‘Sickening that Republicans are now blaming Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill for this bridge accident. The sheer gall and naked opportunism and idiocy,’ epidemiologist says
Republicans are facing criticism for attempting to blame the Baltimore Bridge collapse on President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed on Tuesday after a cargo ship crashed into it. Six construction workers are presumed dead.
South Carolina Representative Nancy Maceappeared on the rightwing channel Newsmax on Tuesday when she was asked why there are still old bridges and roads in the US after the passing of legislation to upgrade them.
Meanwhile, the collapse was most likely actually caused by conservatives’ crusade against reasonable regulation and oversight (in this case, of cargo ship maintenance).
The government has no right to dictate the free market! It will correct itself; shipping companies that don’t meet top quality will fail in the marketplace! /s
Ships are people too - in a landmark Tugboats United vs. FEC Supreme Court ruling Justice Alito wrote for the majority, stating
It would be undemocratic to limit the freedom of expression of Ships, Boats, Catamarans, Tugs, SUVs and Canoe (not limiting) to seek profit.
In a rare double whammy the Supreme Court also affirmed that SUVs and light trucks must be afforded the same access to tax breaks and subsidies as other maritime vessels since, as Justice Thomas commented,
My F-150 took that puddle like a bitch - of course it’s seaworthy.
Or (lack of) infrastructure maintenance, building codes, etc.
The bridge wouldn’t have fallen if a ship didn’t hit it. Conversely, even a brand-new bridge wouldn’t have fared well if a ship hit it.
I know it’s still pretty early in the investigation, but nonetheless, I’m pretty damn confident that this was a ship problem, not a bridge problem.
I don’t disagree, just noting that lack of infrastructure maintenance/safety retrofitting is a very common issue in our country. There are bumper options to protect bridge supports, but idk how effective they’d be against a container ship. Retrofitting stuff like this is much more cost effective than rebuilding bridges, and may have helped the situation.
You’re not wrong, but in the context of a thread about the Republicans trying to spin this to falsely blame Biden, I’m less than inclined to downplay proximate causes in order to talk about more indirect/hypothetical ones.
I’m not attempting to downplay the actual cause in the slightest. My comment is merely to reinforce that republicans’ behavior wrt infrastructure maintenance and improvements was always going to lead to these sorts of situations. I’m just not very cogent first thing in the morning lol.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply nefarious intent. Maybe “pass over” would’ve been a better way to phrase it?
The Delaware Memorial Bridge is installing a fender system to deal with the kinds of ships that took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge:
https://whyy.org/articles/delaware-memorial-bridge-93-million-upgrade-ship-collision-protection/
I expect that there will be an NTSB directive to all maritime bridge owners to reevaluate their fender systems due to increased ship sizes.
Those fenders would have done basically nothing for a ship of this size. You’d be looking at a 20m diameter cofferdam full of concrete to be able to take a hit like that without failing, I did some basic calcs and the ship was about 100,000DWT so the impact force would be in the order of 315MN, absolutely huge.
One article I read, used the opposite as a point against. Maybe they could have done something with protection against collisions, but as a relatively new ( <50 yrs) bridge in good shape, it wasn’t worth any attention
There are ways to build bridges to take a hit like that, mostly through redundancy (making sure no pillar is a single point of failure, allowing it to stay standing if one pillar is torn down). It’s not cheap, but bridges over passageways to ports ought to be built that way for precisely this reason
I used to think in absolutes like that, but here’s another one: that accident was so rare, that there is no point in preparing for exactly that. Yes, there should be responsibility, especially if it was preventable, but infrastructure needs to look beyond any specific accident
It’s more important to see what we can do about accidents like that, in a much wider sense, since those will happen.
- collision protection will prevent catastrophe in many accidents like that, even if this one would have been impossible to block. Do you really think accidents only happen to larger ships, moving at speed, with only head on collisions that can’t be deflected?
- different construction of the bridge might make any such catastrophe less catastrophic, even by limiting how much of it fell
- requiring tugs to stand by until past the bridge would have given them at least a chance to try to prevent the collision
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cause_analysis
Actions like these could help, even before we figure out what happened with the ship and whether there are ways to reduce the chances in the future or to recover from such outages
I’m sure they’ll look at ways to improve disaster response and communication, although it seems like that worked really well. This was a textbook example of how a quick response saved lives and a good lesson on reinforcing that
I’m pretty damn confident that this was a ship problem
That’s so simplistic. Please look into the Swiss cheese model. Things shouldn’t break when just one thing goes wrong. There’s a load of things that could’ve mitigated things.
E.g. better protection for the bridge (was decided it wasn’t worth it), could’ve required that tugs assist until big vessels are safely away from the bridge, maybe could’ve influenced the design of these vessels, etc.
Saying it was a ship problem, nah, it’s a multiple of causes. Or worded differently, there’s loads of things to address possible fires in e.g. building and so on. Because just relying on everything always working perfectly is not realistic.
But even in saying it is a ship problem, that isn’t limiting to one failure point. There could be many small failures or choices that lead to the “ship problem.” Of course after that, you have a new cascade of things that lead to the final outcome still, but I just want to express that “ship problem” doesn’t mean simple.
Nancy Mace, Newsmax, why are you giving them the oxygen of attention? Neither are credible from the start.
So we know what we’re up against.
