Pelican Island Bridge in Texas Slammed by Barge, Causing Portion to Collapse
It turns out there have been 700 bridge strikes since 2022, with incidents increasing due to a shortage of workers and supply chain issues. Meanwhile, the Dali is freed from the Baltimore bridge that the ship struck.
In March, Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was hit by a cargo ship and collapsed. Six people were killed in the incident.
Now, a barge has hit another bridge, this time in Texas. A portion of the structure collapsed.
A barge has collided with the Pelican Island Causeway in Galveston, Texas, damaging the bridge, closing the roadway to all vehicular traffic and causing an oil spill.
The collision occurred at around 10 a.m. local time. Galveston officials said in a news release that there had been no reported injuries. Video footage obtained by CBS affiliate KHOU appears to show that part of the train trestle that runs along the bridge has collapsed.
The ship broke loose from its tow and drifted into the bridge, according to Richard Freed, the vice president of Martin Midstream Partners L.P.’s marine division. Freed said the ship was owned and operated by Martin Operating Partnership L.P., a subsidiary of Martin Midstream Partners, and said that personnel were at the scene.
BRIDGE CLOSURE | A barge struck the Pelican Island Causeway, shutting it down in both directions this morning. The bridge connects the north side of Galveston Island just west of the Port of Galveston with the south side of Pelican Island.
Full story: https://t.co/Y0rXOcGs1n pic.twitter.com/3FD6o3DGuh
— KHOU 11 News Houston (@KHOU) May 15, 2024
Last week, a barge struck the Fort Madison Bridge in Iowa and sank in the Mississippi River.
The incident occurred shortly after 1 p.m., prompting the closure of the near 100-year-old swing gate bridge, but it was reopened around 4:15 p.m., officials said. There were no injuries reported.
The U.S. Coast Guard tells Fox News Digital that there were 15 barges being moved by a tug boat when one of them became loose and hit and collided with the Fort Madison railroad bridge.
Video shows the barge stuck up against the double-decked bridge that connects Fort Madison with Niota, Illinois.
First responders were called to reports of a barge that struck a bridge and sank in Fort Madison, Iowa, the afternoon of May 9. https://t.co/DfWxaoU4T3 pic.twitter.com/f06X6cpUWu
— KHQA News (@KHQA) May 10, 2024
In April, the bridge across US Highway 59 was struck by another barge, shutting it down for hours.
A family out fishing in the Arkansas River in Oklahoma on Saturday afternoon caught the moment a massive barge crashed into a busy highway bridge, shutting it down for hours.
“I looked over at my dad and asked if it was going to hit the bridge and he was like, ‘I don’t think so,’” said Dayton Holland.
The crash happened in the Arkansas River near Sallisaw. The bridge is on U.S. Highway 59, a busy roadway on a Saturday afternoon.
“There were cars driving everywhere on the road above,” said Holland.
No injuries had been reported for this incident, and the road was closed for only a few hours.
Another bridge struck by a barge.
U.S. 59 Bridge in Sallisaw OklahomaDayton Holland and her family captured this video as they were fishing near the bridge. pic.twitter.com/Raw9eCqOzr
— HighImpactFlix (@HighImpactFlix) March 30, 2024
Now, this seems like an exceedingly troubling trend. Looking at the numbers, there have been 700 incidents of bridge strikes, and the number is rising because of a lack of skilled workers and supply chain issues.
USA TODAY’s data analysis revealed at least 2,600 bridge strikes occurring in U.S. waters since 2002, the earliest year for which such data is available. Three of these allisions were fatal, claiming 16 lives in all. The majority, however, were minor – a ship’s antenna or mast hitting a bridge, or a barge clipping a bridge’s protective fender.
But maritime problems – which international governing agencies call “casualty incidents” – have been steadily rising over the past decade, according to a report by Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a global maritime data and analytics company.
That’s especially true for those caused by machinery damage or failure.
The Lloyd’s report cites 700 such reported events in the third quarter of 2022 – the highest in 14 years – and attributed the increase to several factors. Among them: fewer ship inspections and internal audits, an unavailability of dry docks and technicians to perform maintenance and repairs, as well as supply chain delays in getting spare parts.
Meanwhile, Dali, the container ship that slammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in March, was just freed this week by precision explosive charges. The blast also dismantled the span of the Baltimore roadway that came down on it.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore announced at a news conference that a channel 50 feet deep and 700 feet wide was expected to be available to vessels at the end of the month and that it would be a key piece for “fully opening vessel traffic to the port.”
…The removal was less Las Vegas showtime and more Swiss clockwork as the charges emitted short flames and a minor puff of smoke as they released the bonds that helped the bridge carry 34,000 vehicles a day.
This is good news for Baltimore, a top 20 U.S. port for shipping and ranks at the top or near the top for car importation.
Breaking : The large part of the collapsed Key Bridge was detonated today at 5pm.
Officials used controlled explosives to remove parts of the Francis Scott Key Bridge sitting atop of the Dali cargo ship Monday. As the explosives went off, a big boom could be heard through… pic.twitter.com/XESm2bLl6P
— Kaitlin Newman (@KaitlinObscura) May 13, 2024
We have been very fortunate that fewer people have died and that our infrastructure and supply chains seem to be recovering quickly. Perhaps our next Secretary of Transportation can focus on actual transportation issues (such as the ones identified above) and not DEI priorities. That would be most helpful.
