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1 year agoBridges are actually pretty difficult to take out if you can’t get in to hit specific weak points and if you’re willing to just keep running the risk of crossing over damaged bridges and maybe lose everything on it.
It’s exacerbated by the Black Sea being a relatively gentle body of water, so even if you pop the top, it might slam back down in such a way that’s it’s still usable and because there isn’t as much perpendicular pressure from the sea or wind, it’s easier for it to just kinda settle there and just slowly degrade away rather than collapse into utter non-functionality all at once.
No, I meant it in a completely serious way. The explosion might be been powerful enough to lift the decking of the bridge straight up and sheared a lot of connection points in the girder and headers, but depending oh how much force was directed perpendicularly, it might have just caused it to slam down on top of the caps and pillars and just sit there with a really bad weight distribution.
In terms of functionality, that sort of damage is better compared to maybe a cracked windshield, as an analogy? You can keep trucking along and maybe everything will be fine, but the overall structural integrity of the windshield is now in a much riskier state. Any further strikes could cause further destabilization radiating outward from the flaw or worse, the continued use could be causing the material to continually weaken as stress points are flexed over and over and over and over. Similar to how if you bend a stiff piece of metal back and forth, it gets looser and eventually snaps.
The photos Russia themselves published show levels of damage that would take, at minimum, days to weeks to fix back to perfect assuming you’re running everything as an emergency 24/7 rush job, and realistically more likely months since you’re not likely to have a super dense civilian engineering firm able to just instantly slide into place. The more likely case is that Ukraine caused damage that drastically weakened that section of the bridge, but didn’t hit it in such a way as to do much more reduce the weight load that can go over or it alternatively drastically shorten the lifespan of the bridge without major repair. That seems pretty consistent with what you’d expect out of a drone bomb blowing up under the bridge, rather than something coming in and hitting it from the side, like a missile or something impacting from the top down.
Russia is leaning on the thought that the patch job will hold longer than the state of hostilities and that they can do more long term repairs once things have cooled off some. But for now, supplies NEED to be run over that bridge, so fast patch and reduced weight and lifetime is the cost they pay.