The collapse of the huge Baltimore bridge in Maryland, America, and some tips!
Mohammad Reza Eslami
The video below the collapse of the Baltimore bridge is on April 7 and is from a few hours ago.
@karshenas27
Around 1:30 a.m. local time, the main bridge of Baltimore in the state of Maryland, USA, completely collapsed due to the collision of a huge cargo ship with one of its piers.
A few things to note about this incident:
1- This mode of deterioration of the Baltimore bridge is an objective and complete example of what is taught to students in university theory classes under the title of “progressive deterioration”. The term progressive breakdown of the translation
Progressive Collapse
and in simple terms it can be interpreted as follows:
When a structural member/element (among hundreds or thousands of members) is damaged, and the flow of power transmission is interrupted in that “one member”, “but all the members” are affected.
Practically, other members will not be able to transfer the force of that removed member, and therefore “damage” in the structure continues and becomes progressive.
That is, because the other members do not have the ability to bear/transmit that additional force, therefore the damage does not stop in one area, it becomes progressive, and finally the structure collapses.
2- The above tutorial videos explain the concept of progressive failure. But if you are looking for a scientific report about this type of bridge failure, you can see the report by Dr. Abolhasan Astana at Berkeley University about the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007 (link).
3- With the destruction of this new bridge in Baltimore, the complex discussion of “structure and insurance” is raised again. How many dollars should the insurance company pay for this mistake of the ship’s captain? Should the bridge insurance company only pay for the bridge reconstruction? Or is the cost of traffic problems caused by the disconnection of Baltimore’s communication network and heavy traffic also foreseen in his contract? If so, should he also pay the expenses of other economic enterprises whose business has suffered for months due to the destruction of the bridge (Business Interruption)? If he should not give, then who will compensate the losses of the businesses that will suffer from tomorrow? How will the relationship between the bridge insurance company and the shipping insurance company be? … and dozens of other questions.
It is a very complicated discussion in insurance models.
And basically, how many dollars did the insurance company receive for the insurance of this bridge, that now it has to bear such huge losses (billions of dollars)?! And every year, what percentage of the tolls for cars passing over this bridge is allocated to insurance?
This is where the concept/value of the work of PhD students working in the field of risk analysis and insurance models of structures becomes clear.
4- But a side discussion about structure in the new world:
At 1:30 in the middle of the night, a structure collapses on the east coast of America, but five or six hours later, it is seen thousands of times in Iran. The new world has a component called media, and even structures are included in this new concept. In 2007, when a major bridge collapsed in Minneapolis (and even when Prof. Astana’s report was published in Berkeley), none of my fellow engineers had heard of it, and the general public of non-engineers didn’t pay attention/react to it either. But within the last few hours, I received at least ten messages from Iran about the destruction of the Baltimore bridge on my cell phone. Yes! The media was there in 2007, but this media today is completely different from the traditional concept of the media that has been present in the world for the past fifty years!
Not just the structure, today “everything” is affected by the “new concept of media”: the scope of public consciousness.
And the government that still seeks to limit this fact!
This post is written by BORNA12345