Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 131: Sunshine Skyway Bridge Collapse

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

boat vs. bridge: whoever wins, we lose Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

There's, there's complicated free flight checks here, you know, like culture horses over there. So, for those, like, once again to take you behind baseball listeners, we are fucking stupid dumb idiot people. Yes. We are very bad at our jobs and yes, some of you, yeah, and some of us, some of us, Roz, have two cats who are as I can only describe as wily bastards. Yes.

Who interfere and seek, and seek to usurp him at every possible opportunity. Well, I did manage to stuff all their cat hair on my computer. They are very handsome boys. Yeah. Devon, in post, can you please insert the picture of Roz being smothered by his cats? There's several of those. It's a great picture. Yeah, I love those pictures.

Every time you post one on Instagram, I'm a happy boy. So, yeah, that's why we're recording from my laptop today, which is not set up to quickly cause podcasts to occur. So, I've been confused and disoriented. No, I will be building you a new PC. Listeners, please be aware that I am going to spend so much of your money. Yeah, because you're so guideline here. The sole guideline that Justin has given you is I want to be able to play city skylines

too. But we know how he plays city skylines one, which means he needs, he needs the kind of shit that they've got in the basement of the NSA. Like you're going to have to go to Fort Meade with a crowbar and try and like unplug some shit. Hey, hey, no, hey, whoa, don't shoot, don't, that's all calm down. What is that behind my back? Nothing, nothing.

I am backing, I am backing a rider truck up to the loading dock at Fort Meade and trying to wheel out the super computer. What I'm doing, public property, it's public property. It belongs to me, the public. Ross will still defy me and not install any of his new hard drive, which is why I'm getting him an M2 SSD. So he has to put it on the motherboard. So that way he can't run out of storage anymore.

I have carte blanche as far as I know to build him a computer that can play modern city skylines too. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Ross, here we are on vacation about to slide to our desk. Like we did that one time off that coast road. Yes. Yeah.

Welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides, which is itself an engineering disaster. You would not believe the shit we had to do today to get this going. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

I am Alice Kodorekali. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Hey, Liam. My name is Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. And for once, I'm not the person pinning your comments in the YouTube videos.

That was Ross this week. I was about to say a shout out to the guy who only respects me because I don't respect you. So what you see in front of you is a beautiful car. A beautiful car. Yeah. What you see here is a scene from a 70s disaster. It's with the land-based Poseidon adventure.

Yes. There's also a large bulk ship. What there is not is most of a bridge. Yeah, that calls sort of precipitously on the edge of some of the bridge. Sort of a rakeish angle, then again, you would only get in a movie. So I wonder what these bumper stickers are. I wish there was a higher resolution version of this. Yeah, I was trying to work that out too, but I couldn't.

Yeah, US out of everywhere. I don't know. I don't know either. Today, we're going to talk about the 1980 Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapse just outside St. Petersburg, Florida. We're going to Florida. We're going to Florida. We're going back to the Florida mines.

Did you keep my slide dunking on the lightning in here? Yes. Thank you. Before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news. You can see that I did this on the laptop because the font is wrong here, because I don't have that font on my laptop. I think it's something that Kyra did. I think it looks like trash.

It used to be ashamed and embarrassed. I am ashamed and embarrassed. Many people do this without the visual components. I will say that this is... Yeah, and to those people, I am going to keep uploading the bonuses. I'm going to correct the fact that I uploaded college twice. What if it's incomplete? It should be Protestantism.

I was very tired. So bad at our jobs. Very, very bad at broadcasting. Not as bad as this man, Elon Musk, because once again, Elon Musk has tried to send a thing to space, and once again, Elon Musk, who is, again, an Earthcock, who has never been to space. An Earthcock. I mean, even fucking Jeff Bezos has been to space.

Elon Musk never been to space. You know why? Because he's afraid of it. Because it's a pussy. This news happened a couple of weeks ago, and we didn't comment on it at the time for reasons I forget. We already put the slides together. Yeah, we'd already put the slides together, but the thing is, yeah, Elon Musk tried the

first launch of the fully assembled, quote, unquote, Starship. It got off the landing pad. It went up. It blew up over the Gulf of Mexico. You're embarrassing us in front of the aliens. This is how I feel whenever a Jewish person does cry, and I'm like, think of the Goyim. What will the Goyim think? Yeah, what will the grays at Area 51 think of this knowing that we, unlike a sort of

like Lagrange point surveillance station right now, some aliens are like pointing and laughing at us as a planet because of this fucking guy. Yeah, and this is like one of these things where, you know, I guess SpaceX was like, well, you know, all we needed was the data from it launching off the pad. You know, so this is a great mission success. Sort of bullshit. A lot of people were all into that. And even I, even I was kind of like, okay, yeah, you know, you blow up rockets, sometimes

whatever, a lot of black rockets in the early days blew up, you know, but here's the, here's the real thing. Here's the kicker that got me is here on the next slide, which is they completely destroyed the launch pad in the process. Right. They just sort of blasted all of this atomized concrete all over nature preserves and into a bunch of towns that were like six miles away, damaged their own natural gas tanks back here.

I'm not sure if this is supposed to look like this, but it sure looks like a like concrete was blasted off this leg. That may be what it's supposed to look like. I'm not sure. They took out an innocent minivan with big chunks of concrete hail. I, I mean, here's the thing. I generally think that a launch pad is supposed to be a reusable piece of equipment and not know so much in this case.

Elon tweeted something a long time ago. He's like aspiring to have no flame diverter in Bokeh, but this could turn out to be a mistake. This is why, why a flame diverter matters. Okay. So, okay. So it matters because that means the concrete doesn't get blasted away. The flame diverter will, you know, it has the flame.

Yeah. It diverts the flame around. That means you need to dig a big pit. Right. Okay. This is near, this is near an ocean, right? So the water table was high. So they're like, well, high water table means you can't dig.

I've heard this excuse over and over for lots of civil engineering projects, when in fact, there are many, many counter examples to it, like let's say Cape Canaveral in this case, which also happens to be near an ocean and has a flame diverter. So, you know, this is like, okay, Elon doesn't want to pay for a sump pump. You know, and yeah, as a result, he's being like investigated and may get fined by like one or other of the authorities over this flame diverter shit. Yeah, and they cannot make a mistake without tweeting about how he's doing it at the time. They've, they've grounded like the Starship project the FAA has because this is an unacceptable

level of damage. The exploding the rocket was fine, although I understand the self destruct took like 40 seconds to activate or some bullshit longer than it should have, which, you know, is very dangerous considering the rockets go fast. You know, one of the things that really is striking about this entire like launch complex here, you can see the Boca Chico launch complex here is how small it is. I think at the same scale, you know, the Cape Canaveral launch pads would be like just the launch pad itself would be like this size, like four or five times bigger.

This is the whole complex, including fuel tanks and outbuildings, rocket storage. Here's the tiny parking lot over here. You know, it's like very, very, very compact. And when you're you're trying to like launch the world's biggest super duper heavy rocket from there, you figure maybe you could use a bit more space. But now let's try budget rocket. Yeah. You know, there is there is definitely a budget.

This guy's I played tons of Kerbal. I got this. I don't know why I'm doing this voice. He is one of the world's richest people, although he's doing his best to, you know, divest himself of that because he is a comrade. Yes. Elon Musk is a comrade. Listen, I don't know of many billionaires who are doing wealth redistribution as aggressively

as Elon Musk is. This is true. Yeah. I mean, you know, that the thing here is this is that this is a goofy failure to have. You should not have this particular failure. Like if if your complex rocket goes wrong, I get that. But this this is fucking concrete. That's just easy.

All you had to do was put a sump pump in and like one of those. He fucked up at the like the technology of a trench, a trench, a trench and some water guns. Incredible work. I guess one of his theories was, OK, we need to be able to use these starship rockets on Mars where we're not going to have a launch pad, which OK, whatever. But there's also built for that when you need to build for that, dude. You know where people don't usually park their minivans is Mars. Yeah.

There's also no protected wildlife on Mars. I mean, you know, so it's kind of like that we know of. Yeah. What about the man and what about the man on Mars? The man is on the moon. No, isn't there a guy there? There's a guy on Mars. There's supposed to be a guy on Mars.

Yeah. It was it was it was a it was a feature of a like a terrible science fiction movie. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I've seen the Martian, Roz. How do you explain that? I've heard. They're going to take away from Matt Damon.

Yeah. Matt Damon's still up there being real racist. Well, at least then you'd have an excuse for not supporting the writer's guild strike. Oh, you fucking tell him, Roz. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think if you're launching this thing from Mars, you can worry a lot less about like debris and shit. You know, because again, there's there's not there's not much up there to hurt. But you know, this this fucking shit like, holy God, this is embarrassing.

