Reddit's main subreddit for videos. Please read the sidebar below for our rules.
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
Middle of the night means fewer cars but Jesus the thought of any rescue in the pitch black. Absolutely horrific.
There was construction crew working on the bridge. 20 workers missing.
You can see the work trucks with the flashing lights in the middle section on the right side as it collapses.
6 missing
I hope they're all found safe. Such horror to die from being trapped with debris under water in the cold and dark.
Drowning is one of my worst fears. I hope they find those missing workers.
And it's still about 4am over there, a lot of people are still in bed. They're going to wake up later today and learn that the bridge is completely gone.
This is me. Guess we have to drive through the city now.
At least you know in time to adjust your schedule. There are going to be people getting up in an hour expecting to get to work at a normal time
I'm not sure there exists enough time to adjust your schedule with the amount of traffic that's going to be shunted over
What I think is crazy to think about is the cars that pulled up to the bridge right after it collapsed and hopefully noticed in time to stop from plummeting into the water. I'm sure at 4am you're not even considering the bridge being gone!
I read somewhere they were able to stop some traffic just before it happened as the ship did give a moment’s warning.
Something similar happened in Sweden in January 18, 1980.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tj%C3%B6rnbrokatastrofen (In Swedish)
It happened 01:30 in the morning, similar to Baltimore. But it was also foggy.
The bridge of the ship, as well as it's radio equipment, was destroyed. The radio signal from the maritime pilot was too weak and couldn't contact the authorities. But eventually a local radio station managed to discover it, which in turn contacted the pilot lookout.
The mainland side was closed after 15 minutes, thanks to a truck-driver who was going slow due to the uphill, the bad weather and slippery roads. He managed to stop 10 metres (30 ft) before the edge. But he could still see cars plumbing on the opposite side, despite his attempts at warning them.
The opposite side wasn't closed for 1 hour, as there were no police in service at that side of the bridge. The ship crew managed to warn a truck-driver, who stopped. But he did not realise the actual danger, and drove over the edge.
8 people died.
And cold waters
Reading the Twitter replies, someone mentioned divers can't enter the water until daylight due to the debris
Not knowing Baltimore, that sounded like a big bridge. Then I watched the video and that's a big fucking bridge! Really hope everyone is ok.
It's going to be a nightmare around here for a while. The only other paths that bypass the city are the two tunnels and they're already constantly jammed with traffic. This is going to be unimaginably fucked; way worse than when I95 collapsed in PA because there's no way to temporarily build a massive bridge that massive amounts of harbor traffic needs to pass under.
harbor is probably closed too because of the debris in the water.. i can't imagine the channel is clear right now.
Absolutely. Death toll aside, this is going to be a nightmare for commerce. I can't even begin to imagine what it will mean.
The company who hit that bridge will immediately file for bankruptcy because there is no way they could ever pay the cost to rebuild and reparations involved. How the hell does that happen?
There's probably a bunch of master schedulers, production planners, and demand managers who just got their phones pinged relentlessly with all sorts of alarms. After waking up and having some coffee and convening their teams, they're probably going to swear under their breath, attempt to contact their colleagues at the shipping line, and check on the status of their containers. They'll probably have to meet with senior management at some point to discuss the schedule disruptions and impact to customer orders. They'll probably have to do the same for their suppliers, too - all those shipments are gonna have to be rerouted, and all the project timelines just went to shit.
Depending on how long it'll take them to reopen the harbour, this could be an absolute disaster for the city's economy.
They’ll have the channel cleared within two weeks, I’m sure of that. Rebuilding the bridge is a different matter, that will probably take years.
I give it no earlier than 5 days, no later than 3 weeks to get a channel open, if the Army Corps scrambles.
There is little chance there is a channel to and from the port. The bigger issue is that all the way down the bay to the city of Baltimore may very well be obstructed, cutting off most if not all access.
This is almost one of the major hazmat routes as hazmat can’t go through the tunnels.
This was the only way north and south with hazmat unless you go all the other way around the city.
Apparently that bridge took five years to build.
Time to call the army corps of engineers.
Shit, it time to call Tye and the Extreme Home Makeover crew and get this back together in a week.
Hoping for many rescues and minimal deaths - super fucked situation.
Hoping the Army Corps of Engineers can work their magic on a new bridge after the lengthy clean up.
I’m hoping for a recovery and it would be a miracle if they found survivors. They weren’t able to get into the water because a major active power line fell in and they barely turned off the power 20 mins ago. Rescue divers just got in:
Wow that is doubly tragic. I hope anyone who died did so in the fastest way possible. If most of the victims were doing construction, I imagine that would be the case.
