My apologies for the Twitter link. Appears to have happened around 1:30 EDT, judging from the timestamp in the video. Seems unsurprising that Amerikkkan infrastructure is in this dire of a state (at the cost of innocent people's lives, as usual), but I'd still love to know what the hell happened here. Hopefully the early hour meant that more people weren't harmed.
Photo of the aftermath:
Prior to the ship hitting the support column, you can see it lose power, then regain power, then thick smoke starts billowing out the top, then it loses power again, and regains power again seconds before contact.
Could the bridge have been engineered to be strong enough to survive an impact by a >100k ton ship? Maybe, but it seems like better backup and emergency systems on these huge ships might be a more practical idea. Obviously we are still very light on information.
I think they usually build artificial islands around bridge columns so ships will run aground before hitting the column itself.
They do if they're required by law to, otherwise way waste the money on things like preventative safety measures.
There should be tugs that could at least push it off of a direct collision course
Mr. Musk please invent an AI powered tug to guide these ships that will also say the N word
Well we have the ships and have taught them multiple slurs but we can't seem to get that other part working
There is no bridge in the world that would withstand a direct hit to a support by a container ship.
jesus
also this bridge is a massively important part of keeping the entire east coast functioning. the tragedy of the people who were on it is obviously more important, but this is a massive disaster, like holy shit. the number of people this bridge is important to?
Reminds me of how 
talks about the social value of bridges in bullshit jobs
Redundancy and overflow management is communism 
It’s a major artery for Baltimore traffic. It’s going to massively fuck traffic patterns for the city for the foreseeable future. I’m very thankful that this happened at 1:30, because of that hit during morning rush hour, so many more people would’ve lost their lives.
I wonder if the chuds will blame TikTok and trans people for this, and not like, the state of their Empire
the Baltimore Sun is linking the incident with local trans YouTuber ContraPoints
damn she hates nonbinary people enough to do terrorism?
Local trans people are just too damn cute and I can't keep myself from staring.
8 years ago, the bridge was called "structurally deficient", although I don't know if anything changed since then.
It was called one of Amerika's scariest bridges for truckers 3 years ago. People have called it "high and tight".
20 workers were actively doing bridge repair as it was knocked down
Good to know. Really sad for those workers. I hope they're OK.
reports are 7/20 went into the drink, can’t imagine hearing a loud crash while working on a bridge and turning to see a freighter knocking out a support column while you’re on it, the anticipation of knowing that falling hundreds of meters is inevitable and that the freezing water leads to hypothermia quickly, all to the soundtrack of screaming, twisting metal and crunching concrete
Real annoying how the only posts with any information beyond this are coming from the most MAGA chud accounts imaginable. Serves me right for using Elon's hellsite.
it was hit by a 
'Mass casualty incident' as US bridge hit by ship collapses into river
- A bridge in the US city of Baltimore has entirely collapsed into the Patapsco River after being hit by a container ship
- Up to 20 people and several vehicles have fallen into the river, says Baltimore City Fire Department who are currently at the scene
- The fire department says a large vessel hit a column of the Francis Scott Key Bridge at around 01:30 ET (05:30 GMT)
- Videos on social media appear to show the bridge entirely descending into the water
- A number of casualties have been reported and there is now a large multi-agency rescue and recovery operation under way
>Write national anthem for country
>Country names bridge after me
>Bridge collapses
>I'm a metaphor or something
Calling it now, the rescue operation will be a shitshow and cops will get in the way
My hot take is this shouldn’t be possible to occur as an accident during normal operations. Either the bridge is dilapidated or poorly designed, or ships that large should not be allowed under it.
Shit like this will occur with increasing frequency in America, and it will be normalized as an unavoidable, just like mass shootings.
No bridge is going to be designed to take a direct hit from a container ship. This is a multi level failure of the ship and the tugs.
Mr President, a third has hit the towers
God it's so embarrassing how many online libs are suddenly bridge engineers now and trying to explain away this disaster. Like their only explanation for this is that sometimes massive ships will just hit and collapse bridges and that fine.
Like no reflection on why a 50 year old bridge didn't have any modern protective measures, why massive Panamax ships are apparently seconds away from catastrophic impact every time it passes this thing, how they even let a ship on the verge of a double power failure into the harbor in the first place.
Reported on the top of Reddit as an “incident” that closed the bridge.
They can’t turn off the propaganda switch. It’s stuck in the on position.
am i wrong to think this is going to become a major point down the road? from what I hear, it's a lot of Midwest US that's getting impacted due to the effect this will have on shipping, which feels like one of those things that becomes a catalyst for some greater economic/political tension down the road
not to talk over the loss of life or anything here, it's a tragedy in of itself
Vaxxed?
I know nothing about driving(?) boats, let alone a massive shipping container, but how the fuck does this happen. Captain have a few drinks or what?
It's not uncommon for these huge ships to temporarily lose power when going slowly like this, either from age, poor maintenance, or engines that just don't like being at low RPM for that long
The problem is, a few seconds of power loss at the wrong time gets you this
Oh great, everything working as intended then
For what it's worth, this ship would have been controlled by a pilot from the port itself - when big ships enter ports a professional harbor pilot gets ferried out to them and does all the driving as they're familiar with the port.
Dali 'lost propulsion' before hitting bridge
An unclassified memo from the government agency CISA - the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency - has confirmed that the Singapore-flagged vessel Dali "lost propulsion" and collided with "a supporting tower of the bridge".
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