I mean, I look forward to Elon facing absolutely no negative consequences for this and the stakes only getting higher until they're fucking around with like nuclear engines or whatever. And he just fucking shinobles a decent part of Florida. Oh, yeah. Well, I'd have to shoot him up into space first. I don't think they work great in the atmosphere. I mean, if ever we found the man to try. That's a good point.

Yeah. So yeah, SpaceX really fucked up. And it's pretty funny, but also, you know, pretty bad that they murdered a bunch of wildlife and poisoned two towns potentially. Yeah. It's also not great if that's your minivan. Yes. If that was your PT cruiser.

Oh, I assume that person got compensated. I don't like a PT cruiser. That's my fucking problem. Actually, I think it was a Ford Galaxy. But, you know, don't point me on that. Wow. We shot a rocket to the Ford Galaxy. Oh.

Now get ready for Ford, why does everyone have SS tattoos? Okay. You know, other news. Speaking of embarrassing failures that should never happen. Yeah. Speaking of embarrassing failures that should never happen, my mom watched this live. Oh, my God. We had the political version of one of these.

And I was like, I was like, I'll catch the coronation highlights later, you know, maybe someone will like slip on a banana peel or something. That'd be entertaining. I mean, I was kind of hoping. Windmill dunk on King Charles III. King Charles III draws the tech is thrown out of the game. King Joel and bead abolishes the kingdom. Reunites Ireland, heroically prevails as savior of the world.

My God, is that Corbin's music? I think they should have had like, like fights like a hockey game specifically should have broken down here. Like, I want to see, I want to see the king throwing off his crown like an ice hockey helmet in order to get in a fight with somebody. I think that would have been worthwhile. Instead, what we got was a boringly orchestrated thing where they lubed up an old man behind the screen so you couldn't even see him getting lubed up.

What they want. Yeah, exactly. Restore some sensuality to this progress. I'm not even joking, by the way, they're like the lubing, they're sort of like oiling up is an essential part of this. That is where someone would have slipped on something. They slip on the royal oil. The royal oil.

One thing that they did do, though, was arrest a bunch of protesters on really flimsy pretexts in case they disrupted the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they rushed through a new public order act that basically makes sort of all forms of protest illegal. And the test case for that was sort of Republicans. With a small. One thing that is interesting here is if you look at the crown, it's got enough jewelry in it that it goes all the way around looking expensive to looking cheap again.

It just looks like costume jewelry. Yeah, it's like a party, party king. Also, the weird sort of like purple robe that looks very cheap and like Hogwarts-y. Yeah. And yeah, no, so this is this is our king now, I'm told. And I really don't care for it in the slightest. I said this before, but I would tolerate sort of hold over queen out of like leftover affection, but kings.

Yeah, you got a king now. Thank you. Yeah, you got a bad end to this guy. You're a subject. I'm not going to bow down to this guy. I'm simply not going to. The one thing that was really, it was better. You better move to America then.

Yeah. Finally get that green card. One thing that was probably why the immigration to get you a green card. I have to lie to immigration. I married an American. There you go. Well, that that that takes all the fun out of it. It is.

I know. But like one thing that was very funny was they tried to get people to say the oath. There was going to be an oath. And they want to like stand up in front of your TV and say McDonald's or whatever. Try to get people to stand up in front of their television and say the word. Uh-huh. Hey, in post. Can we just do it?

Can we do a rotation of Cornwallis's render at Yorktown? I would also appreciate a shot of the original patent for saying McDonald's in front of your TV to end the McDonald's ad. But yeah, so so they were going to do that. And then they had to like do an embarrassing climb down when they realized no one was going to fucking do it. And they had to be like, why would you do that? It was very stupid.

Yeah. Inviting people to like say it if they want to and no one did. They force you to do it. They have to install like a 1984 telescreen sort of thing. Yeah. The situation. Yeah. The two minutes hate, but you just have to say McDonald's over and over.

Yeah. What was really funny was the amount of enthusiasm for this really tapered off outside London. Like Glasgow. I saw that. I saw that. It was amazing. In Wales, the home of the Devon, Denby Council, Denbighshire County Council allocated 70 pounds for festivities.

That was the whole budget, which is great. It's like you can get like a couple of beers. We had a very small pizza party. Yeah. We all went down to Chippie and that's it. There's your money folks. Yeah. To celebrate the coronation of King Charles III, we went to Chucky Cheese and we solemnly

said the oath with the rat in the ball pit. Yeah. Yeah. Just in the ball pit. There's like a loose orb in there and just like, what the fuck did this come from? Back in your hole. Hey. Yeah, so that's, we got a king now and I don't care for it.

I think we should probably have some kind of president or something instead. Oh yeah. It would also suck, but in a different way. Yeah. I can confirm. You have, you can have George W. Bush. Oh. I mean, you don't know how to use them.

Like, yeah. Exactly. That's a good point. We'll trade you. Yeah. We get Boris. Ross will do the Titles of Nobility Act to King Charles. I will leave that up to the listener to determine what that means.

He has to renounce his title of nobility or he can't be a U.S. citizen. That's easy enough. I'm. All right. Thank you. Thank you for taking away the mysticism of the joke douchebag. Yeah. No, I support the Titles of Nobility Act and I always want the thing.

I want people to understand what it is and why it's important. Anyway, in other news. Oh, big special boy. George Santos has been charged. He's been indicted. 14 counts. And why are these going to let him keep. Yeah.

Why a fraud and lie to Congress. Yeah. Don't do that. They're going to let him continue to serve while it works its way through the courts because Lord knows Kevin McCarthy can't afford any missing votes, especially if a DOJ won't let a bitch cook even one time. I think DOJ should let a bitch cook even one time. Like the charges, right?

What is the charge? Enjoying your own campaign funds to purchase some succulent designer clothes. Is that a crime? Should that be a crime? I don't think that should. Succulent Chinese meal. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the thing is, right, he dresses like shit.

Like a menswear guy could really go off on this guy. The weird sweater thing, the like poorly-fitting jackets, but apparently there's a lot of money in there. You know, maybe that's like a real cashmere knit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know, but I think let him cook, my opinion.

I think it's very funny that that I mean, Menendez served under indictment as well back in 2015, numerous Republicans have done it until Duncan Hunter did it until he was found guilty back in 2020. Duncan Hunter, the guy who like Griffith Steenacones and Vapes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I feel like, I feel like, you know, this may get us sent those back in the news

because he was very funny when he was in the news. But then for a while, it sort of died down. He does a lot of weird stuff again. Yeah. As opposed to just being like an out and out Nazi, which is not particularly fun or amusing, obviously. Yes, we know. You're just a weird pathological liar.

It's a reverent podcast. Just fucking live with it. But like, electing a weird pathological former drag queen serial grifter. Honestly, they were cooking with that one and I support them. They elected the monorail guy from The Simpsons. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. And I think in Congressperson is a grifter of some sort or another. Yeah. And like, they're all criminals. Some of the Democrats for that matter. Yeah. Yeah. Every Congressperson is absolutely a criminal and a grifter.

And I'm excited to debut a new piece of woodworking on the National Mall that might sort of like help remediate some of these things. But in the meantime, they could at least be entertaining. And this one is entertaining. Sorry, I'm sticking my socks off. Oh my God. That's the premium content, you know. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Oh, welcome to footsie hour. Liam Anderson, wick of feet. No, you don't want to see that. You've seen my feet, man. That's bad. I have and I don't want to see them. Yeah.

That's what I said. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I do think they should let a bitch cook as long as that bitch gets better than those. And I see this as someone who dresses like shit. I don't dress well. I think I dress reasonably well.

You dress better than we do. Not especially a hard, hard challenge. But yeah. Yeah. Also, you know, the trans femininity putting me on a slightly higher ground here. But yeah, I feel as if I haven't been grifting from the podcast to do it. So I've just been letting like outfits go squandered, you know. You got to start grifting from the podcast.

Yeah. I got to start grifting. I got to start commencing some wire fraud. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

So that I can get these fits, you know. I don't know how exactly like you could try and start embezzling. But well, you can embezzle for me. I wouldn't notice. I mean, it wouldn't notice. Can I just like have your chef and go like going forward? Like no, at some point, I do need that money. Jesus Christ.

You people. You fucking people. You've made him too powerful. I know, I know. Because like Liam and I, we need that money. We need that to pay rent. And then Justin will just not. I know.

