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- cross-posted to:
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A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water.
At about 1.30am, a vessel crashed into the bridge, catching fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the water below, according to a video posted on X.
“All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge. Traffic is being detoured,” the Maryland Transportation Authority posted on X.
Matthew West, a petty officer first class for the coastguard in Baltimore, told the New York Times that the coastguard received a report of an impact at 1.27am ET. West said the Dali, a 948ft (29 metres) Singapore-flagged cargo ship, had hit the bridge, which is part of Interstate 695.
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All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge
All lanes no longer in existence on I-695 Key Bridge.
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That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
Well how is it untypical?
What about the environmental impact?
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Seven people likely dead so far. What a horrible, terrifying way to go.
I’ve heard it was construction workers filling pot holes.
The bridge at crest is around 185 ft off the water, and footage shows the collapse took about 6 seconds where the cars were.
Imagine doing a mind numbing job in the dead of night and then all of a sudden the floor starts dipping below you. The street lights go out a second or two later, and not long after you’re falling for close to 2 seconds. Then either crashing hard into the concrete below you that just parted the water, having a flood of water hit you shortly after. or just jetting directly into freezing cold water.
How the fuck did this happen?
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Drowning has to be towards the bottom of my list of ways to die
Drowning after falling from a great height.
Yeah I would expect vehicle occupants to have serious injuries after a fall like that. Water can be plenty “hard” enough to break your back if you hit it with something flat like a car
I used to think drowning was the worst until I heard two accounts of people who drowned and were resuscitated. They said it was terribly peaceful. I’m good with it now.
I’ve heard this before but it doesn’t make much sense to me.
Dying of a stroke in your sleep sounds peaceful.
Being unable to leave your submerged car because your back is broken, watching freezing water coming in, taking that last breath. Sounds fucking terrifying honestly.
It’s worse than that. People don’t understand what drowning is like at all, it is a terribly unpeaceful way to go. We all tend to think that you run out of air and then suddenly go unconscious but prior to that:
Water will enter your lungs which, fun fact, really don’t like that and so it is apparently extremely painful. It also triggers an involuntary reaction. You are now conscious on adrenaline, with very painful water in your lungs, and have lost all control of your body. Your body will attempt to flail wildly out of control while you suffer until you lose consciousness from lack of air. All of this happens quickly but probably not as quickly as you want it to given the circumstances.
Uh, source? It’s a slow and scary death.
Just anecdotal. I think it was enough to not fear it so much. The recollection is that the bad part is you are fighting to stay alive but when you give in and swallow all of the you get a state of euphoria… so I figure if you’ve got no choice just suck the water in and die happy.
I sincerely doubt that your lungs filling with water would be “euphoric” considering any water in your lungs feels like burning. Even if the last seconds felt nice, you’re discounting the terrifying minute or two of suffocation and panic.
That’s like saying getting stabbed in the chest isn’t a bad way to die because the pain sends you into shock and you pass out before dying
Whatever you tell yourself to help cope with your own anxiety about drowning I guess… I nearly drowned and I can tell you it was not euphoric breathing in water.
Die happy. Yeah right.
Did you hear this in the prestige? Cause it was revealed he was lying
Nope.
I think you got bad information.
Not trying to defend him, but there are accounts of people who nearly/drowned in freezing water say they had feelings of warmth and euphoria. It’s likely due to shock setting in long before the drowning panic.
This wasn’t just drowning, though. This was drowning after likely sustaining significant impact injuries after hitting the water from many dozens of feet in a vehicle that basically belly-flopped, which is the worst way to impact the water. It’s like hitting concrete from that distance. And then panicking because you’re strapped inside your sinking vehicle.
This was anything but the peaceful drowning scenario you’re referencing that some people have.
Drowning or fire? I can’t decide.
I technically drowned when I was 12 and being an idiot ‘riding’ waterfalls. I got sucked into a big crack in a rock and when my friends finally got me out I was clinically dead, and all of my fingernails were ripped in half from trying to claw my way out. All I can remember is abject fear, and then the burning as my lungs gave up.
