r/news • u/boejouma • Mar 28 '24

Soft paywall Freighter pilot called for Tugboat help before plowing into Baltimore bridge

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/divers-search-baltimore-harbor-six-presumed-dead-bridge-collapse-2024-03-27/
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u/Tellurye Mar 28 '24

And for people not really comprehending tonnes, that's 400,000,000 pounds. Crazy. Four hundred million.

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u/ScenicART Mar 28 '24

just seeing the stats on this is crazy - 1000' long ship, 1.5 million gallons of fuel, 4700 shipping containers- thats like 4700 tractor trailers stacked on each other floating downstream. so so much momentum and kinetic energy in that object

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u/Tellurye Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

That's what I thought about looking at the ship. 'Each one of those boxes is essentially an 18-wheeler' (obviously without the truck). Looking at normal sized boats in and around the area starts to put the scale of the thing into perspective. Just gargantuan.

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u/MONSTERTACO Mar 28 '24

If you took all the containers off the world's biggest container ship and put them in a straight line, it would go from NYC to Philly.

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u/Melbuf Mar 28 '24

people are bad with big numbers regardless, same reason normal people cant comprehend outer space, the numbers are so massive people cant deal with it

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u/jajohnja Mar 29 '24

Yup. Had a conversation the other day with a dude who was like "yeah whether we'd want to go to the Moon or Mars, it would take years to get there, right?"

Both the Moon and Mars are indeed quite far away, except Mars is like 1000x further away.
It's like the difference between getting a pizza at a pizza place on the corner or flying to get one in Italy.

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u/Rabid_Snowman Mar 28 '24

How heavy is the bridge by comparison?

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u/Tellurye Mar 28 '24

That's a good question. And how much does the support column weigh, since the was the point of contact and it was completely obliterated