I'm sitting on it right now. And God knows what I'm going to do with it. Ah, my fingers on the trigger. My fingers on the trigger of the buy gen one vapor button. Ross is that what you want? The business end of the podcast is still a mess, dear listener. Don't don't read too much into that, please. Please do not steal.

Please do not like somehow defraud us. Anyway, no, no. That's why I handle the money because at least I know where it goes. Yeah. Well, no, actually, I don't. Total fucking incompetence. Yeah. Well, thank you for your money.

We need this. That was the goddamn news. I think I got to turn my game down a little bit. I'm red lighting here. But this is the this is the slide where Liam can rant about Tampa. I fucking hate Tampa, man. I've been to Tampa before it fucking sucks. There's nothing to do there.

Yeah, yeah, tell me about the fucking lightning. Do we have this? Do we just have the crying? Oh, you took out the statement where they got swept by the jackets back in 19. It's yeah, I have nothing positive to say about them. I have nothing to say positively about most of Florida. Absolutely shit city, nothing to do there. People who live there are fucking lying to you.

They don't live in Tampa. They live somewhere else, somewhere deep in the shithole that is Florida. I will say, fuck the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Tampa Bay Bucs are going to make it all the way through January. You got to believe that. Yeah, yeah, I mean, they they want a Super Bowl with Brady. But yeah, I believe I just hate Tampa. I will say a dear friend's brother lives in Tampa and he's convinced trying to convince her to move.

And I'm just like never leave fucking Philly. I think that's where my hatred recently has stemmed from is I've invented this rivalry between Philadelphia and Tampa. And as as as a co-chair of the Philadelphia Burning Down Your City coming into the suburbs to loot your TV and do antifa to you. I just fucking hate this place, man. There's nothing fucking redeemable about it. My ex is my ex-girlfriend's good Jesus mother's boyfriend will say lives around Tampa and fucking hate that guy. He still has me 400 bucks. Listen, the thing is, right?

If you graph the number of TVs that are in Tampa versus should be in Philly. Yeah, we got to go down like them all to us. I just I mean, I'm looking at the Google Maps is Tampa right now and it's just fucking depressing. I feel bad picking on them. Honestly, it's just like what the fuck is the point of this place? Sink it. Sink it. Sink it.

You've heard of land back now. Get ready for ocean back ocean back. Yeah. Well, this is the worst part is Tampa isn't even going to get flooded that badly. Like South Florida is fucked. So like three feet under sea level already. Like Miami Beach is just fucked. Oh, yeah.

There's going to be no more Miami in 20. Yeah. But like, you know, absent like, yeah, there's going to be water coming up through the limestone stuff. There's going to be a shitload more like new lakes and stuff. Tampa is not going to sink, at least not for a long while, which sucks. It's going to be sort of the bastion of like Ron DeSantis is anti woke campaign. I see six to the Atlantic. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the hurricanes might get it, but like, I mean, there's just nothing to even fuck it. They have a restaurant depot. I mean, I guess that's nice. I mean, that's all I think you're supposed to be cool, but that's all I got. I don't know. I fucking hate this place.

Yeah. The Philly provincialism will never go away. Sorry about it. Yes, that's fine. Yeah. Oh, and fuck the bolts just while I'm here. The salary cap exists for a reason. You fucking cheaters.

Okay. But Tampa, Tampa is also, as I understand it, a port back when America had those, right? Yes. And actually, according to the Tampa Bay ports website, they handle 33 million tons of cargo a year and opened in 1924. Apparently, Ross should be going to Philly. Yeah. They diverted from us. It's big on, they do a lot of phosphate export there, which will be relevant shortly.

Because phosphates are a major industry in Florida. You may have heard a recent bill that's being proposed in Florida that would allow the byproducts of phosphates, notably phospho gypsum, to be used in asphalt. Now, that's a mildly radioactive substance. And there's a lot of asphalt, but it would at least finally give them something to do with the massive piles of this radioactive substance, which are all over Florida. Eat it. Eat it.

Eat it. So they have big... Struck it all outside Disney World and eat it. Gatsby-like, sort of like ash heat. Yeah, the valley of ashes, except there's no valleys in Florida because it's flat. It's all mountains of ashes. Miserable fucking place, dude. Maybe they could use that to infill some of the extremely porous limestone.

That'd be a great idea. Get sure up from the climate a bit. And you could build poor people's housing on top of the radioactive ash. That's a great idea. No, that implies that they would give poor people housing. We know better than that. Yeah, that's a good point. Anyway.

So, to talk about the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, I thought first we should start with what is a cantilever, right? Invented in Scotland, you're welcome. Yes. Actually, no, it was... I forget where it was invented, but this was not the first one. Invented in Scotland. Okay, we'll say it's invented in Scotland.

Oh yeah, just like you guys with the mallard, just like the mallard. Yeah, okay. There were previous cantilever bridges. Oh, that's shut up. It got shut up. It got shut up. It wasn't better anyway. The simplest terms, a cantilever is like there's a surface and there's a thing sticking out of it, right? This is a cantilever.

Hold on. Let me add some hatching so you know this is a solid surface. Anyway, you know, so that's... Thank you. That's a cantilever, right? You apply some load, right? It's resisted here. In this case, it's a fixed connection, so there's also a moment, right?

You know, but that is a really basic cantilever here, but in terms of the bridge, it means something a little more complicated, right? That's a bridge where there's some center span here, which is supported by two big cantilever arms here and here, right? Instead of being supported by like, you know, a bridge pier that goes into the water, right? So, in our example, we can see there's three guys. There's two guys with their feet on the ground. There's one guy whose feet is not on the ground, right?

Yeah, this is a magician. Ooh. Yes, an engineering magician. Ooh. So, their arms, these guys' arms are cantilevers, as well as the sticks they're holding, right? And the guy in the middle is the cantilever section. So, they are counterbalanced through the base of their chairs and through these rods with these large stacks of weight, which allows them to easily lift this man despite having

their arms fully extended on both ends. This is sort of the golden age of explaining engineering using guys. Using guys? Yeah. A lost art. Yeah, it's a lost art. Yeah, certainly. But using this method, these guys are able to move much more weight than they could have

on their own, right, especially considering it was, you know, the Victorian era and everyone was malnourished, unless the guy in the middle was really malnourished. It's very funny to imagine them having invented the diagram first and sort of like, we've invented a way to lift a man like a foot off the ground if only there are practical application for this. Yes. And this is, you cantilever bridge has some advantages, especially in terms of railways, this can allow you to have a very long center span here with no support pillars, but also

having a very rigid structure. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. And you can get a boat under it, which is what the fourth bridge is for, why it's like that. Yes. And this is much more rigid than a suspension bridge, which can do something similar, but

not very good for railways in general. Yeah. It also sucks because it's like flexible, which, you know, in general, that's something that's going to come up later is you got to know that at the end of the cantilever, you need ballast, you need some way to keep the thing level because your force here is down because you're holding up the guy, right? So you need a counteracting force up, you know, in order to keep the guy from in order to stop from dropping the guy, right?

That's why you need this, this, this big weight. You need something to counteract the force that is naturally going up from the guys here. Otherwise, if they didn't have these, they would both just lean in, right? And collapse and the guy would be on the ground and the demonstration would be worthless and everyone would say, haha, look at this dumb engineer with this demonstration. Yeah. Yeah, I believe that's actually how it would go verbatim. Yes.

Lots of different types of cantilevers out there. Here's one in Tibet. You can see it's sort of a wooden, cobbled arch. This is a very wood bridge, right? And it's just laden down with all these rocks to keep all that stuff in place. And they put a big wooden plank here, right? And then we have these large pack animals of some kind. I'm not sure what kind they are.

That's definitely a yak. You think it's a yak? I think it's a yak. That's probably a yak. It's a yak. Yeah. You know, a yak's milk is pink. Really?

I don't like that. I don't want to know that. I don't want to know that. It tastes very bussy. It's very, it's very fussy milk. That's pink. So it's like, it's like Wisconsin margarine. Hmm.

I have no idea what that means, but possibly. There was a law in Wisconsin that margarine had to be dyed. I forget it was pink or blue. Oh, to shame it. To shame it. Yes. So, you know, it was sort of early Candleever bridges. Your most famous is of course, as Alice said, the 4th down here scene while it was being

painted. It's always being painted. That's actually, that's true. It is literally always being painted. You finish at one end, you have to start again at the other, like. I thought that was an urban legend. Possibly. It is.

I don't know. I don't check these things. I'm not an engineer. I have you ever been there and you didn't see these big white sections? Sure. Then it wasn't being painted. Fuck. Okay.

