Posted on 03/26/2024 7:52:03 PM PDT by hardspunned
The Chinese can put up a 1 km.steel pontoon bridge in 28 minutes. What’s this about a port out of action for months? Just make a swinging pontoon bridge...
That makes sense if the rudder were moved hydraulically, (almost a certainty) and if the hydraulic pressure source were electric. Also highly likely that the rudder control is an electro-hydraulic servo system.
'Swelp me, I'd never want to be on a ship that had no redundancy of hydraulic pump or generator, but who knows?
From my machine tool days in the '70s I know that hydraulic servos have nasty ways of going haywire, so I'd want a manually operable backup rudder valve.
I've read that WW2 destroyers used chain falls for emergency rudder control, but it would take one helluva chain fall and a team of ten or twenty men to do it for a container ship that size.
All modern Navy ships have remote manual backup control of the rudder. I imagine this class of ships does too. The problem is that manual control is a very slow and tedious process. Can you imagine trying to move that size of a rudder with a little hand crank? I’ve tried it...it ain’t fun.
Anyway, it was about four minutes from the initial loss of power to the collision with the bridge. And the collision only happened at about 1.5 knots.
This was described in “Atlas Shrugged”.
On that note, this is a very good column;
Di Leo: The Cheap Mercedes and the Beautiful Bridge
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4227114/posts
I have only viewed film from the first couple hours of coverage.
To my eye, it looked like the sharp edge of the ship bow hit the piling supports straight on, at full speed, and dead center.
The odds of that happening without steering the ship directly at the pilings seem very low.
Not proof - but deliberate sabotage was definitely my first impression.
He’s nuts. I’ve taken that Amtrak route. The bridge it goes over is further north near Havre De Grace and goes over the Susquehanna River on a railroad bridge that parallels Rt. 40.
I want to hear from the Pilot. He would have been on the bridge of the ship the entire time.
“4-5 years to repair.
meanwhile, japan would have it up and running within a month”
The Rats will waive, break any laws regulations on the book to get it rebuilt fast. No bid contracts, only the highest paying Union labor working double time hours.
If this Bridge was in Florida or Texas, forget about it.
That is what I saw as well.
Thank you for your knowledgeable comments. Would be interested to know how you know the speeds with such precision. Could be derived from videos, I suppose, if the viewing angle were right. Or from telemetry from the ship, of that wasn't knocked out by the power failure. Do ships that size have a hulking great tiller? Or a gear of some sort above the stuffing box?
In modern America? Are you kidding? You see how things get done around here. I 75 crosses the Ohio at Cincinnati. Kentucky, Ohio, DC and Cincinnati have been wrangling over how to replace the aging bridge for DECADES. Millions and millions of dollars in multiple studies, with every politician in two or three generations of them getting their hands on cash and woke, green opinions in. It should actually start soon. The last cost estimate was $3.9B up from the 2022 estimate of $2.6B and take 8 years!
From the Cincinnati Enquirer 1963
“The Brent Spence Bridge opens to traffic after nearly three years of construction. It’s named for Congressman Brent Spence, a Democrat from Newport who served 31 years in the U.S. House. The $10 million project is the first new Ohio River bridge in Cincinnati since 1891. Designed to carry 80,000 vehicles daily, the bridge carried about 32,000 vehicles in its first 24 hours.”
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/4/18/the-brent-spence-boondoggle
Other than me, you are the first person I’ve seen make that simple, obvious statement. Everyone else says pipe down, check out the expert speculation, we may never know. WTH?! Ask the guy what happened and tell us.
It’s a shame the aliens abducted the pilot and are holding him incommunicado. I guess we’ll never know what was going on. Things just happen. It’s like the Las Vegas mass shooting. Oh well.
With your truck load of hazmat? Are you sure about that?
Who said anything about mass casualties?
It’s, it’s, the Aliens!
“Companies cutting corners to save a few shekels, that’s all.”
Yep
The “Harbor” Master was in charge of the ship at the time it hit the bridge support column.
He was not an employee of the owner of the vessel.
Don’t get all hyped up.
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