intercst
Thanks, a reasonably knowledgable guy talking us through the entire horror.
No surprise.
Avoiding rare but extremely expensive and horrific events is incompatible with unbridled cost cutting, and that is what i am seeing more and more.
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He’s got a second video that attempts to sync up the marine traffic map with the video.
He explains a bit more about the entire track of the ill-fated vessel in this one.
–Peter
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Let me toss another video in here. In this one, another person knowledgeable of shipping explains why the ship may have veered to starboard as the engine failed. He didn’t appear to know about the apparent engine failure when making the video, but it looks like his analysis is spot on.
From other of his videos, I’ve learned that there are pressure zones around a moving ship. A ship moving in a channel (see the Evergiven incident in the Suez canal) creates high pressure zones along side the bow of the ship. There is a side channel that joins the main channel going under the bridge just about where the M/V Dali lost power. That gives a release to the pressure on the starboard side and lets the high pressure zone on the port side push the bow toward starboard - exactly what seems to have happened in this incident.
–Peter
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I think that’s fair in a lot of circumstances, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. When the Francis Key Scott Bridge was built, ships were much smaller and the channels were much narrower. With the advent of larger ships and wider channels, the potential for this accident increased.
The US is having a hard enough time maintaining and repairing old bridges, let alone building additional safety measures to prevent catastrophic accidents when conditions change.
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You did not follow the simple main point of my posts:
normal practice worldwide and in each major USAian port I have ever visited is to have tugboats accompanying and largely powering the movement of ships both on the approaches to/from and within harbors. Big ships are optimized for long voyages with little steering, and simply cannot reliably steer in tight quarters. There was no need to retrofit the bridge. There was and is and well long still be a need to use tugboats paid for out of normal harbor fees. But those harbor fees were being sucked up for other “more important” uses.
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I think this is the big failure. I was listening to a podcast where they mentioned NY harbour requires all ships to be accompanied by tug boats going in and out of the harbour far past the bridge. But the shipping companies do have to pay for it so likely this could largely be due to trying to save costs… and hopefully they will have to pay for that decision.
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That’s fair, my bad.
[quote=“eldemonio, post:5, topic:103384”]
The US is having a hard enough time maintaining and repairing old bridges,
[/quote]
The needed money is there, or it could be printed. But the US is choosing to not maintain/improve its domestic infrastructure in favor of spending that money on its overseas projects, such as its endless wars of choice.
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