Disregards. So another another famous one is the Quebec Bridge. We did an episode on that a while back. That's the one that fell down twice while it was under construction. Sometimes, Candleever's are not necessarily these big iron structures. You'd have something like the Confederation Bridge. This is it links Nova Scotia to Prince Edward Island. And this is a series.

It goes on for fuck it ever. Oh, yeah. This, you know, it has a bunch of concrete sections, right in between is a smaller concrete section, which sits on the two big ones and it continues on for this one continues on for like nine miles. Okay. For. And then there was this hotel of Alice.

Big. Yeah. Well, next time we go to Prince Edward Island, we'll complain about it. I'd never seen the Canadian sort of like regional official being genuinely hurt by the parents. I do not like the bridge aesthetically. Prince Edward Island, where they were considering putting a rail link over that bridge and Canadian national very quickly abandoned all the railroads on Prince Edward Island for fear they'd have

to keep operating them. They were. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very cowardly. I don't like it. But there's a particular type of big steel Candleever bridge that was very prevalent

during the construction of the interstate highway system, which you can see here in the as our example, the Commodore Berry Bridge, which I believe is the biggest one constructed in that era. I think of these. Great bridge. I think of these as like sort of like new deal and post new deal bridges. There's a ton of them in Louisiana, right? Like.

Oh, yeah. There's a whole bunch in Louisiana. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the sort of bridge we're going to talk about today. This is something sort of of that era, like 1950 through 1970 or so. This was the way you did the big bridge. Sometimes you do a suspension bridge if it's particularly long, but you know, the Candleever

was the way to go. So now we have to talk about St. Petersburg, Florida. Oh, it looks great, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. From here above. Yeah. So I think it's called a kind of stealing valor to call this in Petersburg.

It doesn't look like it has shit in the way of defensible thoughts. When the Finns come over the Bay, you're you're just host host. Yeah. And I believe the old story about why it's named that is that two guys had a coin toss and one of them would name it, depending on who got heads. And the one guy was like, yeah, I was at St. Petersburg once. That sounds good. Let's call it that.

Outstanding. Yeah. But St. Petersburg, Florida was not envisioned as like a tourist town, right? This is supposed to be like an inland port or a port on, not an inland port, a port on like this nice bay, right, Tampa Bay. One thing, one thing I will say is as when you guys are leading the sort of like Philly Antifa to take all the TVs in Tampa, I'm going to take a little detachment, a little flying column, and I'm going to rename St. Petersburg to Leningrad.

That'd be pretty fun for you, that'd be really funny. So you know, they thought this is going to be a port town, right? But you know, Tampa Bay is a great port, but most of the industry and most of the port facilities stayed in Tampa. It was, you know, it's a bigger place, right? So but what St. Petersburg turned out to be was a really great tourism town, right? So by the 20s, industry is booming, but getting around the bay was a big problem because it was really big, it was really wide, it was very shallow, right?

There was a shipping channel that was dredged fairly early on to get up to the port. But you know, other than that, you know, if you wanted to, you know, in the 1920s, you have cars, but you got to drive all the way around, you know, you're like Model T or you're Duesenberg or whatever. Yeah, exactly. So at first, you know, what are we going to do? We're going to start a ferry. There's these two guys named Charles R. Carter and James E. Bussey.

Yes, yes. He invented it. Actually. Please be respectful, Alice. He invented the bus. Mr. Bussey. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Mr. Bussey. Mr. Bussey. No, no titles and ability. He's Mr. Bussey. Oh, please. My father was Mr. Bussey. Call me James. Call me Jim.

Jim Bussey. Jim Bussey. Yeah. Yeah. Jim Bussey. Yeah. Slim Jim Bussey from Tampa Bay. Good Lord.

Yeah. I was about to say. Not from St. Petersburg. Yeah. I can't think of anything for Charles Carter. That's much less what you talk Carter and Slim Jim Bussey. They create what's called the Beeline Ferry Company and that gets people across the widest part of Tampa Bay down into the towns of Palmetto and Bradenton, right?

Oh, this is horrible. So they're better than a lot of other parts of Florida. Cool. Yeah. You can at least walk from one building to another theoretically in some parts of these towns. Give it a minute and we'll be swimming. Yeah.

Yeah. So the ferry was very popular by 1926, you know, with all the people taking this ferry, there was mutterings of, well, maybe if we, if the ferries are this overloaded, maybe we should build a bridge, right? So there's this guy, he's a physiotherapist, he's named Herman Simmons, goes and just gets a permit and commission approval to build the damn bridge. But a physiotherapist, why? Back in the day, that was just like, you didn't really have any sort of professional sense

of anything. You'd just be like, yeah, I'm just going to do it myself. I think I could probably build a bridge. Self-taught nuclear engineers, how I like to think of myself now being just moved this cesium from this era. In fairness, in 1926, all nuclear engineers were self-taught. Yeah, I know, man. God damn it.

Not a lot of formal training in that area. Yeah, it's just two guys. Welcome to Mr. Ed and Mr. Eddie's nuclear science research facility. Please wear gloves. I definitely didn't do that. So this physiotherapist, apparently you could just as a physiotherapist build a bridge back then. He got the permits, he got the investors lined up, but it was 1927.

You know, the Great Depression hit like before they started construction, nope, no money. Turns out maybe when physiotherapists are talking about building 11-mile bridges, that's a sign the economy is overheated. Yeah. Yeah. We would have researched the fucking Bay Bridge tunnel proposal in the 20s was just like, how you fuckers can't pull this off? What are you talking about?

So yeah, for the next couple of decades, there's some rumblings about building a bridge or a tunnel or a bridge tunnel, right, where you'd have a bridge that would go out until the shipping channel and then we'd go in a tunnel and then it would come back up and continue along as a bridge, which is what they do in Norfolk, Virginia and the Hampton Roads area, you know, but at some point they're still running this ferry service that started to lose money, but it's still an essential transportation. So in 1944, I think the Port Authority buys it out and all of a sudden this Port Authority, which is relatively new authority at this point, they're tasked with operating this

expensive ferry and they're like, we don't want to do this, this sucks. Let's build a bridge. Hell yeah. Is somebody in my fucking house? Yes, you are. Oh, geez. I'm good. Okay.

Everything's fine. You're good? Okay. Yeah. My fucking audio, my headphone interface has many tangled cables because I'm a lazy slob who can't ever fucking untangle shit. I don't worry about it. I'm needing to switch over to a new mixer and that's going to be chaos for a while after

which. Yeah. Oh my God. Okay. I have relieved some of the giant tangle. I guess this is what I'm doing. Yeah. Go ahead.

Sorry everybody. I'm cutting the Gordian knot here. Dude, it looks like a Jeff Koons sculpture, man. So these two engineering firms, Bale, Horton and Associates, and Parsons Brinkerhoff, Hogan and McDonald, which I believe still exists as Parsons Brinkerhoff, they're awarded a contract to design the bridge in December 1944, but the process sort of stalls out due to lack of funding. It finally gets going in 1950, right?

Hmm. Or a piece of Hogan and McDonald, I guess. Yeah. But they were undesirable. Yes. This organization does not tolerate failure. Now we've decided, we've decided to up, we've decided the Scots are no longer good at cantilever bridges.

This is discrimination, this is bullshit. Stop drinking so much buck fast. Absolutely not. They looked into it, found out that Scots didn't actually invent the cantilever, fired these two guys on the spot. Yes. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Because it's a little inconsistent, but it's two bucks you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. This is a big competition to name the bridge, right? They have a July 4th, 1950. There's this daylong celebration in St. Petersburg called Spans Across the Bay.

That's where they were like, okay. We're going to call it the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which was submitted by Virginia Seymour of Indian Rocks, Florida. Some rejects included the Magic Carpet, the Loveland Span, the Pearly Gates, the Glory Road, Aladdin's Ramp, and the Garden of Eden. What the fuck, yo? I think they should have kept Aladdin's Ramp. I like Glory Road.

The Glory Road? The Glory Road. Yeah, you're just driving along. You get a knock to, you know, roll your window down and just like a dick comes through. 60 mile an hour hand job doesn't sound like five. Oh, the 150 and a half foot club. Oh, my God. Yeah, I like that.

I like Aladdin's Ramp, too. Nobody's famed for his Ramp for one thing. Real heads know it's the Glory Road. Yeah. So the contractor was the Virginia Bridge and Iron Company of Roanoke, Virginia. Roanoke. Yeah. And that today, while I was doing research for this.

In October of 1950, they started work on the 11-mile span. And they're like, this is the greatest sort of like co-project between Virginia and Florida since the late unpleasantness, you know? Yes. Oh, the Vapors. Oh, the Vapors. So. While between the states.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what it was. That's. Yep. That's. The Wall of Northern Aggression. Somebody put that.

