‘Sickening that Republicans are now blaming Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill for this bridge accident. The sheer gall and naked opportunism and idiocy,’ epidemiologist says
Republicans are facing criticism for attempting to blame the Baltimore Bridge collapse on President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed on Tuesday after a cargo ship crashed into it. Six construction workers are presumed dead.
South Carolina Representative Nancy Maceappeared on the rightwing channel Newsmax on Tuesday when she was asked why there are still old bridges and roads in the US after the passing of legislation to upgrade them.
Meanwhile, the collapse was most likely actually caused by conservatives’ crusade against reasonable regulation and oversight (in this case, of cargo ship maintenance).
The government has no right to dictate the free market! It will correct itself; shipping companies that don’t meet top quality will fail in the marketplace! /s
Ships are people too - in a landmark Tugboats United vs. FEC Supreme Court ruling Justice Alito wrote for the majority, stating
In a rare double whammy the Supreme Court also affirmed that SUVs and light trucks must be afforded the same access to tax breaks and subsidies as other maritime vessels since, as Justice Thomas commented,
Or (lack of) infrastructure maintenance, building codes, etc.
The bridge wouldn’t have fallen if a ship didn’t hit it. Conversely, even a brand-new bridge wouldn’t have fared well if a ship hit it.
I know it’s still pretty early in the investigation, but nonetheless, I’m pretty damn confident that this was a ship problem, not a bridge problem.
I don’t disagree, just noting that lack of infrastructure maintenance/safety retrofitting is a very common issue in our country. There are bumper options to protect bridge supports, but idk how effective they’d be against a container ship. Retrofitting stuff like this is much more cost effective than rebuilding bridges, and may have helped the situation.
The Delaware Memorial Bridge is installing a fender system to deal with the kinds of ships that took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge:
https://whyy.org/articles/delaware-memorial-bridge-93-million-upgrade-ship-collision-protection/
I expect that there will be an NTSB directive to all maritime bridge owners to reevaluate their fender systems due to increased ship sizes.
You’re not wrong, but in the context of a thread about the Republicans trying to spin this to falsely blame Biden, I’m less than inclined to downplay proximate causes in order to talk about more indirect/hypothetical ones.
I’m not attempting to downplay the actual cause in the slightest. My comment is merely to reinforce that republicans’ behavior wrt infrastructure maintenance and improvements was always going to lead to these sorts of situations. I’m just not very cogent first thing in the morning lol.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply nefarious intent. Maybe “pass over” would’ve been a better way to phrase it?
Those fenders would have done basically nothing for a ship of this size. You’d be looking at a 20m diameter cofferdam full of concrete to be able to take a hit like that without failing, I did some basic calcs and the ship was about 100,000DWT so the impact force would be in the order of 315MN, absolutely huge.
One article I read, used the opposite as a point against. Maybe they could have done something with protection against collisions, but as a relatively new ( <50 yrs) bridge in good shape, it wasn’t worth any attention
There are ways to build bridges to take a hit like that, mostly through redundancy (making sure no pillar is a single point of failure, allowing it to stay standing if one pillar is torn down). It’s not cheap, but bridges over passageways to ports ought to be built that way for precisely this reason
I used to think in absolutes like that, but here’s another one: that accident was so rare, that there is no point in preparing for exactly that. Yes, there should be responsibility, especially if it was preventable, but infrastructure needs to look beyond any specific accident
It’s more important to see what we can do about accidents like that, in a much wider sense, since those will happen.
Actions like these could help, even before we figure out what happened with the ship and whether there are ways to reduce the chances in the future or to recover from such outages
I’m sure they’ll look at ways to improve disaster response and communication, although it seems like that worked really well. This was a textbook example of how a quick response saved lives and a good lesson on reinforcing that
That’s so simplistic. Please look into the Swiss cheese model. Things shouldn’t break when just one thing goes wrong. There’s a load of things that could’ve mitigated things.
E.g. better protection for the bridge (was decided it wasn’t worth it), could’ve required that tugs assist until big vessels are safely away from the bridge, maybe could’ve influenced the design of these vessels, etc.
Saying it was a ship problem, nah, it’s a multiple of causes. Or worded differently, there’s loads of things to address possible fires in e.g. building and so on. Because just relying on everything always working perfectly is not realistic.
But even in saying it is a ship problem, that isn’t limiting to one failure point. There could be many small failures or choices that lead to the “ship problem.” Of course after that, you have a new cascade of things that lead to the final outcome still, but I just want to express that “ship problem” doesn’t mean simple.