I would rather die by almost any other means.
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How long were you dead for? How did they make you alive again?
My friends and I all took water rescue courses in cub scouts so they knew how to do mouth to mouth and clear water from lungs. One friend ran for help and the rest pulled me out and two did the mouth to mouth.
The EMTs who ahowed up after I was pulled out said they figured I was ‘gone’ for a minute or so. I don’t really remember the exact details but it was something about the color of my skin that could tell them how long I was without oxygen.
Scary stuff - thanks for sharing the details, and glad you guys had the training!
Navy eod told me drowning feels like your lungs are on fire.
Reminds me of that story Michael Caine tells in The Prestige.
" Remember that sailor I told you about who got tangled up in the sails and drowned?"
“Yeah, he said it was like going home.”
"I lied… He said it was agony.
Had a green beret buddy tell me the same thing. He had to go through a pretty intense water survival training, and part of it was “drown-proofing”. Said it was the worst part of his training.
Grandma told me once your lungs fill with water it’s pretty chill. She almost drowned twice.
This was not a good way to go.
Agreed… They had a bad day.
You’re making your regular commute, a bit annoyed with the sudden traffic backup, and then you’re suddenly falling with no warning, then struggling to not drown in your car.
It’s insane how everything can go from normal to terrifying. I hope those who lived through this have help coping, and am sorry for the victims and their families. It’s so tragic.
The investigation report is going to be interesting. While bridges can only take so much punishment, they are usually designed to survive some collisions with their pylons. I wonder what the state of the bridge was, prior to the collapse. If it’s anything like the rest of the infrastructure in the US, it was probably not good. Though, this may also be a case that the designers in the 70’s planned for a collision with a cargo vessel of the times, which were tiny bath tub boats compared to the super container ships we have now. The Dali was built in 2015 she is a 300m ship capable of carrying 116851 tons. That’s a lot of mass for the pylon and it’s barriers to stop.
I’m pretty sure no bridge is designed to survive a collision with a large cargo ship, even a brand new one. It would balloon the cost so much nobody would be willing to pay it.
New bridges are built with protections such as pylons to prevent ships from even getting close to bumping into the bridge after the sunshine skyway bridge collapse of 1980.
In this case I’m not sure it would have mattered. This wasn’t a bump or a glancing blow. There’s not much which will deflect or absorb that much energy head on.
I disagree, the geometry of protection dolphins use would deflect the ship enough to change its trajectory towards the walls of the channel bed where the ship would run aground before striking the bridge even from a head on collision.
What is a geometry protection dolphin?
They are concrete or wooden structures that are piled deep into the ground like fondation foundation pylons on skyscrapers. The geometry part I was just referring to how they are angled in such a way it ricochets the ship away from the structure it’s protecting or towards the channel.
So why on earth didn’t the bridge have these?
I believe it refers to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)
This makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!
A bridge is quite different to a pylon though.
Literally a block of concrete embedded in the sea floor.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/inspection/
I think you can look up certain characteristics such as this here, I’ve done it before and exported data into Excel when I was looking into something else. If this isn’t the specific site I apologize, I’m on mobile, but it is publicly available.
Edit: these links may be better:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi/element.cfm
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/national-bridge-inventory-system-nbi
https://infobridge.fhwa.dot.gov/Data
https://geodata.bts.gov/datasets/5e58970e89934e818f38772859addf43_0/explore
This is the absolute dumbest shit I’ve seen in a while. And it’s said so confidently, kind of amazing.
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Why do you say that?
This structure was hit head on by a laden container ship. Container ships weigh between 50,000 and 200,000 tons depending on size and cargo. There is not a structure capable of being created by man which could sustain that amount of force, head on, and retain its structural integrity.
Buncha armchair idiots think they know more about bridge construction than civil engineers. Gods, this place is just more and more like Reddit by the minute.
Kinda crazy how those same construction and civil engineers are going to be investigating if the normal means of protection for this very foreseeable event was done correctly, because we design things to avoid these head on collisions:
Also, not for nothing but even if they find out the dolphins in place were sufficient based on prior standards…this event will likely update the standards, same as the sun bridge in the 80s. Regulations and best practices are written in blood.
