‘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.
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