Bridges closed after 26 barges break loose in Ohio
(twitter.com)
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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.
You got unusually, weirdly vitriolic in the reply.
I'm not "paranoid" just based on a whim and out of the blue. It's based on case after case after case, of conspiracies being perpetrated upon us for well over 100 years, with the people in power lying to us about literally everything, often telling us to not believe our own eyes, subjecting us and our children to mountains of propaganda since we were born.
I view things from this mindset because it's the most consistent and correct interpretation. The people in power are liars. View them, what they believe, say, and do from that lens, and you'll almost never err. Do accidents happen? Yes. Are there lots of stupid people around? Yes. But keep in mind the people in power love to cloak their maliciousness in an air of incompetence, to shield themselves from criticism and reprisal. Lots of people still assume that what we're experiencing is due solely to incompetence and greed, but those explanations don't suffice. The only motive that makes sense is malice.