Baltimore Bridge Collapse

Sporky

If I remember correctly (which tells me I need a refresher) you can't indemnify against CDM breaches - they are a criminal offence on the part of the designer.

At a previous job there was a CDM swoop when there was an accident on site (walkway collapse during construction, not one of my projects) ). They come in with the police and take you and a lot of files away, and ideally your employer scrambles a qualified solicitor straight away. It's every bit as serious as it should be. 

Tannin

The shipowners are very, very dodgy. There is no prima facie reason to imagine that the ship was safe and properly maintained. They have form.

The owners of the ship at the centre of the Baltimore bridge disaster in the US had another vessel banned from Australian ports over unlawful exploitation of workers.
The Dali, a 300-metre container ship which accidentally destroyed a bridge, causing the presumed deaths of six people and blocking a major US trade route, is owned via a secretive tax haven company in the British Virgin Islands called Grace Ocean Investment Limited.
Another ship that belonged to the company was slapped with a six-month ban in 2021 for what the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said were "serious and shameful breaches" of maritime labour laws.
The operator of the Western Callao was forced to hand over about $40,000 in unpaid wages to 13 seafarers.
AMSA detained the same ship at Port Kembla in New South Wales in July 2020, finding the operator had unlawfully kept eight seafarers on board for more than 11 months.
Another of the company's ships, the Furness Southern Cross, had also unlawfully kept 10 seafarers on board for more than 14 months.

Excerpted from here (worth reading as there is more): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-28/ship-owner-in-baltimore-bridge-tragedy-vessel-banned-australia/103642216

tone1

RandallFlagg said:

I hope it's not in poor taste or too soon but...

I do hope this bridge disaster doesn't become an idea for the name of a band.

One for the forum long termers.

I was just going to post the same….good job I changed the habit of a lifetime, and actually read the whole thread to make sure someone else hadn’t beaten me to it….Condolences to the Families involved and RIP…

ICBM

Shipping is an extremely dodgy industry, where minimum safety standards are routinely ignored and circumvented, employment laws are flouted and the lower levels of crews are treated effectively as slaves, and the ownership and accountability are deliberately obfuscated.

My brother-in-law used to be in the merchant navy and said the rules that once applied have been completely eroded under flags of convenience and it’s basically unregulated. And that was thirty years ago… I’m sure it’s worse now.

Stratavarious

It is interesting to note that the neighbouring power line pylons have substantial protection from collision and are shaped to deflect a drifting vessel.  The authorities have neglected to put same protection on the bridge supports as the sizes of the ships increased over the years.  For a design in which any point failure propagates quickly across the whole structure, it seems negligent and an accident waiting to happen.

There seems a mass of truss bridges in the USA too.. you’d have thought a critical span like that would have been upgraded with a much wider and higher suspension bridge years ago.   Maybe the Tacoma Narrows disaster put the public’s feelings back.

Tannin

Stratavarious said:

It is interesting to note that the neighbouring power line pylons have substantial protection from collision and are shaped to deflect a drifting vessel.  The authorities have neglected to put same protection on the bridge supports as the sizes of the ships increased over the years.  For a design in which any point failure propagates quickly across the whole structure, it seems negligent and an accident waiting to happen.

The big bridge over the Derwent River at Hobart has had protection against shipping for almost 50 years. 

Q: Why did the Tasmanian authorities insist on spending the extra money to make it properly safe? 

Ans: Because a ship ran into it in 1975 and knocked it down. People were killed. Hobart came to a standstill for many months because it was the only way to get across the water short of driving all the way upstream to Bridgewater and then all the way back again. The ship is still there under the water. It was too heavy and dangerous to move so they put the new bridge pylon in a different place. 

Gassage

Sporky said:

If I remember correctly (which tells me I need a refresher) you can't indemnify against CDM breaches - they are a criminal offence on the part of the designer.