Somebody find us a photo of Hood losing his fucking arm at Getty's Bridge. So this original bridge, it was 11 miles long. Most of it's a very simple causeway because the bay is very shallow, right? In the center to span the shipping channel, the roadway climbed 150 feet, went over this cantilever span that was 100 and, excuse me, 864 feet long. Big bridge. Yeah. Big bridge.

So the bridge, all told, was the longest bridge in the United States when it opened in September 1954, but it was very, very quickly passed by a few other causeways, most notably the 24 mile Lake Pontchartrain causeway in 1956. Louisiana excellence. Yes. You know, one of the things there is you sort of look at the highway infrastructure there and it was all built in 1950 something and none of it's been upgraded. It looks like New Jersey.

Yeah, New Jersey, but like with a distinctly Louisiana flavor of corruption. So like everybody building those bridges surnamed long, for some reason, called Baton Rouge at 900 decibels every hour on the hour like your admission barbecue when they play the fucking national anthem or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Each of those bridges supports an entire ecosystem of do nothing jobs subsidizes the state bartenders and fish fryers.

Like I said, long as long as you can do a lot worse as an ideology. So one of the things about this is, you know, as much as it was the longest bridge in the United States, one of the longest in the world when it opened, it was kind of, you know, not that remarkable of a structure, you know, causeways are pretty easy. It's just this post and beam bridge over and over again. You got a big cantilever span in the middle. You got two ramps, but this had been done before it was this is bigger than any of them. But you know, this is not like a crazy feat of engineering.

Did people like it? Was it convenient? Was it useful? Yeah. Yeah. Loads of people loved it. Yeah. It was very successful crowded up with vacationers, commuters carried 15,086 cars on its first

day and $1.75 toll. So it made a bunch of money. You got the cool breezes from the ocean, right, you know, you also got like it's before climate change happened. So it was cooler in general, you know, actually quite a pleasant experience, I assume. So here's some pictures from the opening ceremonies. Oh, of course, they had fucking like the Sunshine Skyway girls, of course they did. Yeah.

Yeah. The little like Sunshine Skyway themed hats and you know, bathing suits. I mean, this is all good tourism stuff, right? It's like come to Florida. We are attractive women. Yes. Rika, this is from St. Petersburg Times. Rika D'Elina, Miss Grease, hands a replica of the Sunshine Skyway to acting governor

Charlie Johns at the bridge opening ceremony. Charlie Johns is sweating like a priest in a whorehouse. Yeah. Yeah. Shitting like a priest in a daycare. Yes. Yeah. And also, I guess I should say at this time for Florida, Miss Grease, pretty exotic all

things considered. This is true. I mean, people think that Florida was like always terrorism. This is like right at the birth of that. Like Florida was like indistinguishable from Alabama for like a long time. Still is in bits. But like. Yeah.

The more you go, the more South it gets. I have. Well, yes. Quite. Johns placed the bridge in the center of the map of Florida's west coast in the rear, linking the 10 counties together. The counties Citrus, Hernando, Pasco, Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, Sarasota, Charlotte, Lee and Collier were each represented by Skyway Princesses, each wearing a bright red bathing

suit. I'm pointing. That is a county sonar. And while I can imagine being charmed by being Miss Charlotte or Miss Lee, being Miss Manatee. Yeah, it feels a little hurtful. Yes. And this is a picture from the initial motorcade across the bridge.

Skyway crossing begins and the motorcade pauses halfway up the main span to give dignitaries a chance to look back over the sunshine Skyway, open to traffic. It is cool that you can get that view, like seeing a sort of like trail away behind you. But also I know what I do for a living, which means I'm also obliged to take this as a sort of monument to man's hubris. Yeah, you should be doing that. They did the opening ceremony twice once at each end. Really, they fucked up by not calling it Aladdin's ramp, you know, because they called

it Aladdin's ramp having sort of like having a Lars name in there, I think would have protected it. Definitely from this postcard here. It looks like Aladdin's ramp. One light of a lower Tampa Bay, horrifyingly sort of like green-hued. Okay, right, this is redundant notes. But here is another shot of the bridge, shortly after it opened, here you can see it in use by traffic.

Two-lane bridge. That's an abrupt curve, like, really gains a lot of, what on earth? Oh, I like the hump. Yeah. It's like a bunny hill on a coaster. Five percent grade right there, all the way up to the top, and then it goes right back down. Yikes.

That would be fun in a truck, and by fun I mean horrible. Yeah, steep, you know, not even uncommon for bridges of the Zara, I think, you know, like the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, not the big one, but the small one has a similar grade. But, you know, this was built to the standards of the time, there's very much a bridge of its time. Right? True. We can't judge it by modern standards, you know, cancel culture and stuff.

Yeah, exactly. You know, so there were some problems with the span, right? It's very narrow, but it was signed for 45 miles an hour. There's no shoulders. There's no light. You just blast right over this and you're like the longest car you've ever seen. And DUI isn't illegal yet, so. Yeah, you're going from like one bar to another across the bay.

You beach the car on the top of the thing, just like take out like a shitload of asphalt with it. Cool. Yeah, it had no shoulders, there's no lights on the bridge. Nice. Yeah. So, yeah, it's of its time and, you know, once they passed the Federal Aid Highway Act, it's kind of like, well, let's see if we can run an interstate highway on it, right?

Oh, that's bold. But that involves building a second bridge, right? They had a second modernized span. The second span was a little nicer. It had a shoulder. It was a little wider, you know. This starts construction in 1967. It opens in 1971, Interstate 275 was routed over the Parabridges, they had much less elaborate

opening ceremonies, but, you know, with the Parabridges, it was at least much safer than the single bridge configuration, right? Still not a great place to break down, though. No, they're getting like towed off of this down a 5% grade in the dark. Yeah, or someone just wrecks Indio at the bottom. Don't worry, shallow. You can swim. Not this bit, though.

Like, no, you're right. It's not the dredged. Yeah, this is the dredged bit. Yeah, everything else is like, I don't know, six feet deep, you know, but here, ooh. But don't like what Ross just says, ooh. Yeah. Here's a slide where I forgot to put a picture. It's a podcast with slides, without slides.

Without slides. This is a slide I asked Liam to do. Ah. No, that was... Struggle session. Yeah. Sorry, I was at the post office getting fingerprinted, and then I thought you guys had done that because I told you I was still at the post office.

Do you want to disclose why you were getting fingerprinted at the post office? I'm going to be a mailman! Hell, yeah. You finally got that big federal government job. You're going to get that fed money. We wish you every success with it, and also the surreal experience anyone who like listens to the podcast gets, opening the door to you delivering their mail. Yes.

Yes. Incredible. Do we have any notes on the Capricorn and Blackthorn running into each other or just what I have? Just what you have, yeah. Okay. So I... I...

Hang on one second. Yeah. So on January 28th, 1980, the first version of the spread... The Red Liam date. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a U.S. Coast Guard cutter called Blackthorn, originally built in Ross's ancestral home of Duluth, and it...

It's being... It originally had been an icebreaker. It gets reassigned, and it's in Tampa Bay for refurbishment. And then... Well, this happens in Florida on vacation. And then... What happens? Yes.

Blackthorn's ancestral home because it runs into a fucking tanker. It runs into a fucking tanker. And I'm not going to do research live on this podcast. I have some notes. Sorry, everybody. Again, I was on other business this morning, but they led an ensign, have command of the cutter, and he obviously is inexperienced. The D2 Collide, the cutter loses, I believe, 30 men, could be wrong.

Wow. Jesus. It goes down real fast. I didn't know I would get the actual total. The one dredged channel in an extremely shallow bay, it just dunks right into the fucking... Yeah, you're like... Yeah, it loses 23 crew members, 27 survived the collision, so not great. Actually, Blackthorn, the anchor from the tanker Capricorn essentially ripped into the

hull of Blackthorn, ripped it open above the water line. How the fuck do you rip open an icebreaker as well? Yeah, great question. Takes some doing. Blackthorn tips on her size, cap size, 23 men die. Yeah, there's an ensign who's at the command because the actual... Nothing to do, folks. Lieutenant Commander Sepple was just trying to figure out the new propulsion system, which

wasn't fucking working. They also... They were supposed to pass Starboard to Starboard, which is... They were supposed to pass Port to Port, which is what you're supposed to do. Then Capricorn couldn't make contact with the ensign aboard the Blackthorn. They were going to pass Starboard to Starboard, ensign Ryan had no idea what to do, and then they just ran into each other. So basically, he did the sort of like Bob's Burgess thing where Tina's learning to drive,

where she's just like, too paralyzed by fear to do anything and just runs it into the only car. He had no idea what to do. Yeah. Cool. Okay. I also see here that this may be the force of the Soviet Union somehow. Oh, yes.

