A Key followup

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Earlier this week, I saw this article in Apple News. It’s from the San Francisco Chronicle and discusses a recent report on the safety of the Golden Gate Bridge. The report is one of several reports spurred by the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse a couple of years ago. Image from Wikipedia. Spoiler: the report finds the Golden Gate Bridge safe—quite unlikely to suffer damage from the impact of a ship. This has to do with the Golden Gate’s two towers: The south tower (in the foreground) is surrounded by a reinforced concrete protective structure that a ship would have to strike and destroy before coming in contact with the tower and affecting the bridge’s integrity. We discussed the lack of protective structures around the piers of the Key Bridge. The north tower is right up against the Marin County shoreline, where the water is shallow. A large…