Baltimore Bridge

"
MadMossy said:
So more details starting to come.

Vessel tried to slow its forward heading by backing down, they had deployed the aft anchor as seen in some helicopter footage which appears to have been dragged along trying to slow down. The issue is when a vessel this large backs down being a single prop ship, they tend to career off course.

There were no tug boats nearby to assist, in the 3-4 minutes it took for the vessel to go off course and hit the bridge. The had contacted the port and notified them of an emergency on board.
Click to expand...

What an incredibly unfortunate time for the vessel to lose power.
 
One thing I don't understand is, why didn't the tower holding the bridge have protection piers (or whatever they are called) around it like most other large bridges in shipping lanes have to protect against this kind of thing ?
 
MadMossy said:
These ships are not "piloted" they are largely autonomous, the course is plotted and the ship navigates on its own, very little manual navigation is done, even less so on vessels this large.
Click to expand...

Whilst true that while out at sea in open water they will be almost certainly using the autopilot and autopilots on modern vessels are very advanced, in this incident I'd be very surprised if they were in anything other than hand steering due to the confined waters. In any case, the track and the autopilot settings are still programmed by a human and I've seen autopilot do some weird stuff over the years, particularly in strong currents etc.

I do this for a living and have been a deck (navigation) officer on large ships for over a decade.

The speculation so far that it was a power loss on board looks on the money to me. Something like that happens at the wrong moment then you've pretty much had it tbh. Could be all sorts of causes for the blackout, the investigation will figure it out.
 
My main interest is in the ship's maintenance.

When the power went out, there were no external emergency lights to be seen. I'd have thought that if a ship suffered a total loss of power, that several battery systems would come online and light it up to prevent other vessels at sea crashing in to it, and if it suffered a breach, to light up the path to the lifeboats. Yet it just went totally dark, like a ghost ship. Going by the power repeatedly coming on and off in the short clip we've seen, it's possible that this ship was struggling for some time and that the ATS couldn't take it any more and packed up.

I'd also like to know how a ship of this size managed to get itself in to this situation in the first place. The amount of safety and alarm systems in place to prevent this exact type of scenario taking place would have had to be immense, unless it's a 40 year old 3rd world vessel running on 10p coins. That captain's deck will likely have lit up like a Christmas tree several times before getting to this point. And I don't mean in the last few minutes, I mean the last few days, if not weeks.

The investigation is certainly going to be interesting, I suspect we're going to see a company cutting corners, ignoring engineers, and forcing their staff to continue sailing despite the obvious warnings.
 
Last edited:
Seen this on the news this morning, crazy how fast that came down. Was speaking with a colleague who is In the region, used a lot for shipping and ports around there

I wouldn't want to be driving over that when it hit
 
Last edited:
Minusorange said:
One thing I don't understand is, why didn't the tower holding the bridge have protection piers (or whatever they are called) around it like most other large bridges in shipping lanes have to protect against this kind of thing ?
Click to expand...
100-200 thousand tons of ship.

You're going to need protection piers that are absolutely massive to have a hope of stopping it, and you're going to need them all around the supports, which means you've now cut down the usable channel for the ships very significantly.

You hit a certain size of ship/truck/train or whatever where any options for "stopping" it become infeasible, for reasons that go from "it won't stop it" to "it's going to cause bigger problems than it solves".
For example with road barriers, the ones that are best at stopping a 44 ton truck tend to be quite nasty for cars and lethal for bikes, and that's before any consideration of if it's practical to put them down everywhere, let alone the cost and other issues.

These events are so rare that you'd likely increase the number and accidents by putting in big enough protective pillars (as you'd be narrowing the space ships can take), and may not even be possible depending on the geology and flow of the river as if you put huge blocks in the water way you're potentially going to make the water move faster through it (which makes it much harder for ships to navigate as high flow and very confined channels don't go well with big boats), or flooding for miles upriver either immediately or on a regular basis.
 
Last edited:
Werewolf said:
100-200 thousand tons of ship.

You're going to need protection piers that are absolutely massive to have a hope of stopping it, and you're going to need them all around the supports, which means you've now cut down the usable channel for the ships very significantly.

You hit a certain size of ship/truck/train or whatever where any options for "stopping" it become infeasible, for reasons that go from "it won't stop it" to "it's going to cause bigger problems than it solves".

These events are so rare that you'd likely increase the number and accidents by putting in big enough protective pillars (as you'd be narrowing the space ships can take), and may not even be possible depending on the geology and flow of the river as if you put huge blocks in the water way you're potentially going to make the water move faster through it (which makes it much harder for ships to navigate as high flow and very confined channels don't go well with big boats), or flooding for miles upriver either immediately or on a regular basis.
Click to expand...
Absolutely no chance of stopping that have a look at how many containers and the ship's weight just to give it compulsion.

Shame it is but no chance of stopping it
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom