Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MD, collapses after being struck by container ship

“Partial collapse”. It’s the whole damn thing!

So sorry to everyone involved in this

I served 4 years in the US Navy, certified Master Helmsman who took an Aircraft carrier up the Mississippi River and through the Suez canal this is a failure on just about every level. I can only speculate but I cannot see the Pilot and Helmsman making that big of a mistake and if tugs were involved it is even worse. I think they had some sort of propulsion failure.

What a tragedy 😢 thoughts for the people on the bridge

Horrible horrible terrible awful news! Feeling awful for so many lives that are and will be affected by this for some time.

I hate to say it, but once your car hits the water you’ve got about 5-10 minutes before the cabin completely floods. If you’re not able to break out by then, you’re in real trouble. For anyone reading this, I highly recommend keeping a window breaker somewhere around the driver’s seat.

I’m a ex marine radio officer who have had ship collisions experience in the US waters. This is a similar problem, that is collision due to bad vision. When you are navigating a big ship in such dark hours, the view is like almost total darkness and you can only rely on the radars to navigate. On the radar you can only see a straight bridge but not the bridge supports, hence that’s how the ship hit the bridge support by accident. The ship captain could have waited for morning daylight to set sail instead of leaving the port in the middle of the night.

WTF happened? How could this ship hit the bridge in the first place? So scary to be driving on that bridge then all of a sudden you plunge into the water getting injured or killed, with your car wrecked as well. If this cargo ship had any foul play, I hope they get sued for the victims to get compensated. Absolutely horrible, God knows how long it'll take to rebuild this

It is shocking to see the huge bridge collapsed in the river. Huge loss. Very sad

2 things… this isn’t a matter of bad infrastructure. It’s a matter of 100k tons hitting a stationary object. Also the harbor pilot, captain, first officer, and everyone on the bridge of the ship should have stopped this (or at least done something to radio and warn them to stop traffic) Edit: this was posted literally as it happened so we didn’t know at the time they had for sure lost power

This is gonna have major ramifications on the city 4 years to come

Praying for everyone

The ship lost all electrical power twice before hitting the bridge. It appears to fail a third time during the collision. This can be seen in the raw security camera video of the incident.

Technically it's partially of the widely used truss bridge construction, the truss sections usually being strong and structurally independent of each other . The long central section however was cantilevered, which from the video, looks to be why the bridge completely collapsed, rather than just the collapse of a single section.

I cross a large bridge nearly every day to go to work. Pretty scary stuff here. Prayers going out to everyone involved.

“Oh oh say can you see, that huge freakin’ boat heading right towards me”.

I wonder why bridges don't have rubber bumpers surrounding their support beams like on boat docks. There are plenty of used tires at salvage yards.

As the boat approached the bridge at the first power outage, tug boats should've been called to help navigate that ship under the bridge to safety. Maybe this step should be applied going forward, regardless of power outage or not

I take this bridge everyday to work smh it’s shocking to see it gone

That harbor pilot is about to lose his license.