Engineering professor says the Baltimore Bridge collapse left him in 'shock'

I'm 55 been master boilermaker for 30 years I've been across America your bridges are a mess rusting pieces of scrap iron

A major bridge with nothing protecting the piers despite the risk of collision from marine traffic? In regions where ice flows may impact a bridge during spring breakup piers are protected with rip rap. Essentially a tiny island is formed by dumping rock and soil. This is the cheapest material and the easiest to place. The cost of this protection relative to the cost of the bridge is not considerable. If a pier is surrounded by a coffer dam soil can be dredged from the river bed and pumped into place forming an island.

No bridge is engineered to take a direct hit from a fully-loaded, nearly 1000' container ship moving at 10 mph. Why would you then assume that every large ship passing under the bridge would "be ok" under its own power 100% of the time for decades and decades? What were the reasons for NOT requiring tug escorts for ships over a certain size? Whatever they were, it seems that the argument for not requiring tugs was wrong.

You dont need a professor to know that any bridge would collapse if the support is hit by a huge ship like this. No one build bridges to withstand hits by container ships.

There's no excuse for ignorance should not have happened in the first place

The structural engineers that have been interviewed on this subject almost always have a narrow focus on the structure of the bridge itself, and they all say, correctly, that a bridge structure cannot withstand such a load as being struck by a large ship. Then they completely ignore the problem of how the bridge can be protected so that it doesn't get struck by a ship at all. This bridge had no protective structures around the nain pylons at all. I would have liked Prof. Sen to say something about that.

That professor looks more like a student😅

I am not an civil engineer but why the bridge that handles container ship has such a low and flimsy piles?

Finally a media outlet which does not blame the ship

I don’t get why everyone is so “confused”? Dude a big heavy large boat hit a dam bridge.

It doesn’t take a Professor to understand what happened… ridiculous! I’m only an engineer and I could see that was going to happen.

This ship was 985 feet long with 3 times the cargo of a 901 foot ship that hit our California Bay bridge in 2007 where the bumper that protects the footing tore into the ship's Hull and it started to leak fuel. that was a tiny fog induced glancing blow, The port near the Key bridge was recently updated to accept much larger ships. One report said it was going 7 MPH directly into the bridges footing or pier, I'm not sure what would happen if that kind of crash happen out here, and they also say our bridges are over engineered due to earthquakes, the fact it happen at 1:30am with MOSTLY bridge maintenance crew being the loss of life was a lucky break for the 34k people who use the bridge a day. Our bay bridge sees about 300k vehicles a day.

The physics is quite easy to understand; very large (size of Nimitz aircraft carrier) cargo ship (very heavy) hitting the bridge is much like a train at 30 mph hitting a car. The forward momentum of all that weight transfers that energy into the bridge support. That bridge support didn't have a chance. That was a very strong bridge, it still didn't stand a chance getting hit with that much weight. Having bridge dolphins would of helped protect the bridge, they would of helped absorb the impact. Bridge dolphins are a group of pilings driven deep around the bridge supports.

He's surprised it went down so quickly?!! 95,000 TONS that just kept moving!!! That's how!

my concern how do captain see where he is gonna with all those containers in the way is blocking the view ?? where is the bridge on the boat ?? where was the tug boats ???

How does inspection help if the infrastructure overlooks or can’t handle rare incidents and missing safety features?

I always thought whoever designed those low bridges on roads should be unlicensed. And DOT should close them immediately

Finally a news outlet that blames the bridge

also cargo is also over capacity...there are many many faults in the photos....i never seen cargo do 2 cargo ship full containers by doing a cost of 1 ship alone . Is this new norms for people working like this as we notice lately elsewhere in jobs people doing 5 employee jobs by cost one employee doing 5 hours ??

In other news, an engineering professor was fired for not knowing simple math.