But that's what you do with random events -- create policies to prevent them from happening, lowering the incidence rate and minimizing damage once it occurs. Which is exactly what government and laws are all about.

That is a generous reading of the parent comment.

It sounded much more like a common trope, "the do-nothing government just lets things fail, doesn't take action until something fails".

The amount of arm chair quarterbacking here is astounding. Reddit has a more nuanced conversation than HN right now.

A bridge got hit by a container ship at speed and folks here are talking about this like the bridge was not up to standard, or why there was a bridge there at all when they know nothing about the locale. I am not a structural engineer, but I am going to go ahead and guess that not much would still be standing from a direct hit from a container ship. And from observation bridges like this exist all over the world and don’t regularly get struck by container ships.

It was a freak accident.

If we want to point fingers or question things, perhaps if anything the question is why the container ship lost power repeatedly? Was this a known issue before leaving port?

German Wikipedia has an article on ship deflectors. What is says there is that ship collisions were viewed an an inevitable hazard until the 1980 collapse of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa. That was 45 years ago.

Trying to search for "ship deflectors" or whatever just brings up pages and pages of Star Wars shields and such in English.

I know they exist, and perhaps after this they'll exist a bit more.

> A bridge got hit by a container ship at speed and folks here are talking about this like the bridge was not up to standard, or why there was a bridge there at all when they know nothing about the locale.

You're right, I don't. But I do know there are other locales where they seem to explicitly avoid bridges crossing heavy ocean traffic.