At a previous job there was a CDM swoop when there was an accident on site (walkway collapse during construction, not one of my projects) ). They come in with the police and take you and a lot of files away, and ideally your employer scrambles a qualified solicitor straight away. It's every bit as serious as it should be. 

Sporky, don't forget that under CDM 2015 the role of PD is now an outlined and compartmentalised role. 

(which is why no fucker will sign up to it and why PI and PL is through the roof).

Something like this bridge would be procured under something like NEC4 Option F - so in that instance the Employer would procure and nominate a single overarching PD.

ToneControl

Paul_C said:

Rarely do we see anything which is over-engineered or safety procedures which prioritse human life.

The human approach is often "the minimum we can get away with" and "unless something unusual happens people aren't certain to die", which means everywhere you look we cut corners and take unnecessary risks.

we do on various projects I have worked on
There are even special "safety officers" on some projects, whose job is to ensure there is full and accurate evidence of safe design

Read up on SIL levels:
https://blog.msasafety.com/what-safety-integrity-level-means/

Offset

Stratavarious said:

Maybe the Tacoma Narrows disaster put the public’s feelings back.

For feck's sake don't say that twice more whilst looking in the mirror.

ToneControl

Last week I saw a photo of a bridge with protective barriers to stop ships damaging the piers - the Sunshine Skyway.

Searching for it today I found that the same thing had happened there, and the replacement bridge is the one with the protective barriers - you can see them in this photo. The old bridge is in the foreground.

I'm wondering if we'll see this type of barrier being retro-fitted around older bridges

Snags

Thing is, if you look at the gaps between the vertical supports on the older bridges vs. the installations with the protective barriers, if you put barriers on the old bridge you'd not get any shipping traffic through. And I imagine it's quite hard to re-engineer the bridge to allow for a wider span between supports without essentially closing it and starting again (although I know nothing about such things, just a sneaking suspicion that it's probably not that simple).

Rocker

Just wondering why my contribution to this thread received two LOLs.  It is true that I am not an engineer and know nothing about shipping but sometimes the obvious questions need to be asked.

Dontgiveupyourdayjob

The best solution to the issue of getting increasingly enormous container vessels through waterways is the one used on the Oresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden. Don't go under the bridge, go around it using an underground tunnel for the bridge traffic....



Genius!

Haych

Something just popped up on FaceTube about the bridge disaster, nothing controversial, just a guy commenting on what happened.

Skip to the comments though and there are dozens of people who genuinely think it was a deliberate act, a part of some sort of government conspiracy - to what end I have no clue, nor do they.  Some of the comments and reasoning is staggering - the ship lost power, it wouldn't steer off course so quickly after losing power at low speed, or , how come there weren't any tugs or pilot boats guiding the ship, to pick just two.

Beggars belief that people seem to want to believe everything that happens is something sinister and cannot possibly be just a case of sh!t happens!

Kurtis

VimFuego said:

littlegreenman said:

Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner; ergo it was a hit job by anti patriotic, New World Order, Biden sponsored Islamo-Atheist tarot-fied conspiracists!

Hit like and subscribe

I've seen people say it's cos of woke, libtards, it's not real, it's a jewish conspiracy (but also an islamist one, possibly at the same time) it's cos murica has abandoned god. And worryingly, that's some of the least crazy stuff out there.

The worrying thing is that got two wisdoms 

sev112

Sporky said:

Paul_C said:

Rarely do we see anything which is over-engineered or safety procedures which prioritse human life.

Every structure (in the developed world) is over-engineered. Once all the loads are calculated a factor of safety is applied - this basically multiplies the strength of each component to several times what it is expected to be subjected to in normal use.

That factor of safety is typically at least 3; it is often much higher. The fixings we use for projectors (which hurt if they fall on you) are rated for five to ten times (depending largely on the height above the floor) the anticipated maximum load, and that is not just the weight of the projector and its mount.

In the UK, the CDM regulations make me and every other designer in the built environment personally responsible for the safety of what we design past a certain project size (which is pretty small). They cover use, maintenance, and the initial installation - every stage has to be provably safe.

