re: Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed - container ship wrecked into it

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At least it was at 3am and not 3pm.

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For sure. At 3AM there isn't a lot of traffic on the FSK, it is the eastern perimeter and there isn't a ton of stuff out there and usually only has heavy traffic at drive times. The through traffic on 95 will just stay on 95 because it is shorter/quicker when the traffic is light. Other than a little local traffic at night the only other thing is trucks with Hazmat since it is prohibited in the tunnels on 95 and 895. An LA analog would be 210 in Lake Chuck where unless the traffic is backed up on 10 it is mainly local traffic and people afraid of the Calcasieu River Bridge.


Someone mentioned they were surprised all the spans went down. The FSK is a through truss bride with a continuous span. Continuous span bridges have all the spans connected. The bottom chords (where the road deck is) are all in axial tension so if you take out a piling even if all the truss joints fail it will still pull the entire continuous span down. This took out everything to the points on each side where the continuous span met the simple (single) span sections of the concrete bridge spans. Bridges are remarkably strong in some ways and surprisingly delicate in others.


I haven't seen an update but I hope at least some of the workers were saved.

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At least it was at 3am and not 3pm

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or 6 AM. Imagine if it was bumper to bumper traffic. Terrible enough as is