Engineer reacts to Baltimore bridge collapse

Ken Davis, is a structural

engineer

and owner of KH Davis Engineering Consultants in Toronto. Ken, uh, Tony Grace was reporting that this freighter hit the

bridge

early this morning, but we heard from officials that this

bridge

was up to code that there were no structural issues with it, so how does a bridge nearly 3 kilometers long and then like a bunch of dominoes? Mhm, well, it's shocking to see the images of what happened. I was able to apologize, I watched a YouTube video that showed a kind of time lapse of the

collapse

and of course it seems that the ship was wandering, went off course and I guess it just crashed into the bridge pier, which of course It provides support for the entire structure, if you look closely at the photographs of the bridge before the accident you can see that the support that failed consisted of a very heavy concrete beam supported by what might initially appear to be two pillars but in reality there are four and I'm thinking that if there was an impact on one of those four legs that would have created an instability and caused that entire span to

collapse

, and the other reason why it could have brought down the entire bridge is that this is not just a simple bridge that held those points , is what is called through Trust Bridge is very large and the bridge itself depends on the support of not only the individual supports but even the adjacent spans, so it is a continuous structure, so if one part collapses , the rest can fall. also and I'm just going to ask the crew if we can upstairs maybe put those live photos if we have them of the structure now in the water and I'm wondering as we look at that, thank you um given the the large debris deposited and the number of levels of investigations, including the NTSB, the FBI, is it going to be difficult for Ken to come to an early conclusion about what exactly happened?

How difficult will it be to gather the evidence? I don't think it's going to be difficult at all, um, I suspect and I'm just speculating, of course, I have no knowledge, but I suspect that what happened is that there was some kind of failure in some of the ship's systems, um, just I happen to have some. knowledge of these ships and of course there are the main engines that propel it forward, there are also thrusters that allow the ship to move from side to side and I'm wondering especially in light of the fact that it looks like there was a May Day or an advance warning, my guess is that there was some kind of failure in one of the systems on board the ship that caused it to veer off course and collide with the bridge pier and I think the investigation is probably underway.

To show that this was not due to a faulty bridge, but rather a faulty ship, could you give us some insight into why the ship's lights may have been flashing just before the ship veered off shore? There have been reports of lights. blinking just moments before the collision, well no, who knows, um, uh, I know, I couldn't really say speak to it, but was it a human blinking them? Would it be some type of mechanical or technical failure? Well, I guess it's possible that someone was turning on lights to try to warn people, but I think that would be pretty ineffective, but the fact that there was some kind of distress, a distress call made, obviously, that's one aspect. key to what's going on here, so I suspect that, you know, the people operating the ship somehow knew there was a problem and tried to warn the authorities to get people off the bridge and stop traffic on floor.

Ken. I'm going to ask one last question with you and that um is approximately the age of this bridge, we understand it was built in 1977 um again, although we heard that there were no structural problems, according to the governor this morning, would a bridge be built today with a code different from the one you have? It was in 1977, well the current code would surely be different than in 1977. One aspect of this that occurred to me was that, in 1977, container ships were not as large as they are today and I googled just out of my curiosity this Tomorrow, it would seem that in the 1970s these container ships were much smaller than they are today.

I think today they are probably more than double the size they were in 1970, when this ship, this bridge was built and, of course, when we designed structures like this. Engineers, you know, you anticipate, you know what happens if something happens, for example, the domed stadium in Toronto. I think you know there's a lot of redundancy built into that roof in case a plane crashed. In it we don't want the entire roof to collapse, so it has to maintain a certain structure, so in the case of a bridge like this, you would hopefully want to design the supports so that they can support a certain amount. of the impact um now, of course, the size of the impact that you may know was anticipated in 1970 may be very different than the size of the impact that actually occurred given the size of the ships we have today Ken, wait, I just want to ask you another question. question, but I want to point out to our viewers that we are looking at the river and we see the US Coast Guard helicopters flying overhead again as the search and rescue continues, so I lied to you, Ken, I have one more. question and we heard from the governor that this will be a long-term reconstruction of this bridge.

This is an important commuter bridge. 35,000 vehicles pass over this bridge every day to the port in your experience, how long would it last? It would be difficult to imagine anything less than a year. I would say probably more than two years. It's going to be a long build Ken, thank you very much for being with us. Part of our latest news from this morning. Ken Davis is a structural

engineer

and owner of KH Davis Engineering Consultants in Toronto.