Seven vehicles were reported to be in the water, including a semi-truck and trailer.
The bridge is just over a mile and a half long, and it's being reported that the section that fell is around 1200 feet long.
It’s the entire suspension span.
Seeing it collapse was akin to a 9/11 WTC thing. The entire span just falls into the water when the ship hits the support.
That bridge is basically a part of the 695 beltway and leads to the port of Baltimore. The port is gonna be fucked.
It spans the length of the harbor. We'll probably have to wait until morning to see the full damage but the harbor may be locked out.
This will add a lot of strain on Baltimore in general.
Yes, anything that would be considered “Baltimore Harbor” is isolated from Chesapeake Bay right now, with the exception of Sparrows Point and the Wagner Power Plant. This includes container terminals, a cruise ship terminal, a coal ship pier, large car import terminals, some oil/chemical terminals, and a Coast Guard base.
It basically cuts off the Baltimore inlet of the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean
You can’t get into Curtis Bay now. The bridge collapse will block access to the harbor for months if not longer.
I would say they could get the main channel clear in weeks, but yes, massive disruptions to the Port of Baltimore.
Ive been on it a million times and it's major.
I don’t see any mention of this as a reply to you but… it’s the third largest truss in the world
Holy fuck. Just watched the bridge cam footage.
The container ship appears to lose power several times. You can see all the lights on the ship cut out completely a couple of times and the ship just drifts.
Truly sad.
EDIT: Since people are asking for the video, it's linked below, but here it is anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83a7h3kkgPg
Don't bridge piles have a slanted area around them that acts as a barrier against this exact thing?
That’s what I thought too. I found some bridges closer to my area in Europe that have them in the form of a small island at the base of the pillar, but also massive bridges like the Oresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden that don’t. The Golden Gate Bridge also has a pillar in the middle of the water without significant protection around it. Any of those bridges will never withstand the impact of such a massive container ship.
Yea supports be damned. One of those fully loaded ships weighs an insurmountable amount of weight. No chance. It’s like a person walking into a gate made of popsicle sticks.
Ship that massive I'm guessing it would just punch though the hull around the waterline and the rest of the freeboard is just going to continue into the structure. If you had a massive island around the pillar you might be able avoid contact by using the hull as a crumple zone.
The only portion of that bridge that should ever have any shipping activity around it does have protective measures in place.
Thank God. Thanks for the great info! I had just looked at Google Earth and didn’t see anything above water which makes sense now.
If you speed up the video a split second before impact there is a quick veer to their left. Possibly what you are speaking of, but just too much force behind the vessel to have enough effect.
Those are called dolphins, and no, this bridge did not have them.
With the Sunshine Skyway bridge collapse, the supports closes to the channel were designed to withstand an impact. And that support survived with only minor damage.
But MV Summit Venture was far enough off course to also hit a secondary support that wasn't designed to survive a collision, and the bridge collapsed.
In this case, it looks like the ship hit the main bridge support closest to the channel. So I have no idea why it collapsed. Was the Francis Scott Key bridge just not designed to withstand a collision?
Someone from the r/PublicFreakout thread did the math on this one. A fully loaded cargo ship traveling 10mph has the energy equivalence of 1 ton of TNT. I'm speaking without any expertise on the subject, but I'm not sure any barricade or bridge support would withstand that force. But we'll have to see what the investigation comes up with.
Dunno what kind of crumple zone is built into a ship, but you're putting the entire potential energy of a 100,000ish tonne ship moving at 10 knots onto a very specific point on a very load bearing vertical beam.
Yeah. The bridge might take 1 ton of TNT in a big pile, but it definitely couldn't take it from a shaped charge that directed all the energy into the bridge supports. Which is basically what happened here. That bridge absorbed about 100% of the energy.
This ship is 3x more massive than the Summit Venture was. I don’t know that many bridges exist that can handle direct hits from ships of this size. Ship sizes have exploded in recent decades surpassing what anyone ever accounted for building bridges.
seriously
The bridge looks like it's made of matchsticks next to that thing. It's hugely and enormously massive.
You're correct, that bridge didn't stand a chance. https://twitter.com/justin_fenton/status/1772577492915671350
Yes, looks like the ship blackouts for approx. 30 seconds while standbys generator comes online. Unfortunately after a blackout, a ship has basically zero manoeuvrability and even when the ship comes back online, would be too late to correct a wrong heading at 8 knots. Ship also looks to blackout after hitting the bridge. Very sad for all involved and for anyone on the bridge at that moment. Hoping the rescue operation is successful.
