Why did the Baltimore bridge collapse so quickly? Engineering experts explain tragic structural failure

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. They can also be in the form of artificial islands; these are for very large ships and mean the ship will never reach the bridge pier itself.” The Francis Scott Key Bridge is relatively modern, so experts would expect that it was built with the assumption that its supporting piers might experience a collision. “Despite meeting regulatory design and safety standards of the 1970s, the Baltimore Key Bridge may not have been equipped to handle the scale of ship movements seen today.” But, Professor Mottram noted, it is not only the technologies in the bridge that should help avoid such a disastrous collision. open image in gallery ““The collision of a vessel as large as the Dali container ship will have far exceeded the design loads for the slender concrete piers that support the truss structure, and once the pier is damaged you can see from the videos that the entire truss structure collapses very rapidly,” said Andrew Barr, a research fellow in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering at the University of Sheffield. Because this is one continuous truss, the loads are redistributed - the truss pivots around the surviving pier support like a seesaw, temporarily lifting the northern span into the air before the high tension forces cause this to fail too, and the whole truss collapses into the water.” Dr Barr noted tha tthe video itself will be “incredibly useful to the teams” assessing the collapse, since they would otherwise have to rely on the remains of the structure and models.