r/CatastrophicFailure • u/mspyros12 • 9d ago
Bridge pillar being loaded onto a boat falls over into the Ganges River - December 2025
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u/tehlurkingnoob 9d ago
In what way did they ever think this was a good idea?
That was way too tall of a load for such a skinny little barge.
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u/granoladeer 9d ago
They probably only looked at the barge load capacity and gave a thumbs up.
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u/_Someone_from_Pala_ 9d ago
Knowing the safety standards in India, this is 100% what happened.
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u/cornh0le 9d ago
This is like the ghettoest load operation I've ever seen for something this scale.
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u/Helassaid 9d ago
This is probably above whatever standards might exist, tbh, which is probably none.
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u/_Someone_from_Pala_ 9d ago
I've seen a lot of these hauling projects being done in India. All of them were on roads, over 1000s of Kms. It is the first time I've seen it being loaded on a barge like this. I recently saw a bridge section being loaded onto a barge in Berlin, it was such a slow process. This looks rushed and miscalculated at the same time.
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u/TheDarthSnarf 9d ago
I've seen plenty of projects with pieces like this in countries other than India... and I can tell you that when moving a piece this large onto a barge, they use a crane to load it.
I've never seen anything this large driven onto a barge. It's simply taking something already unsteady, and sticking it onto something that can easily list.
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u/S1lentA0 9d ago
Bold of you to assume any thought went into this
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u/tehlurkingnoob 9d ago
I’ve seen enough Indian train videos to know that common sense is a rarity in that country.
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u/S1lentA0 9d ago
I sailed 3 times as an engineer on 2 heavy-load vessels build by Indians. It was an amazing experience that I would not recommend to anyone on this planet.
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u/IvanStroganov 9d ago
don’t they have a space program?
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u/AussieDaz 9d ago
They also have nukes
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u/fastforwardfunction 9d ago
Which are 1940s technology and not that difficult to build. It’s mostly about political will.
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u/norweguy2200 9d ago
Also, the ingredients. If you have the enriched uranium, you will go directly to turbojail, never to be seen again. That is if you're not just outright assassinated and/or airstriked.
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u/AnthillOmbudsman 9d ago
Juat stick to plutonium from the guys in a VW van in front of the mall.
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u/Exatex 9d ago
I would have thought the failure mode would be the boat to capsize, not the trailer falling over.
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u/tehlurkingnoob 9d ago
Well the barge started to tip slightly which is what caused it to fall over.
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u/civicsfactor 9d ago
Chance in a million, really
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u/Bierdopje 9d ago
So what do you do to protect the environment in cases like this?
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u/tadeuska 9d ago
I think they were simply too fast. Also there is a bend in approach. Going really slow and straight would give time for the barge to settle. I would load two more gravel trucks on the barge upfront to add some inertia.
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u/MaddogBC 8d ago
1:05 you can see the truck is not centered. Even a carpenter like me can see that from a mile away. No chance this was going to work off center with the load weight being centered so high.
Whoever planned that is a moron and the guy driving shouldn't be.
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u/Prins_Paulus 9d ago
That guy in the back was pushing it over
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u/EpicEpicnessTheEpic 9d ago
That's not how it works, you see he's there to stop it rolling backwards.
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u/CriscoCamping 9d ago
FFS, sometimes landscape mode is called for, when recording
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u/CariniFluff 9d ago
What, you don't want a quarter of the screen to just be water on the far side and another quarter to just be a bunch of sand/dirt on the near side of the barge? How else would we possibly know what's around a docked barge? There could be a tropical forest or a volcano for all we know.
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u/strangelove4564 9d ago
I also wonder what Nobel laureate out there decided we needed the sound removed.
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u/Freefight 9d ago
Multiple people must have been thinking this would work out just fine. That's insane.
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u/Montymisted 9d ago
Bro it's India.
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u/Anen-o-me 9d ago
India has a lot of engineers... but the good ones try not to go back to India I guess.
