re: Baltimore Bridge May Take 15 Years and $2 Billion to Rebuild

Make it 4 Billion to unracist it.

15 years and 6 Billion dollars is my guess.

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and $2 Billion to Rebuild

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I bet the final cost is double that.

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If it really goes 15 years, I’m gonna say triple, maybe even 4x that.

The longer this stuff drags out, the more “cost overruns” there will be, i.e., opportunities to steal.

Somebody could make a fortune if they started a ferry business.

Apparently hazmat and explosive chemicals cannot be moved through a tunnel and they moved a fair amount of those things over that bridge. So a tunnel probably isn't the solution here.

The single point of failure on that bridge was the real tragedy. Makes you wonder how many other bridges are built similarly that have large vessels navigating around it. There isn't a cost effective measure that would stop a vessel weighing 95,000 tons (that's the dry weight) loaded with another 100,000 tons of weight on it while its moving 9 knots. As for this particular bridge, they need to build it to where if this happens again, only one section is impacted and not the whole bridge. As for other bridges with similar traffic, I'm guessing they'll have mandatory tug boats at least in escort while navigating around those bridges. Either way, shipping freight by ship is going up.

And yeah, $2B is the government price for a $500M bridge.

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Baltimore Bridge May Take 15 Years and $2 Billion to Rebuild

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We used to be a serious country.

Some southern state should expand their port which would take just a few years and make this bridge rebuild pointless.

The north spent about 100 years trying to systematically destroy the south economically. Payback is a bitch.

C.W. Matthews out of Atlanta would build it back in eight weeks. Take a peek at how quickly they rebuilt the I-85 bridge in Atlanta when it was destroyed by a fire five years ago.

I-85 Bridge Collapse Atlanta GA

The quote in question from the Baltimore Sun and was one engineer's opinion:

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“We intend to receive some additional federal dollars very quickly to start that process and then we will come up with a design for the replacement of that bridge as quickly as possible to get the port back up and the community back up and running,” Wiedefeld said.

But even with promised federal money, there are many factors that need to be considered before construction of any bridge can begin, said Benjamin W. Schafer, a structural engineer who specializes in steel structures and is an engineering professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He named securing funding, deciding on a visual design, selecting materials and working out engineering queries as steps in the process.

In the case of the Key Bridge collapse, clearing the river of debris will also be an obstacle. All said and done, Schafer estimated a rebuild could take as long as a decade or more.

“The bridge originally, it seems like it was about five years from breaking ground to opening up. In 1980, when the Tampa [Bay] Sunshine Skyway bridge had a strike and was destroyed, and then rebuilt with a new cable-stayed bridge, that was seven years. I would consider those lower bounds,” he said. “I think we’re looking at seven-plus, I would guess 10 to 15 years before — I know that sounds crazy — but before we look back over and we see a bridge jumping over the harbor.”

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I think this gets expedited since unlike the Sunshine Skyway, there is no other Key Bridge span to take on the traffic.

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Yes, because a 200-foot section of I-85 is the same thing as a massive 1.6-mile long truss bridge.

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That's why it'll take 'em eight weeks instead of the six it took to repair the bridge over I-85.