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Tug vs. bridge
A remarkable series of photos documenting a fight between a tugboat, and a bridge.
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Man, that gave me a good smile for the morning. Thanks :)
That's pretty amazing... :) |
Holy gee willakers! That <b>is</b> amazing. Any details? When/where/who?
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woof
So did the coal barge (with the two guys on it) actually make it under the bridge, and the tug in the last frames is going after it?
I suppose there would be nothing left to do except hook back up and keep heading down the river. Someone, somewhere, be it boat captain, bridge operator, or Coast Guard, needs to get a serious talking to after this. The boat by all rights should have gone to the bottom and stayed there. Tough boats, those tugs. |
Very cool! Ride 'em cowboys! Looks like the Mississippi somewheres...
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Re: Tug vs. bridge
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Re: Re: Tug vs. bridge
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Perhaps they are taken from opposite sides of the same bridge? then again that would make it not sinking and rising again anyhow... Very very odd. Datalas |
What the hey?!.....good eye there sleemanj. Maybe she was pulled down and managed to swing somehow out of the current and round back to the barge?
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Or maybe the engines cut out, she hit the bridge and managed just after the dunk to get them rolling again to head back upstream? but then why didnt the barge come slamming into the bridge? dunno.
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If you're talking about the boat going under on its port side, and coming back up on its port side, then you're correct. If you're asking if it went down on one side of the bridge and came back up on the same side, it didn't.
And from the looks of the photos, he ran (walked??) to the other side of the bridge to take the photos after the boat was going under it. You can also see in the second and third photos that the coal has already made it under the bridge (giving an idea of at least how much clearance was down there). Then again, it's all just water under the bridge. |
I think it went under
You can see that the bow of the boat is still facing the viewer, but the bridge is now on the other side. Unless that boat sank and made a U-turn under water, that can't happen unless the boat is now on the other side of the bridge.
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Looks to me like it was swept completely under the bridge by the current. The apparent shifting of the tower on the bridge looks like it's due to parallax when the cameraman moved to the downstream side of the bridge. While the bridge probably has the same clearance sign on both sides, the high-tension lines (looks like there's two sets of them) are both on the downstream side. (left hand side if I have all this correct)
Notice how nice and level the tops of the piles of coal are after they've made the trip under the bridge....use two *level* bargefulls of coal. |
Re: woof
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Notice that wheelhouse crew stayed with the boat - another tribute to the crew. They saw the problem coming and sent the deck crew off to the barges. IOW those pictures demonstrate a crew doing their job - able to think when things are happening too fast. In The Perfect Storm, whole ships would be rolled 360 degrees without sinking. That means it too was properly built and crewed. It is not something you want happen. But is it what humans must consider when designing. In another event, the ship sank. Why. The Edmund Fitzergerald, for reasons unknown, lost their hatch covers. Disaster was inevitable. Those tow boat pictures are extraordinary, but then again, everything and everyone worked as designed. Most important, even the deck crew appears to have survived indicating that the crew understood their problem and adjusted professionally and in sufficient time. BTW, much too small to be the Mississippi R. |
Website sinks
The site was moved from it's original address to here:
http://www.annex-group.com/towboat.htm but even this has won't load. This morning I got a link to this same address from a friend on a rave mailing group. Apparantly the whole Internet wants to see this incredible story, and the server just can't handle it. Anyone know of a mirror other than the link above? |
I have a mirror, and I'll post a link to it soon.
The boat definitely went down and came up on the same side of the bridge. Definitely. If the guy ran to the other side of the bridge (as it looks like he did), then the boat would have come out on the RIGHT side of the pictures, not the left. Oh well. Not quite as incredible, but still pretty amazing. |
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Charlie -
Look at the top of the bridge. Notice how in one set of pictures the high part is on the right and in another, the high part is on the left. The photographer <b>went to the other side of the bridge</b> to finish up the shots. Now, the boat comes in from the right side, so it should, if going all the way under, exit on the left. Which it appears to do, until you realize that that photographer went to the other side of the bridge, so the perspective is entirely different. The boat comes out on the left side now, which is the right side for those standing on the other side of the bridge and looking at the river. <b>WHICH IS THE SIDE THAT IT CAME IN FROM</b>. So YES, it did. |
the shadow knows
Look at the shadows cast by the bridge. They are going the same direction in all photos that show them.
