Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge leaving two people dead

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/18/mexican-navy-ship-hits-brooklyn-bridge-during-promotional-tour

51•teleforce•2h ago

Comments

ars•1h ago

The article says it lost power, but the photo shows a wind powered vessel with sails.

Some kind of hybrid ship?

frumplestlatz•1h ago

Sailing ships generally have auxiliary engines.

SllX•1h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cuauht%C3%A9moc_(BE01)

Looks like it. It’s a sail training ship, but it has an engine looking at the infobox, presumably so it’s not relying on the sails for tours such as this, and maybe because the ship itself is for training and they need a failsafe? To be honest, I’m not gathering what the purpose of such a ship is to a modern Navy other than maintaining cultural continuity and a tradition in wind sailing.

EDIT: I'm still inside the edit window but there have been several good answers below. Rather than responding to each one individually let me just say y'all have provided some great answers. Thanks!

Tomte•1h ago

Learning the fundamentals.

Germany puts all aspiring naval officers through a tour on the Gorch Fock.

It‘s kot just culture, although those ships also serve as excellent ambassadors to far-flung countries.

nickysielicki•1h ago

The fundamentals have obviously changed. At no point in any serious engagement will it ever be important to have experience with sailing. This ship should have been dry docked and turned into a museum years ago. Two people are dead.

ceejayoz•1h ago

The fundamentals include things like teamwork and following orders. You can learn those on a sailing ship just fine.

shakow•1h ago

That sail-trained sailors make better sailors than engine-trained sailors is similar to how glider-trained pilots make better pilots after transition than engine-trained pilots. They typically acquired a better understanding of the medium they're evolving in, giving them a deeper understanding of the dynamic situation of their craft.

nottorp•1h ago

Same for being aware of the lower abstraction layers down to machine code when you're programming in a high level language.

achierius•1h ago

This incident could have happened regardless of the type of ship. Unless you have some reason to believe otherwise, I'd suggest against saying so.

raverbashing•1h ago

I suppose "not hitting bridges" is part of the fundamentals

But it's really curious how it seems those collisions have been becoming more frequent (or only our awareness of it?)

Another alternative is "the sort" working better than ever which means that maritime employment in some places does not attract the best professionals

defrost•1h ago

To be fair "can this ship clear this bridge given it's height, the time of day, the general broad area tidal conditions and the specific hyper local variations" is fundemental but far from basic.

It also raises a question as to whether the fault lies with the ship crew or with a local pilot who had local control of the ship.

usrusr•45m ago

On the videos the ship is drifting backwards, from wind and/or currents (are currents the East River dominated by tides?). I don't think that they ever intended to clear the bridge. The fundamental they missed was keeping their maneuvering engine up and running (or calling in some tugs).

detourdog•10m ago

Yes, the East river and the Hudson are both tidal estuaries. The tide has a big effect on water flow direction. I'm an in-experienced sailor but I was surprised they left with the water flowing against them.

krisoft•17m ago

It is not a case of not knowing that the bridge is too low. It is a case of not being able to avoid it and being pushed into it by winds and waves. Reportedly something went wrong with their engine.

crooked-v•1h ago

With the case of the US Navy and the well-publicized collisions with civilian vessels, it's happening more because the organization is trying to run more ships and more constant operations with fewer people than are actually required.

And that's on top of scheduling practices that are fundamentally negligent and dysfunctional to start with, like watch standers (whose job is to watch for and react to dangers to the ship) trying to perform duty shifts on 4 hours of sleep a night for months at a time.

hulitu•51m ago

> because the organization is trying to run more ships and more constant operations with fewer people than are actually required

Greed and AI will replace all workers. /s

murderfs•49m ago

Yeah, well, if you've invested 135 million euros into repairing a sailboat, you might as well put it to use...

lnsru•13m ago

Please don’t downvote this. Obviously it was money laundering operation. For the money at least 2 such new ships could be built. The journalists uncovered this years ago.

melevittfl•1h ago

Sailboats, except for the smallest ones, usually have a motor and propeller to move without relying on wind.

jabl•47m ago

Practically all sailing vessels in use (some racing sailboats etc excepted) have auxiliary engines for moving in constricted areas like ports. Considering this accident happened with people up in the rigging, they were presumably hoisting or lowering the sails when the engine lost power and they drifted into the bridge.

codr7•1h ago

I've only ever heard of two ships hitting bridges; both recently, both in the US, both lost power and drifted into the bridge.

At least this bridge fall like a house of cards, I guess because the masts broke first.

user32489318•1h ago

Not sure about the US, but in Europe it happens fairly regularly with inland freight ships and private yachts. There are wooden guardrails near the bridge pylons to limit the damage (to the bridge) specially for this reason. Statics is also quite interesting, you’d expect the heavy traffic - most accidents correlation but it seems fairly randomly distributed. “Alphen aan de Rijn” in the Netherlands is quite famous for boats hitting/removing the bridge, getting stuck, yachts taller than local houses breaking down in tight spots…

userbinator•58m ago

I think you're missing a didn't before "fall".

hiddencost•56m ago

There's a category error in the comparison.

The boat in Baltimore weighed at least two orders of magnitude more, and directly struck a column.

This boat hit a span with a basically negligible piece of wood. I'd be shocked if that shut the bridge for more than an hour.

verisimi•47m ago

> both lost power and drifted into the bridge

"Restart your computer to finish installing important updates".

aragonite•43m ago

The repair traveler [1] underneath the bridge also was struck twice and can be seen swinging pretty violently. I wonder if there was a real chance it could have broken free (& crashed onto the ship below)...

[1] https://gccom.us/project/brooklyn-bridge-traveler-replacemen...

haunter•1h ago

You can see on the video that all masts were fully manned. RIP

https://reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1kp9sxn/ship...

55555•1h ago

RIP to everyone who died. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but when you're standing on the mast, how can you not tell that you're about to collide with the bridge?

ceejayoz•1h ago

You can. You just can’t get down in time.

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