3 ms·

Yes, but if you think of a ship once underway when the engine fails as an unguided ballistic missile with a mass that is absolutely mind boggling (the Dali mass

Yes, but if you think of a ship once underway when the engine fails as an unguided ballistic missile with a mass that is absolutely mind boggling (the Dali masses 100,000 tonnes) there isn't much that you could build that would stop it. The best suggestion I've seen is to let the ship run aground but that ignores the situation around the area where the accident happened. This ship wasn't towed by a tug, it was underway under its own power and in order for the ship to have any control authority at all it needs water flowing over the rudder. Without that forward speed you're next to helpless and these things don't exactly turn on a dime. So even if there had been a place where it could have run aground it would never have been able to reach it because it was still in the water directly in front of the passage way under the bridge. 100,000 tonnes doing 7 Kph is a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. The exact moment the systems aboard the Dali failed could not have come at a worse time, it had - as far as I'm aware of the whole saga - just made a slight course correction to better line up with the bridge and the helm had not yet been brought back to neutral. After that it was just Newton taking over, without control I don't think there is much that would have stopped it. This is a good plot of the trajectory of the vessel from the moment it went under way until the moment it impacted the bridge: https://www.pilotonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/5HVqi-pathway-of-the-cargo-ship-dali-copy-.png?w=1200&resize=1200,900 https://www.pilotonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/5HVqi... You can clearly see the kink in the trajectory a few hundred meters before it hit the bridge.

amelius 1y ago
Perhaps, but you can also build redundancy into the bridge.
- ninju 1y ago
  Too build "a redundancy into the bridge" to survive such a overwhelming force would be a very expensive endeavor. Better to spend the effort in fleet education
- jacquesm 1y ago
  You can, if you're prepared to pay for it. You could halt shipping while people are working on the bridge. You could make tunnels instead of bridges. The question is simple: who will pay for it? Apparently we are ok with this kind of risk, if we weren't we would not be doing this at all. There is a similar thing going on in my country with respect to railway crossings. Every year people die on railway crossings. But it took for a carriage full of toddlers to be hit by a train before the sentiment switched from 'well, they had it coming' to 'hm, maybe we should do something about this'. People don't like to pay for risks they see as small or that they perceive as that they're never going to affect them. This never was about technology, it always was about financing. Financing for proper regulatory tech oversight (which is vastly understaffed) on the merchant marine fleet, funding for better infrastructure, funding for (mandatory) tug assistance for vessels of this size near sensitive structures, funding for better educated and more capable crew and so on. The loose wire is just a consequence of a whole raft of failures that have nothing to do with a label shroud preventing a wire from making proper contact. The 'root cause' here isn't really the true root cause, it is just the point at which technology begins and administration ends.

amelius 1y ago

Perhaps, but you can also build redundancy into the bridge.

ninju 1y ago
Too build "a redundancy into the bridge" to survive such a overwhelming force would be a very expensive endeavor. Better to spend the effort in fleet education
jacquesm 1y ago
You can, if you're prepared to pay for it. You could halt shipping while people are working on the bridge. You could make tunnels instead of bridges. The question is simple: who will pay for it? Apparently we are ok with this kind of risk, if we weren't we would not be doing this at all. There is a similar thing going on in my country with respect to railway crossings. Every year people die on railway crossings. But it took for a carriage full of toddlers to be hit by a train before the sentiment switched from 'well, they had it coming' to 'hm, maybe we should do something about this'. People don't like to pay for risks they see as small or that they perceive as that they're never going to affect them. This never was about technology, it always was about financing. Financing for proper regulatory tech oversight (which is vastly understaffed) on the merchant marine fleet, funding for better infrastructure, funding for (mandatory) tug assistance for vessels of this size near sensitive structures, funding for better educated and more capable crew and so on. The loose wire is just a consequence of a whole raft of failures that have nothing to do with a label shroud preventing a wire from making proper contact. The 'root cause' here isn't really the true root cause, it is just the point at which technology begins and administration ends.