The photographer just walked across the traffic lanes, and photographed the boat come out the other side. The bridge superstructure appearing to shift sides is an effect of perspective. The boat went completely under, knocking off the starboard funnel and deforming the rail as it scraped under the bridge. |
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1: The bridge is a lift bridge, and the lift section is UP - you can see the baricade in the span (5th picture), along with the sloped road - now LOOK at the 9th picture - the road and baricade are still there - the bridge looks like a single leaf bridge - most are 2: Look at picture 3 and picture 9 - in picture 9, you have the access stairway building, in picture 3, you can see all the way across the river, it's not there 3: Picture 12 - look at the downstream turbulance around each object in the water (Bridge piers, that stairway) - your sure not getting that on the upstream side of the bridge - look at the upstream photos 4:Look at photo 1 - there are no wires crossing upstream - look for the towers - now look at the last 5 or 6 photos - tower and wires - NOT the ones going to the bridge - the ones crossing the river 5:Release a set of barges in a river moving that fast, and they aren't going to stay upstream, they are going to keep moving - now the fact is, unless the barges stopped (and if they could, the tug could too), and the barge spead up to get in front of them, the barges went in front of the tug, which means under the bridge. The tug collects the barges at the end, on the side it ended up! So unless they anchored the barges, the tug speed up and rammed the bridge, came out the same side, and NOW had the power to resist the river to go get the barges, it went under |
<b>If</b> it is an effect of perspective (thanks, Joe!), then I can accept that it went out on the opposite side. If the photographer went to the other side, then it definitely came out on the same side that it went in on.
There. Clarification. |
Ah! the Wires!
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Here's an image which may clear some things up. I took <br>
the image of the little girl on the bridge (towboat04.jpg) <br> and used it as an anchor around which to build a panoramic<br> view of the whole scene. As you can see, I cut portions out of the other images and <br> then spliced them onto the anchor by means of lining up the <br> tree line. Look at the overhead lines, which have been mentioned <br> before. They start on the image just after the one with <br> the girl (towboat05.jpg), but they must just be nonvisible <br> in towboat04.jpg, because the tree line is otherwise <br> identical. <img src="http://www.worldwidemart.com/sapienza/img/panorama.jpg"> Ahhh, the free time that comes with being laid-off. sapienza |
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Why the photog would suddenly decide to run across a drawbridge in the middle of an incident like this, I couldn't say. Sounds like an unsmart move, (doubly so if the bridge was opened; I don't think it was). KInd of like that guy who ran along the node line just before Galloping Gertie (the bridge in the K5 logo) fell apart. IIRC the caption writer *said* the bridge was "closed", which I took to mean "lowered", that being the reason the whole mess (tow boat + barges) couldn't just steam right though, and was the reason the boat capsized..it was forced *under* the still-lowered drawbridge by the current. The barricades may have been to close the bridge to traffic for some reason other than to raise the draw. Perhaps it was being repaired, which might explain why it couldn't be raised. |
Any super sleuths find out where this is? Deno...Bridge...anybody with the Army Corps of Engineers?
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Okay. Who spread the link?
Just a bit of trivia: my web server's connection got overloaded because (get this) 178,260+ individual requests for that webpage. Now, the only place I mentioned it was here.... After moving the files, the problem (Tony knows what I'm talking about) is fixed (except the ISP now has us capped at 128K up). Anyway... Who told? :) |
:o ooh oh
I showed it to my father-in-law forgetting he is a committed email spammer. I showed it to him on my machine but he coulda sent the link home when I wasn't lookin... a thousand pardons if I started the collapse of western civilization with a keystroke |
Nah, 'sallgood now. Getting email was hell for a couple days though.