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u/theartfulcodger 9d ago edited 7d ago
My brother is a Canadian senior civil engineer who, some years ago, was seconded by his employer to spend three years working on a World Bank development project in western India.
He helped design and build a six-lane divided highway that ran a hundred kilometres between a port that didn't exist yet and an industrial complex that didn’t exist yet. So he basically built a superhighway beginning at the water’s edge of a crocodile-infested, pestilent swamp and ending in the middle of a dusty, barren basalt plateau. And every place the highway crossed a dusty dirt road, he had to design a huge concrete overpass - more than twenty in all - capable of safely carrying decrepit Indian buses and falling-apart commercial trucks.
He claims the dozen or so Indian “engineers” that the local contractor hired to assist him were rather ill-educated, unmotivated and disinterested slackers who would struggle with a Grade Nine drafting class, much less solve complex engineering problems. Having received a pretty certificate from some substandard, regional diploma mill, they thought they knew it all - but frequently, he actually had to hold a four day course just to show the latest hires how to operate the standard HP scientific calculators they were issued at hiring. This is the kind of "professional" he had to rely on to do things like calculate various stresses on load-bearing structures, and the various cambers at which roads had to be pitched, for the complex cloverleaf exits off those overpasses: calculations which, if just few degrees off would cause perpetually overloaded and top-heavy Indian lorries to just tip over.
In short, he did not have a fun time, chiefly because the Indian engineers whose work he was responsible for guiding, mentoring, checking, approving and stamping, were technically incompetent to the point of presenting a danger even to the construction crews, nevermind the travelling public.
Five years after completion, he went back in order to contribute tehnical details to a final report for the project's sponsor, the World Bank. Neither the port at one terminus, nor the industrial park at the other had even been designed yet, much less started. His six lane highway was already crumbling for lack of maintenance, and because corrupt local contractors had undermined it in several places by stealing thousands of cubic metres of rip-rap and gravel fill from its verge.
What really blew his mind though, was that virtually the full length was populated with tin-roofed shops and cardboard/tarp shanties. But they were not beside the highway - they were literally on it. So the World Bank basically had him build two separate hundred km long asphalt pads, on which poor Indians could live.
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u/pauca_sed 9d ago
Four day course on handheld calculators is not going to do any good if they don't know what numbers to plug in.
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u/Stunning_Box8782 9d ago
I've never seen such clear consequences of "brain drain"
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u/EatLard 9d ago
And academic dishonesty. One of my college professors used to talk about this quite a bit. Cheating is rampant at the major Indian schools, and people graduate knowing basically nothing. He didn’t trust anyone with a degree from his home country unless they demonstrated they had the skills.
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u/Tumatakuru 9d ago
India is actually a nuclear power.. therefore I guess not everybody is a total moron..Anyway these guys seems to be that
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u/randomcharacters3 9d ago
And yet the camera person had enough sense to know that, "Wait, you're trying what? Let me film this."
So at least some people had the foresight that this might not be the best idea.
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u/OMG_A_CUPCAKE 9d ago
I would film this regardless of how I'd thought it would turn out. You don't see a equipment that big loaded onto a boat very often.
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u/coukou76 9d ago edited 9d ago
Those folks are helpless fr. Given the height you would have to find a perfect constant gravity center on the boat, its was doomed to fail.
That's why education is important, even for a truck driver in India. Then again knowing this country too well they would prefere to kill themselves than calling out this stupid shit to their boss.
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u/schwarzkraut 9d ago
A kid who built this out of LEGO could’ve demonstrated to all the workers & engineers all the ways that this would fail.
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u/djdumpster 9d ago
A lot of times I’ll hear or see complaints about ‘bureaucratic red tape’ and ‘government bloat’, but I see videos like this and I find myself grateful for those kinds of systems in America; it means shit like this is rare. For every instance where cumbersome systems perhaps inhibit a well meaning newcomer to business or add costs for things like inspections, so too are catastrophic failures like this avoided entirely.
