The city is going to be fucked traffic wise for a while. The bridge was part of the beltway here and connected two counties.
So many people from the one side commute to either work on the docks or one of the many distribution centers located on the Baltimore County side of the bridge. The only alternates they have is either the Harbor Tunnel on 895 which is small and always congested before this, the Mchenry tunnel which is a little further out, or to have to drive all the way around the beltway to get to work.
Some of my friends who drive Uber and Lyft would just pick people up from the dock or distribution centers and take them over the bridge, and then pick up people going to work.
Rush hour here was bad enough before it’s going to be horrific in the future.
They can’t open the port back up for shipping until they get all of the debris from the bridge out of the channel, which who knows how long that will take. Companies have diverted their ships to Norfolk and other ports. The cruise lines as well. This will be a hit for the dock workers for sure once the ships that are still there have been unloaded because after that nothing comes in.
As for the search they stopped last night and are supposed to resume in the morning. A friend of mine is an EMT with the fire department and was out on one of the boats all day today. He said they could detect vehicles under water but no bodies turned up, possibly because of the time this occurred and the tide at the time.
They’re just damn lucky they shut it down to traffic right when that ship sent out a distress signal, even at that time in the morning there’s still trucks leaving and coming into the port over the bridge, it could have been a lot worse casualty wise. Those poor workers who were on there were just eating lunch in their work trucks when it went down. I’m sure you’ve seen the clips it went down fast like a stack of cards.
It’s not that it wasn’t safe it was just built in a time before the cargo ships had gotten to the size they are today. That’s why ships have to stop at the Bay Bridge and have a harbor pilot board to bring them under that and down the channel and under the now collapsed bridge to port and vice versa when leaving the port.
Hopefully they can find the workers so their families can have some sense of closure, and they can get it cleaned up quickly so the port can reopen.
I can’t count how many times I’ve driven over that thing in my life, lately to take my father to doctors appointments on the other side of town. It’s a damn tragedy for everyone, which as awful as it is could have been a lot worse.
That’s my 2 cents.
Topic: News of the World (Read 776 times)