People always forget that deflection exists. I don’t know why that guy is hung up on stopping the ship instead of just nudging it forcefully. If we can figure out a way to deflect explosions and sabot rounds, we can deflect a ship.
Yeah also just the basic concept of sacrificial parts and things designed to wear. The derailleur hanger on your bike, crumple zones in cars, plastic gears in your KitchenAid mixer - lots of engineering practices are designed around shunting failure to a particular piece or in a particular way, to avoid otherwise catastrophic or very expensive damage.
Oh my god! No way! They’re going to investigate and learn from a rare event! That’s shocking!
We study things all the time. Your extrapolation that an investigation means something was preventable is evidence that your higher brain function has been damaged.
You: "There is not a structure capable of being created by man which could sustain that amount of force, head on, and retain its structural integrity.
Actual engineers in the linked article: literally describe how to build secondary structures to deal with giant ships and prevent head on collisions on bridges.
I know you stopped responding but I’m piling on because I’m apparently in an impish mood:
Sherif El-Tawil, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of Michigan with expertise in bridges, said if the Key Bridge had been built after those updated standards from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials were put in place, the span could still be standing.
“I believe it would have survived,” El-Tawil said.
From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/how-key-bridge-collapsed-baltimore/
It takes a pretty special kind of small mindedness to think that this accident will be uninteresting to engineers because container ships are simply too heavy to consider building against.
The amount of force needed to deflect a large object is much smaller than to stop it. In fact, if done over a large enough distance, a tiny amount of force is sufficient.
Need an example? Imagine your big brother is skating down a slope. Could you block him, head on? Probably not. But what if your sister, who was skating next to him, were to slightly steer him out of the way so that he doesn’t hit you?
As an alternative, you can also slow him down over a long distance, requiring the same(?) force but applied in a smaller amount, longer.
Because of a contradictory ass like yourself.
- in the '70s* planned
- and its* barriers to stop
It’s* no tits
I live not five minutes away from the Key bridge and the sound of this woke me up last night. My GF takes this bridge to work every day. Driving through the city now for her every morning is going to be fucking awful.
I watched it on the news last night all the way from Australia and I said ‘man they just fucked that whole cities traffic up for a long time’.
Yeah, IIRC it is the route for hazmat trucks. Gonna fuck with a lot of businesses down the line for a bit too.
As an aside, they used to have a rave down in the park under the west side of the bridge a decade or so ago, and it was always awesome being on the beach stage looking at that bridge at night and as the sun would come up.
The construction workers that died is fucking awful. The traffic situation won’t be great, but at least she’s alive with a job to go to.
Most people would take that as a given. He was just pointing out the effect on his own personal life.
It would be pretty annoying if everyone shared their own effect but had to precede it with a standard “I know it’s more awful for those with lives lost, but this affects me because…”
Time to move. Or switch jobs.
Which is super easy to do. /s
If the traffic is bad enough you might not have many options.
But people do have dozens of jobs lined up at least, right?
Hopefully employers will allow WFH for jobs that can be feasibly done remotely. This will also help reduce traffic for those who cannot WFH.
Sounds like a problem for the people who use cars. Leg commute gang
I’m just glad it happened in the dead of night and that the ship sent a mayday several minutes before it happened. State Police were apparently able to close the bridge and clear most of the traffic (it’s 1.6 miles/ 2.6 kilometers long) off of it before it collapsed. It’s sad that there were still construction workers and some cars still left on it, though.
Crazy. Even with the mayday I’m amazed they could get police in position fast enough.
Maryland has the MTA police (tunnel rats) who are in charge of the toll roads (originally just the tunnels but it’s expanded) so I’m sure there there MTA cops lurking about. Thank God they jumped to action.
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I’m so confused why a mayday wasn’t sent out earlier though. Like they had to have known collision was imminent.
And weren’t there local authorities on board that were guiding them through the waterway?
They lost power, dropped anchor, and called a mayday. By the sound of it the pilot probably did everything perfect. But whatever caused the power loss and engine failure is gonna be looked at very closely.