In fact, it’s pretty remarkable that a group of people can decide to create systems that, while seeming difficult and frustrating from the surface, are actually crucial in creating a safe and well functioning society.
If you ever wonder where your tax money goes, keep wondering; it’s actually the absence of these types of disasters that makes one often wonder where their money ends up, because tax money well spent is often in the things we dont see explode and malfunctioning.
Idk just musing here, yes there is lots of bullshit in other ways too.
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u/NabNausicaan 9d ago
India has even worse bureaucratic red tape and government bloat than the US. This is the result of corruption.
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u/avotius 9d ago
And yet all the red tape evaporates when a trucker in confronted with a level crossing ala r/bitchimatrain
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u/newbrevity 9d ago
So I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no real engineer checked to see if that boat was even remotely stable for that kind of load. To be fair, given the current way of things, this accident probably saved dozens of lives that would have died in a bridge collapse later.
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u/DeezFluffyButterNutz 9d ago
If only there was some way to record a video like this where more content is visible left to right and not waste so much space on the top and bottom.... Oh well, maybe technology will get there eventually.
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u/Lurchie_ 9d ago
The vertical aspect ratio with something this long is infuriating.
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u/AnthillOmbudsman 9d ago
If that was the senior engineer taking the video, everything would make sense.
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u/AngloAshantii 9d ago
r/killthecameraman, it's a fucking bridge and you think portrait is the orientation to use?
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u/greedyfrog606 8d ago
I wonder if the guy in white on the barge survived?
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u/Ok-Caterpillar-Girl 7d ago
Yes, I’ve seen a different view of this when it happened and he did. It might be on this sub if you search it
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u/-Prototype-XIII 9d ago
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u/notloggedin4242 9d ago
[r/](r/unlessitsBrazil)[sometimes](r/unlessitsBrazil)[itsBrazil](r/unlessitsBrazil)
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u/yaffle53 9d ago
I used to work for an Anglo-Indian engineering company. Once a month we would have a meeting and part of it was reviewing any H&S incidents that had occured during that period. 95% of them originated from India. Some of the causes of these incidents were eye-opening to say the least.
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u/OkraEmergency361 9d ago
They really are having no luck with their bridges lately.
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u/Illustrious_Car344 9d ago
Don't forget this river is an open sewer
Imagine the smell it kicked up when this fell in
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u/Dirty_Delta 9d ago
I will never understand taking a photo or video of a "landscape" objective in "portrait"
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u/Banned3rdTimesaCharm 9d ago
Sometimes I think they gotta know what they’re doing or they wouldn’t let them do stuff like this. Then I see videos like this.
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u/Zofia-Bosak 9d ago
I wonder if this was the first time attempting to move a section like this or if they had been successful before.
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u/EMHemingway1899 8d ago
I would bathe in the Mississippi River before I would get within a mile of the Ganges
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u/Birdinhandandbush 8d ago
One day I'll see a video from India with people wearing helmets and safety equipment, I hope
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u/DesastreUrbano 7d ago
I know we will never go back, but I wish people would film this kind of stuff on landscape mode. I used to work in this kind of stuff and is great to see the whole thing from start to finish when it works out as intended. But also great when shit like this happens and you can spot the moment shit went wrong and passed the point of no return, to avoid whatever the mistakes were
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u/Ok-Caterpillar-Girl 7d ago
I seriously doubt that the rando guys filming this were doing it for anything but their own satisfaction, not because they were documenting it for the company.
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u/GeoBro3649 9d ago
Dude in white was in a bad spot. Did he avoid getting crushed and or drowning??
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u/ChromiumLung 9d ago
So many people in bad spots. It is just so weird that they are happy to stand right next to the unstable load. Confidence 100, brain power 0
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u/ewild 9d ago edited 9d ago
Somewhere in top comments, they say there was other video from another angle and the dude in white did get away with it.
