regulators for blocking its employees from directly reporting safety concerns to the U.S. Coast Guard — in violation of a seaman whistleblower protection law, according to regulatory filings reviewed by The Lever.
Eight months before a Maersk Line Limited-chartered cargo ship crashed into the Baltimore bridge, likely killing six people and injuring others, the Labor Department sanctioned the shipping conglomerate for retaliating against an employee who reported unsafe working conditions aboard a Maersk-operated boat. In its order, the department found that Maersk had “a policy that requires employees to first report their concerns to [Maersk]… prior to reporting it to the [Coast Guard] or other authorities.”
Am I the only one who also would like to look at that bridge?
If you have traffic infrastructure, you want it to be able to either resist accidents and collisions, or that there is protection that will avoid total collapse from a single impact.
Why did this bridge just tossed over like a deck of cards when a single cargo ship ran into it? How many hundreds of those ships sail under it every day? An accident was bound to happen, by sheer chance, and that bridge, any bridge, any infrastructure, should be ready to receive an impact like that, and not immediately crumble.
I think you’re vastly underestimating the size of that boat.
When the bridge was designed, cargo ships were much, much smaller.
Even then, dump heavy concrete blocks around it, anything to protect it.
Given the design of the bridge and the forces involved, it’s reasonable to expect it would fall down. Check out this thread in the Civil Engineering subreddit.
(Hate to link to Reddit but sometimes that’s where an active community is)
It weighs 116 million kg and can travel up to 12 meters per second. The bridge was absolutely going down. Any bridge would be going down. You say it was bound to happen by chance and yet as far as I’m aware its the first calamity of its scope and type to ever happen in our history.