I think new procedures for having tugs hooked up until ships are entirely clear of port may be on their way - even if they’re mostly just escorts unless the ship’s engines fail.
There’s gonna be a lot of pointing fingers and yelling, but hopefully in the end things will be safer than they are today. From the sound of it we got really lucky on the “lives lost” side of things.
I’m so confused why a mayday wasn’t sent out earlier though. Like they had to have known collision was imminent.
Prolly something like:
“Aww nah, theres no need m8, I’m sure we’ll figure something out”
I’ve heard the same thing with another issue
It’s sad that there were still construction workers and some cars still left on it, though.
Hopefully police told the people to evacuate their vehicles
Unfortunately, it would’ve simply been faster for them to drive to either end of the bridge. The Maryland Department of Transportation had already closed the bridge. The only traffic left on the bridge was the traffic that got through before the closure, but everything happened so fast I don’t think they had time to get off the bridge.
One article I read said that the mayday call, the bridge closure, the collision, and the collapse all happened in the span of about two minutes.
That’s the ship that hit the bridge. It’s still there as I write this, but there are a bunch of tugs on scene right now.
Marine traffic can show you all the active AIS contacts in real time.
Found a photo of the bridge on it.
Seems normal.
At least it happened in the very early AM hours when traffic was low and there were no visibility problems, unlike the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
The fact that it was early morning probably saved hundreds of lives, from what I’m reading
That sounds like a traffic armageddon around Baltimore for the next few years…
Not just Baltimore. This is also a major cargo port. That harbor will be blocked for a long time. Get ready for supply chain disruptions and more rising prices.
I doubt the harbor will be blocked that long, maybe a week or so at most.
That’s a crime scene and a death scene. It’s not going to go quickly. The good news is that it’s a critical roadway and waterway intersection so the feds and state government have motivation to make haste.
Except there is no mystery as to the deaths part. Investigations take a lot of time when there are a lot of questions. The only question here is “why did the boat plow straight into the bridge?”. There’s very little question how/why the bridge collapsed(it got hit directly by a massive cargo ship). No one’s going to question the physics of it. The only question will be “was it captain error or ship error so we know who to fine”. Recovering the ship will be part of answering that and the rest will be communication and maintenance logs.
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The accident didn’t happen in the middle of the navigable channel, so you can maintain the pier and ship while clearing the main span.
As for being a death scene, you likely aren’t going to be able to access the site with divers as it is too dangerous.
I saw another article today where they said exactly that. The remaining vehicles are under concrete and its now converted to a salvage mission.
Good luck finding the necessary crane capacity. There are a handful of seriously big cranes in the 7000 tons plus range, but they are Dutch or Japanese, primarily. Wherever they are, they are probably busy and will take ages to get there. While the weight/mass of the bridge is not available online, it surely exceeds the weight limits of cranes currently in existence by far, so the bridge segments need to be cut up prior to removal.
Even if the US spends insane amounts of money, this issue will take quite some time to resolve.
You’re not lifting it out of the way, you’re gonna pull it out of the way with a tugboat.
It still is thousands of tons of steel, which will not be pulled that easily. And it is steel that does not swim, but drag along the muddy ground.
You cut it into pieces, add some buoyancy things. Naval operations can be impressive. Hell the Navy probably already has stuff to do this exact thing in case of war and a bridge out of Port gets destroyed. You don’t want your Navy blocked in. You also don’t need to move it far to get shipping back.
some buoyancy things
I get the distinct impression that you have zero engineering knowledge or experience.
Feels like an army corps of engineer training exercise, especially after Biden committed to help rebuild. Be really interesting engineering coming out of both the cleanup, rebuild, and post accident analysis.
The “cut into pieces” will be interesting. There are a shitload of large pieces, and everything is under tension. The links between the pieces are rather large, and a good amount of them are under water. That’s going to be serious work.
The Left Coast Lifter is in NY and can be on site in about 24-30 hours depending on currents going up Delaware Bay. It can make picks up to approx 1,600 tons, it would laugh at what the Key bridge weighs.