There was a Soviet passenger ship called the Kazakhstan, which had been overtaken, which overtook the Blackthorn. And there are some people because the Blackthorn navigator's almost been channeled and comes back, and there's some belief that basically the lights of the passenger ship dazzled both crews into not seeing each other. But I think that... You have the ultimate level disco. His child is piloting the ship.

He doesn't know what to do. You've got the disco ball on. You're on a Soviet cruise ship off of Tampa Bay, so I assume you've just made it Cuba. All right, I'm confused because it's like, what, did they come in to port at St. Petersburg and the guy had to say, sorry, wrong one. Wrong. Sorry. Hey, hey, put the guns down.

Put the guns down. No, no, no, no, no, no, wrong St. Petersburg. You're looking for Leningrad, actually. Yeah, it's because me and the Antifa have been overchanging all the signs, you know? Yeah, I really struggle to imagine like a passenger ship dazzling you in that way. Yeah, I don't know how true that one's going to be. That doesn't seem like it makes sense to me. It seems like just a bullet.

The bridge gets out of this okay, right? Yes. Yeah, it's just off the bridge. It does. They don't run into the bridge until... Very close. Four months later. Yeah.

No. Actually, the anniversary of this was yesterday. Wow. May 9th. Hmm. See, I didn't even think about that. It's time. I'm not here for.

So, this is the Motor Vessel Summit Venture. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It was built in 1976 by the Oshima Shipbuilding Company of Nagasaki, Japan. Registered in Lime Bay Area. Yes. Convenience-like? Yes.

You see here, registered in Monrovia, that happened later. 609 feet long, 85-foot beam. I don't know how much draft. 19,735 gross tons. This says self-unloading bulker. That's what all these cranes are for, right? They're supposed to have big claws on them. They lift up the bulk cargo and dump it on the dock, right?

You know, bulk is coal, iron, cement, grains, fertilizers, so on and so forth. In this case, it's, of course, in phosphate service because a whole lot of phosphate is made in Florida. Mm-hmm. So, they're entering Tampa Bay, right, on May 9th, 1980. Go pick up some phosphates. I'm going to go pick up some phosphates. So, they're running empty.

They're running pretty high in the water. Now, Tampa Bay is a shallow harbor, right? So, they're shipping channels in there that have been dredged into it to make room for these bigger ships. Navigating these narrow channels is difficult. So, guys called pilots board the ship outside the bay at... That's pilots, not pirates. Yeah, pilots, yes.

I mean, bring back pirates boarding ships outside of harbors, but... They boarded this key, which I forget what it is. It's in the notes somewhere. Buttkey. Yeah, buttkey. And they take over piloting the ship into the harbor, right? The pilot is in charge. I mean, the captain still has his final authority, but the pilot is the one steering the ship,

right? Mm-hmm. Or rather, the pilot is the one telling the helmsman how to steer the ship. There's many layers of command here. At the end of the day, it all boils down to a terrified teenager steering the thing. But yeah, the captain is in charge at sea, but the pilot is in charge near land, right? So pilot John Lera was in charge here. He boarded, I believe, at about 4.30 in the morning at Edgmont Key.

So yeah, it's right here. What we previously referred to as buttkey. It's Edgmont Key. Oh, we're going to have to rename that along with St. Petersburg now. Yeah. It will always be buttkey to me. Yeah, buttkey in buttgrad. Now, he had done this run about 788 times before, right?

So he's just enough times to get cocky. Yeah. So it's early, you know, it's dark out, it's overcast. There's a bit of mist coming down, but otherwise the weather is OK. You know, it's not like great weather, but it's OK weather, right? So he starts piloting the ship down the channel. Around 7.30 is when he's approaching the bridge, right? As he's going, though, the weather starts to get worse, right?

So the fog starts to get worse, the rain gets heavier, right? So he's like sending lookouts to the front of the ship to help him guide the thing. He's relying a lot on his radar, as opposed to anything visual. He's going to get a bit of a muted triangle. Sounds like he's about to get a bit of a muted triangle. Sort of. At this point, also, the captain, I forget his name, it's later in the notes, the captain is getting worried.

This will be relevant for later litigation, where it was really hard to find the research on that, especially in the amount of time we have. I'm sorry, folks, my computer broke, so this had to get put together really quick. So someone commented on the most recent bonus that they really like it when we do a rushed episode and an emergency, and the monkey's paw curled, you know, exactly, right? Good fucking news, folks. Captain in the first major concern, they don't do anything, the pilot John Larrow is concerned, doesn't do anything.

Doesn't do anything. Yeah. But you've got the guy right there who's supposed to know what he's doing. He's done it like 18,000 times before. Yeah, exactly. Right. And, you know, all he does is go from the key into the harbor and back, presumably knows what he's doing.

There's also sort of an informal company policy of do not interfere with the pilot ever. That really counts as a hijacking. Yeah. So Larrow guides the ship towards the bridge, the fog is getting worse, then the microburst happens. Oh, what? The microburst. The microburst.

What the fuck is a microburst? Oh, I'm about to tell you that. So a microburst is an extremely severe but extremely localized thunderstorm, right? It's kind of the reverse of a tornado. Didn't they make those? Yes. Yes. Living in the United States means you just hear about the weirdest fucking weather possible

all the time. Yeah. You've got too much land over there. Yeah. We've gotten hit by microbursts here in Philly, I think, not even that long ago, you know? It happens every once in a while, you know? So I've never heard of this fucking thing. Yeah.

So it's sort of, you know, suddenly there's this, you know, a tornado kind of sucks things up, this sucks things down, a lot of rain, a lot of precipitation, hail, you know, there's lots and lots of wind that sort of goes out. So you suddenly have this 70-mile-an-hour sustained wind out of nowhere, you know? It's very, very localized when you get very heavy precipitation and very heavy winds, all of a sudden out of nowhere. This ship in particular. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. It's like the cartoon thing where one guy has a cloud over his head. Yeah. But it's a shipping container or a shipping vessel. So at this point, Laro, you know, he's navigating by radar in his lookouts, but the precipitation from the microburst makes the radar useless. His lookouts can't see anything, right, right as he was approaching the bridge. And he was suddenly blown.

Keep in mind, this vessel is running light and as a result has very little draft. There's not much stopping it from being buffeted by the wind. He's blown by a sudden 70-mile-an-hour wind onto a collision course with the bridge. Does he know that? Is there like a moment where the sort of like the cloud's part and the, you know, he's like, wait a second, we're at 30,000 feet, why is there a goat in front of me? Sort of like a moment of horror. Well, he knows the situation is bad, but he didn't know how bad until the bridge came

in view. He's been in the span of like minutes. You know, the bridge comes in view and they are not aligned to go through the channel. They are aligned to go into one of the bridge piers. So Laro orders full reverse, dropped the anchor. The ship was now moving fast enough that collision was inevitable, right? They weren't going to be able to slow it down in time, but they were also moving slow enough that they couldn't really steer because boats are funny like that.

You know, you have the most control when they're moving fast. You just got to gun it, you know? Yeah. See if you can't sort of like Tokyo drift it through. Yes, exactly. So you're like, whaaaaa, off the deck. At 7.38 a.m., the ship wrecked into the bridge. It took a greyhound bus with it.

So some of the images you see of the sunshine skyway collapse are kind of misleading because the ship did wind up backing off after hitting the bridge. What we see here is... Sorry, sorry. Sorry. I'd love to try this again, back to do it again. What we see here, we see the MV, what should we call it, some adventure, is parked up next to one of the big bridge piers, which is what the ship initially hit, and then it

was diverted and it hit this bridge pier, which you may notice is not there. Oh, just scrape down the side. Yeah. And this is where the mechanics of the cantilever bridge come into play because engineers had anticipated bumps and bruises from shipping on the main piers, and in fact, several ships had struck the bridge before and there was no incident, but what was not anticipated was the ship would hit one of the piers that was outside of the shipping channel. And this was the worst one to hit, right here.

It's like if you go back to that diagram of the three guys, it's like kicking one of their arms. Yes. If you kicked out the... You kicked the weights, actually, is what happened here. If you kicked out the weights, well, I'll demonstrate in a following slide. So here's something from the NTSB report, you can see these are the sections of bridge which collapsed all from hitting this one pier, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So that's a good chunk of it. We can, I think, demonstrate this. We can show this in the next slide. Okay. So we have this. This is a very pixelated, very low resolution photo.

