Yeah, but this bridge didn’t have any kind of upstream structure to protect the piers at all. Sure, they have a foundation, but that’s immediately below each pier, and looking at the aerial photos of the bridge (pre-incident), the piers are entirely unprotected other than for a very few feet of concrete belonging to the pier foundations. And the foundation doesn’t appear to extend more than just a few feet above the water. This ship, or any of similar size, would not have even contacted those foundations before the bow rammed the bridge pier structure.
Yup. It was a bad design as far as protection from ship impact. But what is worse is that there were no serious modifications to the area around the piers to prevent this from happening. Not in all of these years.
poorly designed bridge. only the section hit should have gone down - not the whole 1.6 miles