At a 1,600 tons limit, one would have to cut the debris into a lot of small pieces. There is no info on the net on how much mass the Key bridge had, but assuming the build and the size, half a million tons is probably not to far off.
It won’t come out in one piece, but it can come out in much larger pieces with a big crane. This one specifically was used to build bridges and put in far larger sections than this job would require. Smaller crane barges will work on the smaller pieces simultaneously. They’ll clear half the channel (most likely the section away from the Dali) and open it to one-way traffic while they continue clean up.
I think we all know someone who was forced to buy TP on ebay in the early pandemic.
This could send us right back there. Doesn’t much matter why stuff can’t move from A to B, prices will increase and people will take the opportunity to profiteer.
I think we all know someone who was forced to buy TP on ebay in the early pandemic.
No. I don’t know anyone, aside from Internet memes.
Do they ship much toilet paper by boat?
You can clear the debris in a week or two. It will take multiple years to build a new bridge.
The AP article says the exact opposite, that it is in fact not a major cargo port.
Vehicles from Europe coming via ROROs come to Baltimore primarily. This will impact them as diverting to Jacksonville or Savannah is going through take a lot of landside logistics to figure out.
If I’m not mistaken, it’s Brunswick, not Savannah, that is Georgia’s major port for automobiles/ROROs. Savannah is bigger overall, but that’s due to other types of cargo.
This article mentions Brunswick having a goal of surpassing Baltimore, which is #1. I guess this disaster makes that more likely…
Port of Baltimore is top ten in the US for international trade. It falls to top 20 when domestic shipping is included, but it’s absolutely a major port.
holy shit. I’ve been getting alerts about it, but that video is so much worse than I imagined.
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US uses law even more favorable to the shipowner.
Color me surprised.
I appreciate the research and sources you’ve listed here. Its quite interesting from an impact perspective.
I am guessing these liability limits are for the cargo, not any damage caused by the ship. If shippers had to ensure everything they shipped for “storms and pirates” in the 1800’s, then they probably wouldn’t be able to do business. So there is a limit to what shippers would owe their clients if a ship got captured or wrecked. Those clients would need their own insurance if they wanted to be made whole in the event of a catastrophe.
What happens next is likely to be the result if the investigation. If this was a freak mechanical failure, and the boat’s maintenance was otherwise up to date, then maybe the State won’t be able to go after the boat’s owners. But if there’s any inkling that there was negligence in the maintenance of the boat, or in the piloting of it, the the State is going to go after the company for all it can. Depending on what they find, there might even be criminal charges.
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Ok, I stand corrected then. They’re gonna have to sell a lot of crab cakes to fix that bridge…
Ahhh yes corporate arbitration lawyers. They shall be among the first to be flayed in the uprising.
the liability of the owner or owners of any ship or vessel … shall in no case exceed the amount or value of the interest of such owner or owners respectively, in such ship or vessel, and her freight then pending".
I think that’s probably way more than $39 million.
The Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez Canal was worth about $125 million carrying about $600 million in cargo. It had a capacity of 20,000 TEU (twenty foot equivalent units).
This MV Dali has a capacity of about 10,000 TEU and was carrying 4700 containers. I think no matter how you slice it, the value of the ship and its cargo would be in the hundreds of millions.
Feds are going to pay for it
The feds will front the money to start clearing the harbor and fixing the bridge as soon as possible, but I’d think that they’re gonna go after the ship for whatever they can recover. They have whole offices of lawyers who go after liable parties for costs they end up covering.
There was a live-stream where you can scrub to the minute where the bridge is gone (1:28:43 by the time-stamp inside of the video, not the YT timestamp). The Ship apparently lost all the lights 2-3 times shortly before impact. Maybe it was a problem with that. We also noticed a lot of hacking activities in the last weeks. Maybe it was that.
Better to wait for more details to come out than to speculate wildly.
Idk I’m going with space lasers and you can’t convince me otherwise.
A guy at work showed me the footage on his phone. Whatever shit news site he was pulling from had the headline, “DEI focus by The transportation department under Pete buttigiege results in bridge collapse”.
