Container Ship Strikes Scott Key Bridge in MD

In 1980 a freighter hit the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa Bay and 35 people died when the main span came down. The new design incorporated "dolphins" or concrete barriers away from the piers. Large rock islands surround the base of the piers and the piers themselves have steel reinforced concrete collars that are twelve feet thick. FDOT says the dolphins can take the impact of a 87,000-ton ship at ten knots before getting to the pier collars.
 

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AF6872 said:
In 1980 a freighter hit the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa Bay and 35 people died when the main span came down. The new design incorporated "dolphins" or concrete barriers away from the piers. Large rock islands surround the base of the piers and the piers themselves have steel reinforced concrete collars that are twelve feet thick. FDOT says the dolphins can take the impact of a 87,000-ton ship at ten knots before getting to the pier collars.
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This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the news. I drive over the new Sunshine Skyway several times a week and the 1980 disaster crosses my mind every time.
 
Stealth_81 said:
This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the news. I drive over the new Sunshine Skyway several times a week and the 1980 disaster crosses my mind every time.
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I thought about that incident every time I transited under a bridge on a ship. Terrible incident. Another bad one was the USCGC Blackthorn incident in Tampa Bay. 23 Coast Guard personnel lost their lives. Future SWOs and USCG officers that case is worth a read. No organization is exempt from serious problems in leadership, human error miss-management and process failures.
 
I am sure they have barges with heavy lift cranes like Manitowoc with or without ringer deploying to the site to clear the channel after preliminary investigation is completed. Clearing the channel will reopen the port but new bridge and vehicle traffic will be years. In a former life as a newbie long boom operator a friend who worked on the water told me that before you make a pick from a barge drop your hook and make sure your cable is long enough to reach bottom if the load as you swing out is too much and you have to let it go before the load takes you over barge and all and hope the load hits bottom before you do.
 
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From the pics I saw, it looked like the ship missed the dolphins. Also, that ship can be 100k+ tons, and was moving at just under 9kts....that's a lot of energy.
 
AF6872 said:
Don't think they had any pier protection dolphin or otherwise. Yes a lot of kinetic energy and hard to stop.
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Yes, not a "fail safe" system design. Low cost design for the bridge and its protection. Ship issues are a separate concern. Human error will be involved on the ship.
 
Don't Give Up the Ship said:
Yes, not a "fail safe" system design. Low cost design for the bridge and its protection. Ship issues are a separate concern. Human error will be involved on the ship.
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I agree that human error on the ship will be the vast majority of the reason for the impact. In some way or another. I do wonder about the bridge completely failing. The proximate cause is still the ship hitting the bridge support, but It seems like that support is pretty close to the channel. Why this support was not considered for a dolphin/ more protection should be considered. Likely the costs for dolphin build is pretty high and not as "popular" as bridge maintenance on the car side(as that is what more voters see). I don't think anything will come to a investigation about why there is no significant dolphin as everyone will point fingers at everyone else. I still think it should be considered though.

Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
 
I'm curious, would tug boats have made a difference? I know Bay Pilot(s) would be on board, but don't how much help they could be with a ship with no power. I have zero boating knowledge, so forgive my ignorance.

On a side note, everything I've read about Bay Pilots highly ranks their professionalism and experience.
 
I read a Capitol Gazette article this morning (it has paywalls). A couple things stood out to me:

The MTA had a police DETAIL assigned to the construction crew for traffic control, if necessary. As such, their presence allowed them to stop bridge traffic access within the 90 seconds they had. Absent the assigned detail, that wouldn’t have occurred in that short amount of time. Those people are HEROS.

There was a State Inspector at the site, in his car, and he literally cleared the point of breakage as the collapse occurred (my add, so he must have had notification and was able to get out quickly).

Two construction workers were in a truck. And not recovered. Speculation was the noise level prevented them hearing radios. Or they were on break in the truck and didn’t receive notice. MTA could not go onto the bridge to get them bc they would be in harms way. All presented in the article.

The construction company has strict safety guidelines. They practice all sorts of emergency contingencies, but not a ship hitting a bridge.

There are hero’s in this story. There are things that went right. There are also lessons to be learned.
 
AF6872 said:
Don't think they had any pier protection dolphin or otherwise. Yes a lot of kinetic energy and hard to stop.
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I think in many cases the dolphins are not there to actually stop a ship so much as deflect it back toward the channel or past the bridge, or at least slow it down before it hits anything important. There's no tugboat or bollard around that'll stop 150K tons in a minute or two, but you can perhaps shape the impact to mitigate catastrophe.

Someone mentioned earlier that there are probably a lot of bridges and other infrastructure all over the country that are woefully under-protected in today's world of vast ships. I think an event like this shines a light on the problem every so often, but it's so wide-spread that we don't ever make real progress against it. For example, back in 2003 the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis fell and bridge inspections were conducted all over the country. But how many were replaced or upgraded? The numbers are so big the mind kind of boggles.
 
Ihavenoidea said:
This is also a case of a immovable object versus a unstoppable force. There may not be alot that could have been done to stop this event. The ship loosing control right at that time and location is just the absolute worse case scenario(other than it happening at rush hour). There will be some questions and answers needed, and I'm sure that something will go up to try and limit this from happening again. Hopefully it will be helpful.
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Proper barriers would have stopped this vessel; some states are retrofitting bridges with large bumpers to absorb the impact of a vessel strike, most notably the Delaware Memorial Bridge which carries I-95. Given the wakeup call from the Sunshine Skyway disaster decades ago the failure of the Maryland Transportation Authority to take appropriate measures was in my opinion grossly negligent; this was a disaster waiting to happen and so is the Bay Bridge.
 
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