That could definitely start it, but one has to wonder how 178,260 individuals would get it just from that. Suppose that each person looked at it roughly 4 times with different IP addresses - probably an understatement. So we'll say that's 50,000 actual people that hit that link. That's still <b>a lot</b>. The ISP (i55.com) was SO hit by the requests on that line (which also, by the way, houses their MAIL SERVERS) that they capped us - no one at i55.com or their residential customers could get their email. All because of that little mirror I did and the one single link I made to it - right here on the Cellar. I didn't even email people about it. :) As of last night, there was a request for the page coming in every 2 to 5 seconds - roughly 17,000 requests a day at that time. I moved the pictures and page and connectivity was almost immediately re-established with the server - I could get in just fine. So that was definitely the problem. Anyway, it's no big deal. Just thought I'd share. :) |
Wow, Griff, I bet you had NO idea you could single-handedly cause the /. effect on a server!
Such power .... sapenza |
Heh heh...
Kinda like bringing down the government by smokin pot... its just too easy. |
Farked
I think you were farked http://www.fark.com Their public archive doesn't go back far enough or they removed the link because it stopped functioning; however, I think I remember seeing there. Anyone with TotalFark confirm?
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Which is in turn evidence of the myth of broadband, if a bunch of people interested in a few pictures of a boat incident can crush an ISP. But it's certainly true; some back of the envelope calculations say that it certainly could result in that sort of network requirement.
What really SHOULD happen in cases like these: the whole shootin' match should go on Morpheus or some other P2P arrangement. Then it doesn't matter how much bandwidth is needed; people will naturally share. Now imagine if peer-to-peer sharing of this sort were included in the browser, so that a request could be managed through the browser interface AND such requests could be linked into web sites. You hear me knockin'? |
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Meanwhile, if you send the images to me, I'll put them into a nice one-image-per-page format with a frame and a Cellar banner of some sort, and then we can point people to that version, and if it maxes out my T1 I'll just put up a message for people to try again later. Just an idea...
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I'll email you the URL on the site to get 'em. You can do whatever you want with them.
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the story
a few friends of mine are on a boat list, and this is the story that was posted - take it as it were
>There are some things about me that you are just unaware of, and this >instance is a fitting example. Please send this to all, my explanation. >And as Paul Harvey used to say..." that's the rest of the story..." > >It was either late 1978 or early 1979, I have forgotten exactly, but anyway, >I am close on either... The river is the Tombigbee River and this happened >to be the record high water ever for that area. The towboat you see coming >down on the bridge is the Motor Vessel Cahaba owned by Warrior Gulf >Navigation out of Mobile, Alabama. Warrior Gulf is a subsidiary of >Pittsburg Steel. I know you are familiar with Birmingham's coal mines and >steel mills, and this company would haul iron pellets up to Birmingport and >off-load to make steel plate. On the return the barges were filled with >coal for export at the McDuffie Coal Terminal at the mouth of the Mobile >River and at the head of Mobile Bay. >The Bridge was the Old Rooster Bridge (since demolished and removed - I saw >the explosion to tear it down also) located below Demopolis, Alabama. The >land-side highway dead ends at the bluff, and you can still drive to this >site and imagine how high the river had to be to get to the bottom of the >bridge... >The pass or Channel Span of the bridge was located on the far West side of >the river, or on the opposite bank from the photographer's standpoint. In >normal river flow, we would drop down near the rock bluff and steer through >the opening to pass southward with our tows of coal barges. Normal loads >were six barges, each measuring 195' X 35' and loaded to a 10' draft. This >allowed each barge to carry approximately 2,000 tons of coal (times six = >12,000 tons X 2000 pounds = 24 Million pounds of cargo.) The boat is 1800 >Horsepower twin engine diesel built in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It is named >after one of the eight "friendly" Indian tribes. It is the Motor Vessel >Cahaba. At the "sticks" or helm is Captain Jimmie Wilkerson, a long time >river pilot and was my personal friend - since deceased. >The river current was so very treacherous that we were forced to drop down >to the bridge in the slack(er) water on the left descending bank and when we >got down to the bridge, we uncoupled the boat from the barges and let the >barges drift down under the bridge. The bottom of the bridge would "shave" >the coal stacked in the barges off to a level surface. The next step was >to back the vessel upriver and then go over to the far West side and >traverse the bridge's channel span with the boat, and run down and catch the >barges. It was just too dangerous to try to bring the