They didn’t even wait half a day to start lying.
Sigh.
Yeah, not everything bad that happens is intentional despite how much some people want that to be the case.
FBI confirms not an act of terrorism rn
Here’s a quick take on the crash. Informed and conspiracy free, based upon the video:
- Ship power cut off and the pilot panicked and threw engines into reverse (as seen by engine exhaust)
- ‘Prop walk’, which happen when you operate a propeller in reverse, turned the ship starboard into the bridge support
Some speculation in there about the state of mind of the pilot in trying to explain their actions. Hopefully the NTSB report will shed more light on things. The state of the steering particularly.
It doesn’t look like it was lined up right to begin with.
It was. Just a weird angle on the camera.
Wow, that was a wild shot of the collapse.
Police audio from the event:
It sounds like police got their just in time to stop traffic. One of the officers says that as soon as backup arrives to take over stopping traffic he would go and evacuate the workers; when we get the report that the bridge is gone.
If you watch the stream of the crash, you can see that traffic was flowing just moments before it fell.
Wow, damn. Unfortunately similar to the Tasman Bridge collapse
May all involved find peace, that’s so tragic.
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Just looking at that map makes me crack up as someone from Ireland. Baltimore is a small town here on the south coast of Cork. Dundalk is up in Northern Ireland. Pasadena is a place in California.
I just think it’s funny when America has random place names taken from elsewhere.
Thank your ancestors for that. Couldn’t think up any new names on their way over so they resused a bunch.
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Specifically this guy right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Calvert%2C_2nd_Baron_Baltimore
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You do realize how little that narrows things down.
If you want a laugh, check out cities in Texas. We have a Moscow, Paris, etc.
As does Maine. I’ve never looked it up, but I think Maine might be the state with the most places named after another place.
It also has a place called Ireland.
Just as long as you stay away from Vidor , you’ll be fine. According to the stories they used to have a billboard that said, “Don’t let the sun set on your black ass.”
I’m not black though, so I think I’ll be fine regardless. But thanks for your concern.
I live not super far from there, so I make sure I warn everyone I can to avoid it.
And there’s a Brooklyn Park in Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and South Australia.
Cultural appropriation is US culture. The UK and Ireland were just some of the earliest donor countries.
We have a London in Canada.
California is down in St. Mary’s County
Interestingly, there’s a St. Mary’s church there.
And Florida is cold and snowy
Hazmats are prohibited in both tunnels. About the only option for those is to go all the way around 695, adding the better part of 50 miles.
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Even the largest ferry can’t come close to matching the capacity of a 4 lane highway bridge.
Wow really? I totally can’t believe that /s
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Its not the same thing at all but they got the I-35W bridge rebuilt in 13 months after the bridge collapsed into the Mississippi. Its only 1/2 mile long and the river span is of course tiny – no supports required in water.
A portion? That looks like the entire thing dropped.
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Ah I see!
Why is he listed as “amateur poet” if his work was so famous that we named a bridge after him 130 years posthumously.
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Time for a redundant array of inexpensive bridges?
(computer joke about backups and resilience.)
Or on a more serious note, maybe a tunnel?
They also have a tunnel and other Bridges
So which version of RAIB you thinking? Because obviously, this has to be hardware, can’t do this with software. IMO, RAIB-5 is probably overkill but I think the locals would appreciate it.
I’m thinking RAIB-0. Not one problem there. No problems at all.
Just a Bunch Of Bridge.
I was thinking RAIB 10 . .no need for parity checking.
What sort of cabling, do you suppose?
Strong Cable Support Infrastructure?
RAIB-0 would be interesting enough. Each car split into equal parts across multiple bridges.
There are two tunnels, plus you could go the long way around or on local streets. However there’s a lot of traffic, plus the tunnels have restrictions against hazardous or oversized loads
What kind of RAIB array would you suggest?
The Beowulf Bridge.
Looks like most crossing upstream are tunnels.
They are, with restrictions for hazmat, propane, and similar materials, so another tunnel with the same restrictions would be a major headache.
