Baltimore bridge collapse

Be interested to hear an engineer's view on the collapse as I was surprised to see the whole thing go down, especially the first section to the right.

Having watched the video it appears to have at least happened at a point when there were no vehicles on the section of the bridge that collapsed. It doesn't go on long enough to show if traffic on other parts of the bridge had time to react after the section went down.

Very scary how quickly and easily it went down.

Construction going on on the bridge, you can see the flashing lights of the vehicles stationary through the video before the strike, poor bds.

That went down far too easily, maybe there was maintenance going on on the bridge at that time.

An absence of redundancy in the structure - probably an old design.

That footage is truly shocking

Baltimore are sayIng ‘partial’ damage. If that’s partial then I’d hate to see what is more than that.
And Sky News are saying ‘some damage’

BBC news has a vid of it falling down, imagine that during the day with busy vehicles.

There's really no such thing as redundancy for structures like that, it will be the same result if a ship crashes into the right part of the Forth rail bridge.

The possible weak point / unluckiness in this case is that the deck level on these massive recent cargo ships protuded out far enough to catch the steel upright pillars (rather than the hull hitting the concrete abutment first).

(Example of Forth bridge with small cargo ship to give an idea)

I’m not sure 50/50 is a possibility…..

Very strange. There are big concrete barriers before the main bridge legs but it looks like they came at a slight angle and missed those.
The bridge is a bit longer than what you see in the video too, which is why they call it a "partial" collapse.

A ship of that size and fully loaded as it departs would slice through that bridge like butter - as we saw.