In Mobile Bay there are escort tugs on ships coming into and out of the bay that never cross under a bridge . There is one bridge north of the Port of Mobile that has to be crossed under to get to the Port of Chickasaw , it has barriers protecting it . A pilot tug can stop a ship going 8 kt in the distance of it,s length . While a tug might not have stopped the ship it probably would have kept it from being in the location of the channel that it got in when it lost power . Protecting and maintaining bridges in the U.S is all about State and Federal money , fixing a known problem can be put off for years due to budgets , like no barriers for the bridge when they knew it needed them . We went in and tied piling together with a concrete collar above the water line so we could put rip rap at the bottom and not knock the bottom of the piles out of line and collapse the bridge . The piles were a little over a 100 foot below ground when driven in the 60,s , the sonar data telling us how deep the washout,s around the piles were was done well over a decade earlier (early 2000,s ) . We were to put an average of 65 foot height of rip rap around the piles to build up to a certain water depth , when we used up the last barge of rock that should have completed the job we had a sonar done , we were still low in one area . We brought in more rip rap and ended up placing 100 foot + or- around the set of piles we put the collar on , you can do the math on how much of those piles were in the ground . There are planned bridges that are 20 or more years out , even many overpasses have a time line on when to be replaced or widened , they will not fix most problems until it is a have too or like this one , an oh s..t moment .
