Originally Posted by
petit plateau
Regarding the train: in the centreline roadway video we can see that the train is stationary, not even slowly moving. In the long distance shots we can see that the now-burning train has no locomotive attached. My best guesses is that i) less likely, they are short of locos and parked the tank train there overnight as it ought to be a SAM-protected area, or 2) more likely, the train was waiting at signals to proceed, but that the loco driver then sensibly got him/herself out of there.
Regarding the source of explosion : either explosives placed on the piers or one+ of those fancy boats. Given the size of the blast(s) I tend towards the boat(s). Something like that can carry a tonne or so of explosive and with the right sort of charge shaping the effect would be upwards. The sensor set on the boats washed ashore includes some things that would enable the necessary precise positioning. That in turn tends to suggest a Ukraine job, rather than an internal faction within Russia. I am also tending towards just one device with the multiple spans being dropped just being shockwave effects, that would account for the clean road-deck end in one of the stills.The damage to the adjacent road carriageway deck was happenstance imho. Whether they always park tanktrucks at that point overnight is something I am sure intel would have been aware of, and might have played a part in precise target selection, who knows. Nice coincidence mind you
Putting enough bang in place while there is CCTV would be a neat trick, or local talent, which is not beyond the pale. There will be some Russians that will not grieve the loss of the Crimea bridge, it may save their lives.
The video along the road way supports a shock that is from under the structure of the road spans, and, IIRC, most spans are located on plates and are free to slide for expansion joints normally, so are able to be lifted off a buttress, like the SFO and LA earthquakes. Parking a full set of tanks on a bridge, with carriages uncoupled from any loco, is loco. The engineers are going to be spending a fair bit of time thinking through the damage of the rail bridge structure, The closeups will be interesting to see if there has been any distortion to the structure, the rails are a given. Those tanks with wind underneath were pretty good furnaces.