barges through the >bridge span in the current. >Anyway, Jimmie dropped down properly and with the entire rest of the crew >standing on the barges for safety, he began to reverse his engines to back >away. His stern would have to be kept directly pointed into the current or >the boat would travel sideways like a kite without it's tail. Captain Jim >was a fine pilot, but he made a small mistake and his stern was caught in >the current, twisted sideways and the river smashed him into the bridge >sideways. Notice that the boat re-surfaced right side up on the down stream >side. What luck you say? Nope, WGN ballasted all their vessels with three >to four feet of cement in the bottom. The boat was like a little yellow >rubber duckie, and came back up like a duckie oughta do. The boat >suffered major cosmetic damages, but little flooding because of water tight >doors, except in the pilothouse. Notice the picture where the boat is not >quite righted and you can see water pouring out of the wheelhouse door. The >chair washes out, and Jimmie told me he was holding on to the controls with >all his might to keep from going out the drain and into the river. >He was very shook up and you can see him approach the tow of barges >downriver. Well he didn't get it together quite soon enough and he smashed >into the barges, causing further damage. >I next saw Jimmie about a month after this and we had a cup of coffee >together and talked about the incident. He was smoking a Camel Non-filter >but didn't even need an ashtray beacuse his hands were still shaking too >much for the ash to build up to any degree. >How do I know all this? I was on the boat that went through the bridge >immediately before the Cahaba. The Motor Vessel James E. Philpott made the >bridge and was headed south at close to 15 MPH. For all you who don't >understand, that is very fast on a commercial towboat with that much >tonnage. >Glad to pass this on to everybody... >Captain Michael L. Smith |
Even more info
I found a web site that discusses EXACTLY what happened that day
http://www.riverchat.com/cgi-bin/Ult...Page=0&Session Take a look - very interesting what was going on |
Totally off-subject, but your posting that "riverchat" website (River and river-industry related subjects) reminded me of one of my favorite things about the web: there's a place for everyone. And not just the niche sexual fetishists, which seems to be all people think about when they think about message boards and chat rooms on the net. Hooray, Internet!
... and thanks for all the more info about this fascinating event, Charlie. sapienza |
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Charlie |
The net really does rock. I sent Charlies link to a buddy who used to Captain a lobster boat since he was so pumped when he saw the original photos, very cool.
Charlie, do you do your own machining or can you or do you buy steam kits? |
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For those of you who wonder what a Millrite is - You may have seen a Bridgeport Vertical Mill - Bridgeports came in 3 basic sizes - the old M Head, the J head, and the Series II (In size order). The Millrite is somewhere between the M head and the J head in size (Closer to the M Head), but takes R-8 tooling like the J Head (In fact, the HEAD of the J-head will fit on the ram of the Millrite) I guess you could say I'm a multidisciplinary Geek :p - I can do "Steel Age" stuff - weld, steel fabrication, machine shop work (what I did for $$$ during college), I can do electronics tech work (right after college), and now I program for a living |
A true Renaissance geek!
sapienza |
I hear you
I used to program and run a Fadal CNC (machining refractory ceramics of all things, I felt sorry for that machine), and can also weld using wire feed, stick, TIG and gas torch. Been a crane operator, forklift driver etc. Spent many a long shift hand-cranking a Bridgeport mill and Hardinge lathe, and basically doing all those shop tasks that it seems every American guy does in his early years.
Then I got out of school with a CS degree and now program for a living in C, C++, Java and a little HTML. I never really looked back, though I did buy a house with 3-phase in the garage, and I have a few tools out there still. I think shop skills and computer skills are closely related, if you can do one you can probably handle the other. |
Re: I hear you
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(BTW My lathe is a little Atlas - I almost brought home a Hardinge DV59 the other week, but... One day, I'll have either a HLVH or a Monarch 10ee) |
So, I'm currently a programmer and interested in perhaps doing some machining, maybe even as a career... How would I get into it?
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I'd START by picking up a copy of "The Home Shop Machinist", which is a magazine available at most Barnes and Noble stores, and working from there I'd also look at my local Community College - they often have machine shop courses. If you want to be GOOD at it, you should try to learn the basics, and NOT just the CNC stuff |
True account summaries
Since this thread discussion, Snopes has put up a full explanation of the incident, which took place on April 28, 1979.
Also included, are fresh links to the full series of photos, which were lost from the original post to this thread and are linked again for those who may have missed them. |
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