Well, I just a saw clip of Maria Bartiromo blame open borders for this. So maybe it was the Messicans.
Just wait until the gun lobby starts spinning it... "if the bridge crew had guns, the engine wouldn't have failed..." So many causes will latch onto and spin this.
Okay, I'll admit that this is just speculation on my part, but I think we can expect to see a lot more cyber attacks and infrastructure sabotage disguised as "accidents" in the coming months/ years. The ship is Singaporean. China hacks it to crash into the bridge. No one blames Singapore, because why would they do that? Meanwhile, China laughs because they fucked up a major US port. China is desperate reduce US influence around the world. Okay, I'll take off my tin-foil hat now.
This happened also to the (former) Skyway bridge in Tampa in 1980. It sent a greyhound bus into the bay, 35 people died. Yikes:
Been over the Skyway bridge more times than I can count and always remember looking at the damaged portion. Took quite a few years but it was finally replaced with a rollercoaster of a bridge. We went on a cruise out of Tampa/St Pete a few years back and the cruise ship *barely* fit under it.
I don’t think your tin foil hat is necessart. I have been thinking about this too, and fucking with public infrastructure is a really easy form of asymmetrical warfare. The day after Sweden got admitted to NATO there were 4 separate incidents on the stockholm rail lines within 30 min that shut down all commuter traffic for hours. Causes were an unexplained power failure, 2 incidents of unknown people being in restricted areas on the tracks without permission and arson at a station. When I first heard about it I joked that it sounded like enemy action seeing how hard it would be for a small group of people to create chaos.
Narrow-but-busy channel, giant scary bridge, and the craziest fact about that water is it’s as deep as a backyard pool. What its maximum, twelve feet? Tampa bay is a massive puddle.
The ship lost power, and thus steering. Why and how it lost power are the subject of investigations. FBI is on scene, and they usually start these kinds of things because they have the right kind of equipment/staff (like very experienced dive teams) to respond first and collect/preserve evidence. The likelihood of some kind of state actor behind this, or even Isis or the like is extremely small at this point. The idea that a random bridge in Baltimore would be a viable target for violence at 130 am is...far fetched right now. If a terrorist could assume control over this ship, why not redirect to DC? Why not aim it at naval vessels? The fucking pentagon is 30 miles south. The company that insured the vessel will be on the hook for the tremendous expense, and Biden has already said the feds would help rebuild. The vessels coms are the main thing, and the more information about that will determine the likelihood of a malicious attack. Right now, sanity says this is just a standard failure, not some sort of half assed attack.
Pretty funny, I didn't know how shallow it was so I googled "Tampa Bay depth" and 90% of the returns were the rosters of the Bucs and the Rays. Go Sports!!!
Don’t worry everyone, my conspiracy-minded acquaintance said it was a deliberate attack by “them” in order to divide us by the Mason Dixon line. his knowledge of Maryland geography is astounding.
I tend to call that "lack of maintenance", not sabotage. Well, sabotage by your elected officials for not spending money on infrastructure upkeep. But I'm sure they'll spin it however suits them.
Not really. It wiped out main support pier for the largest span of the bridge. It failed pretty much like you'd expect in that scenario.
I'm more speaking to the general decline and lack of maintenance to general infrastructure that will start to fail more and more, not is particular case.
It's really not hard to think of the movie Brazil. Blame crumbling infrastructure on "terrorism" and call it a day.
Anytime you want depth information, just Google the name of the body of water + nautical chart. Most times the first return is a link to the pdf of the official chart. Everything that is light blue is less than 20' deep.
and the seas get fucking HUGE in there!! Last time I went under Skyway it was in an 82 ft yacht, and it was a less than pleasant experience. That was the largest one though. Been in TB in everything from little center console fishing boats to RHIB to monohulls. Seems like it's either glass or hell, no in between.
This is how the world works now. Not that what you said is true, but that nothing will ever happen that won’t immediately be seen through this type of lens of “everything is a staged and planned event, some secret plot by someone to affect something.”