You can see this pier here. This is from the one of the newer bridge. The newer bridge had to be reinforced because it was on a bad foundation, but that's not relevant to this accident. So the boat hits this pier, right, and just demolishes it. I believe the pilot said it looked like it came down like it was made with cornmeal or something like that, right? So this pier is doing two things.

We can see on the other bridge, which is it's supporting this section of trust deck here, right? But it's also pulling down on the end of the cantilever because that is counteracting the force from here on the same cantilever from the center span, right? So what happens when you get rid of that pier? The answer is the entire, this deck here is simply supported. It just falls into the water. It sort of rotates into there.

And the cantilever, on the other hand, is now there's nothing to counteract the force from here. So it starts to rotate up. Oh, no. Oh, God. I don't want the whole bridge to pivot like, no, no, no. And essentially the center span just drops and this rotates up. We don't know how much because there's no eyewitness accounts because everyone died.

How many people were on this fucking guy? It's like seven in the morning, right? So like, when it happened, there were only, I think, three people actually on that span of the bridge, but there was a lot of fog. So we'll get to that soon. So this thing, the whole thing rotates up and then just sort of falls in the water that way. You know, this is, this is a very wild ride for anyone who was on there, but we won't

know about it because, you know, they died. Yeah. I'll ask them about it when you get up there. Yeah. And then, you know, the other thing is, since one pier went before the other, because there's sort of two piers per pier, there's two columns, I guess you would say. It also twisted as it did it. You can see how the wreckage is lying in the water.

A free roller coaster ride, you know, in a sort of horrifying way. Please die, Mr. Tampa's wild ride. That instantly kills you. The bridge that kills you instantly. Only the sunshine skyway can reduce an entire Floridian to a soup like a Modena. Yes. So there's several casualties here, right? You know, three cars in a truck were on the bridge when it collapsed.

They fell on the water. But again, there's a lot of fog. There's this microburst. There's everything. So three more cars in a greyhound bus just drive off the end. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. Imagine the bus. The bus was, I believe, mostly full of college students. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So, you know, in total, six cars, one truck and a greyhound bus fall off the bridge. 35 occupants of the vehicles were killed. The only survivor who fell off the bridge was Wesley McIntyre, whose Ford Courier pickup truck bounced off the hull of the Summit Venture and into the water. Wow. It was a little tough. I mean, like, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You'll never buy another brand, will you? Yeah. Exactly, right? And then the ship's crew fished them out, you know, but this is a 150-foot drop. It's not a very survivable fall. But you have a few vehicles who've managed to stop right before the big hole in the bridge, most notably this vehicle, which belonged to a Richard Hornbunkle, who managed to stop

about 14 inches from the end of the bridge. Incredible. Yeah. I know this is an old shitty 70s car with shitty brakes, but I wonder how a modern vehicle would perform considering it could be much heavier. I was going to say, like, you throw, like, an SUV or something at this. Yeah. I don't know.

I don't like those odds. No. Yeah. And this is another, this is one of those visuals the press goes mad at. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. It's a great photo. You got some great photos off of this, absolutely.

So yeah, the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, it claps. There is recordings of the May Day call that the pilot sent when he collapsed the bridge or when he accidentally collapsed the bridge, which are sort of like the Coast Guard takes like several minutes to register when he collapsed the bridge. Oh, boy. Get the nuts. Get the nuts. So something is difficult to communicate the enormity of what you've just done over

a radio. Right. Kind of screwed up. But that's, that's an all time embarrassing moment having to radio the Coast Guard that you took down a bridge. Yeah. So the bridge collapsed and sort of like, all right, what do we do now? The rescue effort was, well, they saved the one guy.

Yeah. Yeah. It's already a rescue effort. That's incidental. He sort of like bounces onto you. It looks like. Yeah. There was no one there that was able to respond in any meaningful way.

People just died. It's fog. I mean, what do you want to do? Right. There's a couple of boats who showed up pretty quick and they couldn't do very much. You just couldn't see anything, I assume. Yeah. Well, there's also no one who was like, everyone was in their cars and the cars immediately

sank. Right. Yeah. And it was about a 67, 67 mile per hour impact with the ground. With the water. So, you know, not the most 80s car too. Yeah. No, a 70s car.

Oh. Yeah. So, all right. What happened? Who is to blame? Right. John Lerow, the pilot, is cleared of all charges by the Coast Guard and by a grand jury. He acted reasonably in the circumstances.

That seems fair enough to me. Yeah. There's a serious act of God's love here, I think. Kind of was like, you know, what the fun thing is, he was able to successfully argue that it was an act of God, but the company was not. That good, that's the sort of legal presumption we should be working with. Yeah. Wesley McIntyre managed to sue the company that ran some adventure into the bridge for

$175,000, which I'm sure went to like medical bills and legal fees. I mean, these days, that's like $500,000. Yeah. That's good. So, probably he paid off like, you know, 1% of his medical bills for that. Yeah. Well, it was 1980, though. Medical bills were less expensive back then.

Yeah, that's true. The court ultimately finds the captain and the company are at fault, which you might ask why that when, you know, the pilot was the one driving the ship. Anyway, the district court found, unequivocally, the circumstances surrounding the approach to the bridge made such a case of great necessity that it was played negligence on part of Captain Lou to allow his ship to proceed under the control of pilot Lara after Captain Lou became aware, but should have become aware of the inevitable risk of the accident. And indeed, Captain Lou testified that he had been concerned for the safety of the vessel

for approximately 10 minutes before the collision. Moreover, while on paper, the ship owner followed the IMCO rules and regulations. I'm not sure what IMCO is. The evidence showed that the actual practice of the... It's not some marathon cargo organization, I bet. Yeah, that sounds about right. The evidence showed the actual practice of the company was to permit all navigational decisions to be made by a pilot while it went on board and that the master could only relieve

the pilot if he were acting in a drunken or crazy manner. According to Port Captain... They really say a drunken or crazy manner. Yes. I love Florida legal English. Oh, no, that was according to the company, the company that was based out of... Oh, okay. Yeah.

According to Port Captain Chang, the ship owner's policy was that the pilot is command in charge, right? Accordingly, the district court found that Captain Lou's adherence to the company's policy constituted negligence when he relinquished to pilot Lara his responsibility for the safety of the ship, right? It's the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization, which is some great UN English. What, the IMCO? Yeah, the IMCO.

That doesn't match the acronym. What, international maritime... Intergovernmental Maritime... Yeah, it should be IGMCO. Maybe they exchanged it to sound cooler. Anyway, I had a hard time researching exactly what transpired from this lawsuit. I believe the ship owners got the pants suit off of them. Reasonable.

Yeah. You have to expect that the Tampa Bay Post Authority wants its money back. Yes. And one effect of this is that the Sunshine Skyway was brought back down to two lanes. Oh, yeah, because the redundancy, you know, they still have the original one. Yeah, the original one actually still worked fine. It was not really affected by the collapse of the newer one. So you're back to the bad old bridge.

No lights, no shoulders. No lights, no shoulders. Here you can sort of see the debris removal. So this is the center span, which you will notice after having dropped 150 feet is basically in perfect condition. Oh, shit. That's not a new one. That's the original one.

They'd like dropped in the fucking ocean. Yeah, I believe so. They're still using like the broken span to raise it out of the water. This may be during deconstruction of the new one now that I think about it. Ignore this slide. No, it's cool. Yeah. Yeah, but you know, this is the, you can see how the cantilever bridge works.

You can, you can just, yeah, it's actually got to be the new one because there you can see a pier here anyway, but you can sort of see how the bridge, the cantilever bridge can support the cantilever span even when it's in a different position. You know, so this is, they start deconstructing the old bridge fairly quickly because they start building a new bridge. Again, remember when we used to build things in this country after we destroyed the previous things? So I do kind of genuinely believe that this would just like sit there as like a two-lane

bridge now. Yeah. Yeah. So well, for several years, it is a two-lane span. You know, they have the old one left up for a long time. Folks who are driving across the two-lane span, they generally sort of describe the experience of going across it as very eerie because, you know, you get a bridge next to you, you got a bridge next to you, you got a bridge next to you.

Suddenly you don't. It's like, damn, that could happen to me, including, that's something my mom told me a long time ago because she used to have to go over this bridge fairly often to visit the family in Naples. Yeah. In 1983, they start building the replacement span. It's inspired by a bridge Governor Bob Graham had seen on a vacation in Normandy. He was just like, yeah, build that one.

Okay. Yeah. Just build that one. Fair enough, I guess. Yeah. It's like a two-lane-sheets direction with a shoulder. So it's safer. It's a big cable-stayed span.

