11 January 2008

Another One Hits a Bridge

And another one hits
and another one hits
another one hits a bridge

(sung to the tune of Another One Bites the Dust by Queen).

Wow, an oil-laden barge hit the Richmond Bridge last night (the oil-laden part is for effect, not a drop spilled apparently. But I'm going for ratings here). This particular "boat" had two tugs guiding it and still delivered a glancing blow to a bridge tower.

News here or here. The two articles disagree on the amount of oil (2,000,000 vs. 65,195 gallons) but that seems to be caused by them disagreeing on whether it was sixty thousand some odd barrels or gallons.

Now, bridges don't move. And they're pretty well marked on charts. But still, I get it. You would think that racing marks don't move either but lo and behold, the whole frickin' Olympic Circle has been uprooted. Maybe somebody took the bridges out for cleaning and put them back a few feet from where they were supposed to be. Stranger things have happened.

For example, I was out sailing last weekend. I was going over to check out Olympic Circle Racing Mark C to see how it looked after its cleaning. I went right up to it, glanced down at the GPS which said I was .37 nm away from it. Weird magnetic anomaly at a minimum. Devastating satellite malfunction most likely. Because I was right there! Not .37 nm away.

I'll end with the most important part of this post. Water-bound people everywhere, especially on my beloved SF Bay, stop hitting bridges.

2 comments:

Zen said...

Good Grief!!! What the Fudge is going on?

EVK4 said...

Zen, believe me, I know and am as exasperated as you are. A couple of years ago I sailed all around the Olympic Circle course to mark the exact spot of each mark on my GPS. Now, they're apparently up to .37 nm from where they're supposed to be.

Good grief indeed.