tal , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

nbcnews.com/…/-whole-bridge-just-fell-police-audi…

“I need one of you guys on the south side, one of you guys on the north side, hold all traffic on the Key Bridge — there is a ship approaching that has lost its steering. So until you get that under control, we got to stop all traffic,” one officer says on the dispatch.

The same officer then asks: “Is there a crew working on the bridge right now?”

He continues: “I’m not sure where, there’s a crew up there you might want to notify, whoever the foreman is, see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily.”

Another officer replies to say that once another police unit arrives, “I’ll go grab the workers on the Key Bridge.”

Moments later another officer says over the radio: “The whole bridge just fell down! Start, start … everybody. The whole thing just collapsed.”

The power loss on the ship happened about two minutes before the collision. The pilots managed to assess the situation, send a mayday, request that the bridge be closed, police dispatch contacted the police, the police closed the bridge, and traffic managed to clear it.

The police didn’t have time to go out and grab the crew. Frankly, if the cop who announced that he was going for them as soon as the next cop arrived had just gone, he probably wouldn’t have even made it far enough to go down with them.

I think that the police and the pilots did a pretty impressive job with the extremely limited time they had.