And they add these things called dolphins, right? And what your dolphin does is it's a big, in this case, a big concrete block. So if another ship comes in and smashes into it, it smashes into the dolphin instead of smashing into the piers. Oh, they made like a catch fence, but for boats. Yes. That's cool. I don't, you don't really see those often, even in a lot of like, sort of like heavily

like boat-trafficked bridges. Yeah. And this one, this one, they, this one, they went all in because they're like, we're not going to do that. That's not going to happen again. Hmm. Too embarrassing if it did. You know?

Yeah. Well, the new bridge was opened in 1987, but the day before it opened, a shrimping vessel crashed directly into one of the dolphins. Hell yeah. Yeah. Why not, man? Yeah. And what happened was the dolphin was fine and someone towed the shrimp, shrimping vessel

away and then it sank. Yeah. It's, it's good. It's, it's like sort of established an appropriately defensive aspect now. It's like, I will kill any boat that hits me. Yes. And then, you know, they start deconstructing the original bridge or demolishing it right in 1990.

Some of it was done manually, a lot of it was done with controlled explosives and some of it was preserved as a fishing pier, huh? Now you just have the one solitary, extremely defended bridge. Yes. You have the most defensible bridge in Florida, at least. Still a sort of remarkable grade on this as well. Oh yeah. I mean, it's, it does end a lot further along because this is built to modern interstate

standards as opposed to 1960 interstate standards, but yeah. You can see it on the next line too, it's like, yeah. Wow. Striking. There's some, there's some telephoto work in here. Still gives me anxiety. I don't like it. No one is about 180 feet above the ground as opposed to 150.

There's some criticism. Some people said it should have been higher so they could like cruise ships come in. Oh, you don't want that. You really don't want that. You're going to flood your entire thing with like norovirus and also water. Look at what fucking Venice and Costa Mela having happened. Yep. Cruise ships should be an episode in and of themselves.

Florida. Maybe they will be. Oh yeah. Florida. Florida. It's all right. The norovirus is already there. The water is already there.

Yeah. What else are you really adding? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that's the story of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. What did we learn? Nothing. Fuck Tampa.

Absolutely nothing. Build, force-fly all of your bridges. Right, right, right, right. Cannons on bridges is what we learned. Yeah. I don't think you would have had time. I don't think the cannon would have done anything. No, no, no, no, that attitude.

Well, that's why you have to have the pirates to like hijack it. You gotta have the pirates, Roz. I guess if you hadn't, you had a bunch of pirates who were really good at navigating in storms, sure, but, you know. Yeah. And I guess also, don't build a bridge that you can drive a cruise ship under because the idea of driving across a bridge and seeing a cruise ship underneath me is very troubling. Don't like that.

It would give me anxiety. I mean, the whole thing there, the whole thing there is, with this disaster, it does not necessarily seem like something you could relate to a lot of negligence. No. It was just kind of like, oh, shit, we didn't know that could happen. Yeah. A mysterious act of God's love. But it has definitely, definitely changed the way you design bridges like these near

busy shipping channels ever since. Which is curious. I don't really see those dolphins for many other bridges and those circumstances, but I'm sure they're not retrofitting old bridges, new bridges that are like this. Yeah. I'm also sure there's lots of clever ways to integrate them more elegantly into the design than just a bunch of hockey parks. This is true.

Yeah. Well, we have a segment on this podcast, on this show called Safety Third. Oh, that's an intriguing diagram we've got. I didn't read this one before I put it in. I had a boy. Good. Might have slurs in it. We don't know.

Good. There's no way of knowing. We'd never do this at the time. Fuck you. Howdy. Howdy. Howdy. I would like to share with you a safety third from my time spent doing science stuff in

the Arctic. Already a perfect, perfect opening sentence. Yeah. The remote nature of the Arctic in tracks all sorts of weirdos, including myself. Yeah. When we came in, there were these Norwegian guys screaming at us and about what? That's the Antarctic. Fuck.

God damn it. Oh, well, we tried. But one type of weirdo it attracts is helicopter pilots. Oh, no. Helicopter pilots are a special type. Not only do they enjoy working in a loud, vibrating hot capsule full of jet fuel several hundred feet off the ground, but they also choose to work with people who are impatient assholes and want to treat their miracle of physics flying machine like it's a rental

pickup truck with a chauffeur. Where we work in the Arctic is especially remote and shitholish. So pilots are constantly rotating through the town every six weeks throughout the busy summer season. Therefore, we are always getting used to the unique ways in which every pilot likes to work. A flawed constellation of different sort of personality disorders. For example, some pilots like to give a thoughtful safety walkthrough of do's and don'ts of the

helicopter. Other times I've had new helicopter pilots land at our camp, jump out of the helicopter with the turbine and rotors still running, walk over us and say, all right, let's boogie, jump in. The Chad helicopter pilot. At the start of one of our fall field seasons, we had about four hours of helicopter time to sling a load into a bunch of equipment, to sling load in a bunch of equipment into our camp, and we were working with a new to us pilot recipe for disaster.

They got a sling and there's equipment in the sling and they're going to attach it to the helicopter. Right. Yeah, this is really fucking difficult. Nate told me some stories about doing this in the military and some of the static discharge off of a helicopter leads you to some interesting places with static electricity. We, the people standing at the camp, first helicoptered into the camp, then the next few trips the helicopter would convey the sling loads we had previously prepared back

and forth between the camp. Slings were being carried connected to the helicopter by long lines that were a few hundred feet long. This way we could unhook the slings after the helicopter put them on the ground and the helicopter could immediately turn around and fly back to base to have the next sling hooked on by someone at the base and brought out to the camp. We had made this plan with the pilot that we did not go into enough detail about how this would specifically be done, which will become apparent in the next paragraph.

The helicopter appeared over the horizon with the first sling load and gently placed it next to our camp. One of my colleagues walked over to the sling to unhook the long line from the sling load. This is something we have done at least a hundred times before during the last several years and this is the only way we ever unhook sling loads. As he was unhooking the line from the sling, the pilot electrically released the 5 pound master ring from the hook at the belly of the helicopter, which was hovering a few hundred feet directly over him.

This was a feature I was unaware of. I happened to be recording a video on my phone of my colleague doing this and was able to confirm that the master ring missed his head by only a few feet before smashing into the ground beside him. I immediately deleted the video. The helicopter pilot landed after realizing what he had done and apologized profusely for nearly insta-killing my colleague. I guess we were at fault for not communicating with the pilot about how the slings would

be unhooked, but I think it's the helicopter pilot's duty as the person with the expertise to inform us how things are going to go. As I said, we only ever knew and learned how to unhook slings from the bottom. We are just nerdy scientists. We don't know about this kind of shit so much. We all learned from that day that being specific about how things will be done in potentially dangerous situations is incredibly important. Yeah, I'll say.

No, you were both wrong here. Like, you gotta know whether or not the guy is going to drop a giant metal hook on top of your head from 300 feet. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have a gruesome post-script. Oh, God. Yeah.

P.S., these helicopter incidents aren't even too bad compared to some others I've heard from my boss, who had a friend whose colleague was decapitated by a spinning rotor blade after the helicopter landed on a frozen lake. Oh, he got John Landest. Yeah. They exited the helicopter while the rotor was still spinning, and then the skid of the helicopter broke through the ice, bringing the rotor down to intercept the man's neck. Ooh, that's unforeseeable too.

It's like fucking some final destination shit, you know? After seeing his research parter getting viva la France by the airspace shell A-stars rotor blade, that guy understandably decided to retire from science. Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. He picked up religion. He became a deacon.

Love the show. Keep up the good work from Earth Nerd. Please don't use my real name in the podcast. Thanks. Are we going to have to bleep Earth Nerd? I don't think Earth Nerd is his real name. I don't think so. I don't know.

I don't know. Whatever their gender is. I don't know what it is. We're going to have to bleep every instance of Earth Nerd, which makes it sound much funnier. I had a different name in the email. Okay. So, I assume that's not their real name. Ah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, just don't, don't helicopter. Don't helicopter. Yeah. Don't helicopter. Especially don't like cargo loading operations around helicopter. Don't do that shit.

No. For troops and other idiots, you know, like, they're the troops of science. Science troops. And we salute them, you know. Yeah. Support our science troops. That was safety third. Yeah.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Us. Give us money so that the movers who need it, like, have it, patreon.com, flash, I think WTYP pod will be in the commercial. Yes. Yeah. I think, I think that's it.

I think that was a podcast. Good job, everybody. Yeah. Yep. Happy Mother's Day, everyone. Bye, everyone.