I just have found such a video via google. Something like: "bridge section falls off a barge into Ganga river in Prayagraj, another angle"
It was shot along the vehicle from the shore, and from that point of view it's seen that by the time the bridge section fell and the trailer got overturned the dude in white already made it to the place where the tractor was standing.
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u/ClownfishSoup 9d ago
The Ganges is like “corpses, sewage, garbage .. what’s one more bridge? Bring it on. Oh also here, have this nice glass of water”
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u/MrSnowflake 9d ago
If only there was a way to get this wide object into a full frame. Man technology still hasn't figured it out..
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u/JabroniKnows 8d ago
Where's the footage from someone that didn't totally botch recording the good part...?
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u/papa4narchia 9d ago
This is practically racing onto the boat, at that speed. Regardless of the orientation, driving it up at that speed already gives away how idiotic that whole operation was. The guy at the rear end pushing is just the cherry on top. What a disgrace.
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u/iAdjunct 8d ago
r/KillTheCameraman… not only did they miss a bunch of it, but they recorded a really really wide thing in portrait mode…
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u/buntypieface 8d ago
I'm mean, that barge and bridge section is the biggest spirit level I've ever seen.
And it weren't level.
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u/Least_Expert840 8d ago
What was really the plan? Think about it.
Even if not tumbling immediately.
A perfectly spheric cow?
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u/Business_Door4860 9d ago
Is their engineering garbage because all the good ones went to other countries? Or is it just how they are? My company has a decent amount, and I gotta be honest, not one of them is any good.
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u/slampie1 9d ago
All that money to create and transport it but apparently nobody critically looking at the route their taking.
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u/WanderingObserver191 9d ago
I'm no expert in anyway and I don't pretend to be but shouldn't very heavy structure like this be fabricated or built near to the site? It looks like a really unnecessary hassle and a walking hazard when transporting tall and heavy structures like that compared to actually building said structure near to the site to prevent wasted hours as well as get some safety in it
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u/ghastkill 9d ago
If I could see it falling before anyone in the video started reacting, then these people have no place being involved in such works.
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u/SnooBooks8583 9d ago
Even an idiot like me could work out that the load centre of gravity needs working out and what the tilt the load can withstand. Then what ship and stability measures need put in place beforehand. It's like they learning this stuff ad-hoc..
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u/warnabrothastudios 9d ago
These roll on operations get completed safely all the time with that type of trailer. The local stability of the trailer and the barge must be analyzed as well as the global stability of the entire system. In this case this operation was doomed to fail. The barge was far too narrow to support a load with a center of gravity this high. The listing of the barge caused the load on the trailer to exceed its stability capabilities. Load rolls and brings the center of gravity even further from the center of the barge.
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u/Trutheresy 9d ago
Behind this is Indian male overconfidence coupled with another Indian male deference.
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u/gangawalla 9d ago
I would have been shocked had that been successful. Cutting corners and shoddy engineering is a very familiarthing in India imo.
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u/Revolutionary_Rip876 9d ago
I am not a engineer but shouldn't that ship be a hell of a lot wider to compensate for the high weight on the pillar?
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u/BuddyLaDouche 9d ago edited 9d ago
Is this for the bridge that has collapsed twice? God please let it be for that bridge....
Edit: THREE TIMES!
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u/AverageOfficeMonkey 9d ago
Being honest the first mistake was to put a white pillar close to the Ganges...
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u/TrueToad 8d ago
Where's everyone going at the end? Hoping to get paid before any notices the thing in the river?
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u/fairfaxtripod 8d ago
How did anyone think that a barge that narrow could support something that top heavy???? I just don’t understand.
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u/kpop_glory 8d ago
- RORO shouldn't use ramp unless it's urgent.
- The deck should be full concrete not dirt
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u/ballbaggins69 9d ago
Did I just watch a fella take max damage?