Bridges closed after 26 barges break loose in Ohio
(twitter.com)
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I get the skepticism, but Pittsburgh received an extreme amount of rain and flooding the day before. A rapidly rising river creates more stress than the ties binding the barges can handle. There's a good chance that this really happened as reported rather than sabotage or DIE incompetency.
How common is it for barges to come loose during flooding? How common is it for multiple barges to come loose during flooding? I've never heard of this happening, and flooding isn't an uncommon occurrence. It's always happening somewhere.
It happens occasionally in Pittsburgh. The Liberty Bridge (one of the major bridges in the area) got hit by barges in 2012 and 2019, and nobody lost their shit over it back then. The flooding is the worst it has been in years--comparable to Hurricane Ivan in 2004--so this isn't a "routine" flood, either.
You've never heard of barge shenanigans because it's a non-event unless you have an autistic hyperfixation on shipping. You can see the barges much more clearly in the replies. They're basically the riverine equivalent of trailers. It'll be a bitch for a day or two, and somebody's gonna get a tasty government paycheck wildly overestimating repair costs, but an attack on infrastructure this is not. You'd get better results downing a few trees along the freeway.
Lemme put it like this...
According to USCG data, between 1992 and 2001, there were 2,692 REPORTED commercial collisions with bridges or USACE managed locks and dams on navigable rivers.
That's an average of one collision every non-winter day of the year.
The AASHTO impact protection standards for bridge piers are deliberately designed to take a standard 35x195 barge drifting in the current of a 100 year flood.
Knowing about government regulation bullshit, that could include love taps which result in no damage, so the number itself could be wildly conflated.
I tell you all this shit happens all the time, you refuse to believe me.
I go and dig up the hard data from the coast guard about how often it happens, and you refuse to believe that too.
I get that you're paranoid and looking for any reason to find a plot amid chaos, BUT AT LEAST BE FUCKING CONSISTENT ABOUT YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE NUMBERS.
On the scale between aircraft crashes and car crashes, believe it or not, river barge incidents fall a LOT closer to the CAR end of the spectrum. And it's usually no big deal because bridges are usually built for it. If it's such a big fucking deal to you, pick a side of the Mississippi and never cross it. But stop making this community look like a bunch of paranoid fucking idiots with the attention span of a twitch streamer.