Noted
The problem is that the majority of individual designers and their employer and the clients of the projects do not know (a) what the actual law/CDM says and (b) don't k ow how to apply that law ans (c) their company procedures are all weak !  I know this from daily experience as well having examined numerous prospective Chartered Engineers for >20 years .  On top of that is that hardly any designers and clients ever consider a "extremely low probability/high severity event" like this bridge. Most practising engineers and clients really only consider higher probability events and ignore these, at best some of them just say it's an unrealistic risk.  I do encourage designers and clients to consider more "consequence assessment" instead of poor risk assessments.  I have started including "multiple fatalities" on summary risk assessments to really bring out to clients what might go wrong, and I have been doing g more "what if" discussions.   Unfortunately many designers and clients revert to "well noone else has done that or asked us to do this before" . 
Finally the HSExec does have an approach called "tolerability" and this is the real crux.  What does society need which helps determine whether a risk is sufficiently addressed.  They also consider that what is tolerable will change with time, as greater knowledge comes along and awareness of what they call "developing risks". - an example is fire from (the electrics serving) solar panels which exist on many roofs (there have been a lot of fires in Europe (different to EVs but that's another discussion )

crosstownvamp

Rocker said:

Just wondering why my contribution to this thread received two LOLs.  It is true that I am not an engineer and know nothing about shipping but sometimes the obvious questions need to be asked.

Cos you said

Rocker said:

Why have a bridge spanning a river or inlet that is directly in the path of a major shipping port? The bridge should never have been built there or the port infrastructure should be on the 'outside' (the seaside) of the bridge. Were the workers on the bridge wearing any floatation aids? A ferry system can be setup fairly quickly to move people and goods across the river/sea inlet. How quickly can the main channel be cleared to allow shipping to resume (pending a decision on what to do about a permanent river/sea inlet crossing)?

Much of which is impractical or worse. The bridge was built there because it needed to be built there. The geography of the world is not put together to make things convenient. The bridge carries a major highway - a ferry service will not be any sort of solution.

yocky

Commercial shipping is a disgrace. Laws centuries old. Owned somewhere, company registered somewhere else, ship registered elsewhere again, crew from yet another country. Regulatory arbitrage the main reason I'd guess. This is how most goods are transported around the world, it's a joke.

Wasn't the stuff that exploded in Beirut the result of a ship that the owner was just able to walk away from because it was cheaper that way?  

Haych

I remember this not so long ago, basically everyone abandoned the ship, including the owners and left a new crew member responsible for the ship and who now cannot leave.  I think it was eventually sorted but not before the poor chap was left alone on the ship for some time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zD-KjuGuiM

Sporky

sev112 said:

Noted
The problem is that the majority of individual designers and their employer and the clients of the projects do not know (a) what the actual law/CDM says and (b) don't k ow how to apply that law ans (c) their company procedures are all weak !  I know this from daily experience as well having examined numerous prospective Chartered Engineers for >20 years .  On top of that is that hardly any designers and clients ever consider a "extremely low probability/high severity event" like this bridge. Most practising engineers and clients really only consider higher probability events and ignore these, at best some of them just say it's an unrealistic risk.  I do encourage designers and clients to consider more "consequence assessment" instead of poor risk assessments.  I have started including "multiple fatalities" on summary risk assessments to really bring out to clients what might go wrong, and I have been doing g more "what if" discussions.   Unfortunately many designers and clients revert to "well noone else has done that or asked us to do this before" . 
Finally the HSExec does have an approach called "tolerability" and this is the real crux.  What does society need which helps determine whether a risk is sufficiently addressed.  They also consider that what is tolerable will change with time, as greater knowledge comes along and awareness of what they call "developing risks". - an example is fire from (the electrics serving) solar panels which exist on many roofs (there have been a lot of fires in Europe (different to EVs but that's another discussion )

Interesting - thank you.

My view is that the root issue is - as usual - growth capitalism. It corrupts everything.