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Metaphorical for the state of this country.
Hmm. Bridge collisions. And there is evidence that food processing plants are being destroyed with disturbing frequency. Throw in rail accidents.
Well, there is the conspiracy theory route, and the inadequate training/inspection route. Or both.
The bottom line is that a lot of our infrastructure seems to be at risk.
Was this covered by Biden’s infrastructure bill, or was that just another Biden cash redistribution scheme?
It’s not so much at-risk infrastructure as it is crumbling infrastructure. This goes along with how run-down and dowdy everything looks compared to, say, 30 years ago.
The country is dying.
Yet we spend more than ever and it seems to go nowhere. Where is the money really going?
Ukraine. Like a greedy, ungrateful beggar, Zelensky needs more and more.
Ukraine is a tiny drop in an ocean. We have 3.5 trillion in deficit this year, sending some tanks to Ukraine is not the problem
To geroni: yes, but, 100 tanks here, 25% of the UN’s budget there, and soon you are talking real money.
I vote both ….
watch for attacks on water and power
supplies ….
Yup. How many illegal alien foreign criminals are being paid to foment all these “accidents.”
Very rare for a European bridge with piers on a navigable waterway (for commercial traffic) to not have any kind of fender around that pier. It’s surprising how many bridges in the US don’t have pier protection of any kind…like this one and the Baltimore bridge don’t (didn’t) seem to have.
Time for the adults to return and spank the unruly children of the current administration while silencing detractors that pitch tantrums.
One swift belt strike would dry those tears as the pacifier won’t fit a human microphone mouth.
It keeps on feeling like we’re living in Atlas Shrugged.
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. – Ayn Rand
“a lack of skilled workers and supply chain issues.”
Well, when the celebrated “symbolic analysts” allegedly “in charge” have such contempt for hands’ on insight, this is what you get. Presentation weenies, and spreadsheet jockeys forget that their symbolic models are *models.”
What was it Brandon said on the campaign trail. How hard can farming be? You dig a hole; drop in a seed; come back later when its grown.
(*) Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint ought to be required reading, except nobody who needs the hint will get it, the message not being arranged in bullet points.
The ship broke loose from its tow and drifted into the bridge
Well, at least they were trying to control that one.
Will be interesting to determine what happened in terms of the loss of control.
Failure of a Chinese-made two cable.
“The ship broke loose from its tow …” — requiring a lot of energy and steering the barge aggressively off course.
“and drifted into the bridge.” — implying there was no control of direction, no ability to steer the barge.
Odd.
Barges are usually just containers that float. They require tugboats to actually move them. Around here (Pittsburgh area), they fill them up with coal or ore and tie them together three or four abreast and three to five long and the tugboats push them up and down the rivers. So one tugboat is pushing anywhere from 9 – 20 barges at a time. Sometimes one breaks loose due to an error or a tow cable or rope breaks.
We recently had 12 or 15 barges break loose during a storm and float their way merrily down the Ohio River, bouncing off of bridges, going over dams, and grounding or sinking wherever they wanted.
good site if interested
https://gcaptain.com/reports-of-pollution-after-barge-hits-bridge-in-galveston-texas/
the forums also discuss the ntsb dali preliminary report released 5-14.
AOC is sending her dentist to help out with the reconstruction work.
All that infrastructure spending just goes into certain peoples pockets. I mean they allocated $7.5 billion to build EV charging stations 2 years ago and only 7 have been built.
and like the rest of communist run america
the collapses are adding up
“A China-linked cyber espionage group known as Mustang Panda has allegedly introduced malware to gain remote access to computer systems belonging to commercial shipping companies based in Norway, Greece, and the Netherlands,”
https://gcaptain.com/china-linked-hackers-targeted-commercial-shipping-companies-report/
I believe the portion of the bridge that collapsed was an unused retired train trestle. The adjacent vehicle bridge appears undamaged.
Hard to find good help these days.
Considering the lack of interest from commercial shipping in hiring Navy/Coast Guard Vets to form a US owned and operated merchant marine or to build commercial vessels in US shipyards built by US labor ….it isn’t surprising that Shipping Companies would skimp on maintenance/repairs and/or upgrades equipment on the vessels they operate with largely foreign crews.
I saw about a decade or so ago that Airlines had begun shifting major maintenance overhaul work to India; cheaper labor, educated work force, less regulatory BS. All things being equal it made financial sense and probably still does on a ‘this quarter profit’ framework. Longer term airlines seem to be having much more frequent issues not all of which can be laid at Boeing’s feet. I wonder if something similar holds for these foreign merchant vessels.
Is the US over regulated and sometimes overly litigious? Sure absolutely. On the other hand using those points as the excuse to abandon US shipyard production and use foreign crews v US crews seems like a rehash of the arguments listed to off shore US manufacturing since he 1990’s. Was the juice really worth the squeeze if we consider societal impacts and increased taxation and far larger budget deficits and Federal debt accumulation since then to pay to clean up the mess? IMO, not.
Is anybody scanning TikTok, to see if there is currently some kind of “Bridge Bash Challenge” currently active?
Hey– what’s “Cantilever Crush?”