Great Start
This week was the start of the Spring Break season on the Gulf Coast, when local tourist businesses start making some money, and local hiring edges up in the service industry.
Needless to say, what no one needed was a crane being pushed on a barge to slam into the bridge to the barrier island.
The water main to the island was busted, and there will have to be a complete inspection to see if the bridge can be repaired, or needs to be replaced, which would be a severe economic loss to the area. The bridge was constructed as two parallel structures, and only one was hit, but it was already over-capacity for a four-lane bridge, so limiting it to two lanes will be a traffic nightmare.
The island can be accessed via a second bridge at its eastern end, but almost all of the houses, hotels, and condos are built near the damaged bridge. Water taxis are going to be needed, and we don’t have any.
The crew of the ship pushing the barges is going to be having an uncomfortable discussion with the Coast Guard as to why the boom of the crane wasn’t lowered for transport.
2 comments
Good grief. I can understand how a barge operator could misjudge the height of either the barge in the water, or the crane or the available height under the bridge, by inches. That is clearly not what happened here: they missed by a lot more than inches. What a needless mess!
The slideshow was helpful; a single still pic didn’t convey the degree of damage.
According to witnesses, the crane went over the top of the guard rail and lifted the front of the barge better than 6 feet out of the water. They were lucky, because in addition to the water main, there were conduits carrying power to the island, and breaking them would have definitely produced some nasty results.
The questions to the tugboat captain are going to get pointed, and the DOT has already said that the cost of repairs isn’t coming out of their budget.
The current high tide is only a one foot rise, and it didn’t occur for four hours after the accident. It is part of the Intercoastal Waterway, so there are detailed charts showing all of the bridges and their minimum heights. Fortunately there were no pedestrians on the bridge at the time, because what’s missing is the pedestrian walkway.