This isn’t some crazy person howling into the wind, this shit gets broadcast and people believe it. People with no media literacy just slorp it up and make it part of their worldview like they already have a neuralink implant.
Ignoring it is worse IMO. Then you’re just letting them get away with it.
So we know what we’re up against.
The only ones who don’t already haven’t been paying attention and likely aren’t going to.
This isn’t some crazy person howling into the wind
Nope, it’s crazy people howling into an echochamber. Just as inconsequential as into the wind, since other crazies are howling the same things.
People with no media literacy just slorp it up and make it part of their worldview like they already have a neuralink implant.
If you’re brainwashed enough to believe Newsmax under any circumstances, being exposed to more of it won’t help.
Ignoring it is worse IMO.
No. They subsist on attention. Clicks and shares from people who realize what lunatics they are benefit them as much in income and exposure as from those who don’t.
letting them get away with it.
Short of a modernized version of the Fairness Doctrine, that ship has not only sailed. It’s currently stuck and blocking the Suez canal of information because people with limited amount of attention use some of it on the lies of Newsmax.
…that analogy kinda got away with me a bit, but I’m pretty sure I managed to make it understandable in the end 😁
Bridges break when hit with a large enough object. Listen, I don’t need to be an engineer to explain this, but I am an engineer and yeah that’s how fucking bridges work.
It’s Biden’s fault.
It’s the Black mayor’s fault.
It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a ship crashed into and structurally compromised it until it failed. Nothing at all. That played no role.
Should we design our bridges to be able to withstand these types of incidents? Ok - sounds like we’re gonna have to raise the budget for…checks notes infrastructure. Has anyone thought of that recently? Anyone at all?
But do you have any proof that Biden wasn’t the one who crashed the ship?
Oh on a serious note I don’t know the exact design specifics for this bridge but often they are designed to take some impact. But the Francis Scott key bridge was designed in the 70s when container ships were much smaller. The ship that hit it was finished in 2015. It is a Neo-Panamax and about 3 times larger than ships of the 70s.
Yeah, you’d struggle to design a foundation that could take a hit like that, it would be something like a 20m diameter cofferdam full of concrete. The ship that hit it was about 100,000DWT so the impact load will be something like 300MN.
The bridge did have some small dolphins / navigation guides in front of the piers but they were likely designed for a very small impact load from a small vessel losing control.
Right, and that’s my point - it could be done, we just choose not to, but leave it to Republicans to blame whoever they don’t like and say whatever awful thing they can that day to outdo whoever said the most awful other thing the day before because that’s what shitty people do.
Meanwhile during 4 years of Trump, every week was Infrastructure Week, nothing got done then, none of the people saying the dumb things now have any real solutions to these absolutely real problems nor do they even care to, and so here we are.
And yes I’m preaching to the choir, screaming into the void, but it’s the hypocrisy - it’s the constant hypocrisy. It just never ends. Sorry, thanks for letting me vent lol
One quick point here. @MicroWave@lemmy.world 's link in the write-up is to a piece in the Independent that has a short paragraph on each of the 6 missing-presumed-dead victims of this accident.
It’s not usually possible to monetize this kind of background work, and i suspect most papers will skip the effort for that reason. But kudos to the Independent for giving us a face and a story to all of the names of the victims that people still couldn’t save. Keep us to task, and remind us how we could have been better, and show us personally why. This is the mirror we need sometimes.
The Apple News podcast this morning actually bothered to interview some of their family members and spoke at length about them.
Made me cry in the shower.
epidemiologist says.
Just feels so weirdly out-of-place.
you passed a bill to build an aircraft carrier, and then the aircraft carrier failed to just appear in Norfolk! YOU CANT EXPLAIN THAT!
I refuse to read any article with a headline that contains the words “Slammed” or “Claps backs”
Lemmy User mysticpickle BLASTS Sensationalized Headline!
Reeeeeeeee
sheer gall and naked opportunism and idiocy
That’s literally the only things the GOP does. Has been since 2010 at the very latest.
Holy shit, they were SLAMMED???
By epidemiologists, no less!
At least they’ve moved beyond blaming “the gays” for stuff like this 🤷
Sigh. They’ll blame anything and everything as long as it doesn’t involve self reflection or… Reality.
Is it still infrastructure week?
Republicans do not care about getting “slammed” or “destroyed” or “shamed”. They care about one thing, control. Power. And they’ll do anything to get it.
Create local support/defense networks, work towards electoral reform in our respective states, and find what peace we can while living in the conservative fascist multiverse.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace appeared on the rightwing channel Newsmax on Tuesday when she was asked why there are still old bridges and roads in the US after the passing of legislation to upgrade them.
“The legislation will reauthorize surface transportation programs for five years and invest $110 billion in additional funding to repair our roads and bridges and support major, transformational projects,” the White House said in November 2021.
Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding wrote that it’s “Sickening that Republicans (Nancy Mace) are now blaming Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill for this bridge accident.
Democratic congressional candidate Mac Deford added that it’s “shameful that @NancyMace has used the #FrancisScottKeyBridge collapse to score political points, especially when she can’t get her facts straight.
Far-right Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was hit with a community note on the platform after she asked if the bridge collapse could have been an “intentional attack”.
In addition, Maryland Governor Wes Moore confirmed that the crew on the ship issued a mayday and communicated that they were having a power problem, leading to transportation officials stopping traffic.
The original article contains 637 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
SLAMMED
9/11 happened because Bush’s infrastructure bill.
