deathmtn

A bridge is a carefully calculated thing. One of the major assumptions is that where I put the support points, I’m going to give it support. If I take that away, there’s not a design that’s going to allow the bridge to span anyway.

You literally just see it all erased, and then the bridge is moving vertically down as a rigid body.... It’s gravity. Its support has been removed. The places that you see it fail and then finally fail into the water are directly correlated to the loss of the support. It’s not some propagation of: one thing happens, and then that fails this member, and then that member that failed fails this member.... The whole bridge, every piece of steel, goes vertically down. There’s not a twist or bend or anything like that. Support’s gone; down it goes.

Are there any engineering lessons from this disaster?

So maybe we treat it as a full infrastructure problem, as opposed to a bridge problem, right? We need the Port of Baltimore. It’s a major shipping port for the entire Northeast Corridor. It has significant shipping traffic. If you look at the size of the ships from the 1970s, when the bridge was built, to now, it’s radically changed. When you look at the failure in the video, the container ship is as wide as the bridge is tall. It’s hard to get your mind around how big it really is! A lot has changed in terms of the environment in which that bridge operates and what we need it to do.