Do you have a link?
This video shows the boat drifting into the bridge and its power going out prior to hitting the bridge
I have never been so stressed to see cars reach the edge of the bridge, at the 1:40ish mark there are a couple of cars/trucks which only make it off the bridge about 20 seconds before it collapses.
according to news outlets, 20 people are thought to be in the water. :(
I kept glancing to the right to see whether any other vehicles were approaching. As terrible as this will turn out to be, it could've been much, much worse if it happened during the day, not to mention during rush hour.
Clearest footage yet. It looks like that whole work crew went down with the bridge but there was a break in traffic after those three car/trucks.
I’m hoping they were able to get a call out to shut down the bridge. Not that it helps the people still on it but hopefully they saved a few lives.
That is absolutely insane…can see a couple trucks drove over about 30secs to a minute before it happened too. Must be a trip knowing how close you were to going down with that bridge.
Look like there was 4 trucks stationary on the bridge with flashing lights probably doing some road surface work
It will be, but I wouldn't be surprised if those who made it off the bridge didn't even see what happened, went home and are asleep with no idea how close they were to that incident.
Hard to see exactly what the ship was doing from the head-on shot, but it looks like it turned starboard toward the pile, then slowed, then speeded up again. Some kind of control system failure on the ship??
This is a livestream of it. I can't make a clip of it, but if you go back about 2 hours and 20 minutes (from the time this comment is made) you can see the ship approach. The timestamp on the top of the screen should read 1:23am when you see the ship start to approach. Lights are on, then go off for a minute, then back on, and then impact at 1:28am.
Looks like dark smoke is coming off of the ship right before impact as well. Some people are saying fire, but I don't know enough about cargo ships to say if that's normal.
My former work is related to these sorts of things. I have looked at this video and also the vessel’s AIS track line. I may not have gotten everything quite right because I’m bouncing back and forth between this post and the video. Some early items I noted:
When the ship entered view from the left nothing looks out of the ordinary, but there could be events occurring on the ship. (Edit: And comparing to the AIS track, the ship was already lined up to safely pass under the bridge at this time.)
The ship looks like it suffers some sort of electrical failure, as much of the lighting goes dark. This does not necessarily mean the propulsion was not working. It may mean the steering was affected. Often when there is an electrical disruption it can take some amount of seconds to reactivate and gain full steering control after a brief outage. Even if the rudder is frozen for 20 seconds at a very small angle, it can create big issues in harbor areas where every second counts.
The power comes back on. Shortly afterwards, a plume of smoke can be seen from the ship’s stack. This would indicate a strong engine order change, like ordering Full Ahead or Full Astern. It’s possible that the pilot and Captain felt they could not properly control the direction of the ship and so ordered Full Astern to try to slow or stop the ship. Unfortunately, going astern also reduces the ability to steer almost completely. In fact, the typical forces of a ship going astern is that the stern (back) of the ship wants to move to port (to the left). If the ship is still moving forward (like it was, about 8 knots) then the resulting effect is that the ship turns to the right, which might explain the ship’s right turn towards the bridge supports.
The lights come back on and the exhaust plume intensifies. The ship now looks directly aligned with the bridge supports.
The power appears to go out again.
The power comes back on again. Immediately before impact, there actually appears to be some turning to left to avoid the strike but the effect was not successful.
The strike and bridge collapse was absolutely horrible to watch. I wish the searchers strength and success, and I am so sorry for the friends and families of the victims.
Edit: So people have an idea of what’s coming next, separate from search and rescue efforts, the Coast Guard and NTSB investigators will start interviews, ensure drug/alcohol testing is performed, and start securing evidence. This would include the ship’s voyage data recorder, which records electronic data from the ship’s systems as well as audio recordings from the bridge.
Very well laid out. I worked with propulsion on a very large ship, and what you say about full astern is absolutely true. If they had steering control they should have continued ahead, right? I never had much to do with steering or navigation, though. Could they have dropped anchor manually? Would that have made a difference?
We also had four screws that we could run in opposition, and I'm sure that makes a difference in emergency steering procedures. Not sure of the configuration of this particular ship.
To add to your edit, maintenance records will be reviewed as well as records of emergency drill training.
I'm wondering fire or full reverse ?
Full reverse would make more sense, I think, since the smoke seems to be strongest right before it hits the bridge.