NutLoose

THEY HAVE HIT IT………….. THE KERCH BRIDGE
This topic is of sufficient interest to have its own thread. While what blew up does not appear to be the result of an air strike, it is of interest, militarily, due to this bridge being a logistics route in and out of Crimea. There is still a war on. Over 100 posts were moved from the usual Ukraine War thread to this one.
Some of the detailed discussion is quite interesting, thanks to all of you for your insights.
T28B

Beamr

Something went off big time, that is not your average HIMARS explosion. Or did they hit an ammo train or something?
In Russia TASS reports it is a fuel tank that has caught fire (reason for the ignition is unexplained. Maybe someone had a smoke. Again.)

NutLoose

Happy Birthday Putin..

On the top picture I can imagine the CCTV operator sitting at his desk looking at it and thinking ohhh shit should I wake Putin….



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peter we

Russian explanation looks most likely. its a fuel fire.
How it caught fire, however..

NutLoose

Finally…. Now they are screwed supply line wise it looks like both lanes and the rail line, time to sack a couple more Generals and the odd Admiral.

A fuel fire that dropped two spans of the nearby, but lower road bridge? and here was me thinking explosions tended to go up and out..

Beamr

Meanwhile the Kremlin official newspaper Rossiskaja Gazeta hasn't got a word of the Kerch bridge, though they have a big headline that at the exact moment of Nord Stream explosion a US Navy Poseidon flew by it. Interesting to see how tgey'll develop this story.

NutLoose

I wonder if the boat is any relevance or is one of the decoys? One lane left standing so the Russians can evacuate Crimea?

fdr

Yikes!
Now, that is going to take a fair bit of bog to fill in.
Crimea just lost it's eastern MSR, for the next year or so. They have...

A. Ship transfer from Novo to Sevastopol, ripe for interdiction, and maybe 3000T/day;
B. Airbridge, open to attack on airport, forget about air interdiction... 500T/day?;
C. Truck from Rostov, along the M14... which have critical bridge access, and appear to be within Ukraine ranging now.
D. what they will do

Question: what dropped the road bridge? that looks like it has been dropped at one end completely, that would take a fair bit of bang. Did a Russian smoker pop off a tank of propane or some other FAE equivalent at an inopportune time?

Ukraine needs to be getting as much SAM/AAA/ABM protection as we can muster, as Putin will not be amused by having his candles blown off the cake by a fuel train which then burns out the structure of the rail bridge, and... what ever on earth happened on the road way.

Russia needs a review of their ISO 45001 program... they really do.

Neither of the bridges is a drawbridge, there are at least 5 spans of the roadway that are out of commission. That's all happening around 100m to the EAST of the elevated span over the Kerch-Yenikale canal... just a bit to the Ukrainian side of the mid way of the waterway, in Ukraininan waters!

20driver

Hard to see a scenario where the fire on the train on the track about could lead to the outer bridge deck collapsing.The train viaduct/track is still intact.
If some of the cars dropped onto the road decks below there would lots of visible evidence so the two events are separate.
The road way collapse looks like several I have seen where the bearings/connections at the pier have failed. (Often due to poor maintenance in older structures. The Mianus River bridge is a good example. Faulty shear calculations and or bearing fabrications have dropped a few bridges as well)
OTOH - If I was going to drop a bridge deck , I would get underneath and destroy the bearing plates and connections. Not hard to do if you have access, a boat and a ladder will do, and if you know what to do. Ukraine does not seem to lack for engineering talent.
Presuming this happened , not a big deal to get up the the railway viaduct and place a few shaped charges that would blow up and puncture the tank car.
What I find interesting is the lack of traffic on the bridge. You think it would be crammed with trucks.

rattman

I think it was a missile strike and the train was just a happy accident. Maybe they bodged harpoons onto mig 29's. It could have been a truck bomb or maybe some form of remote / unmammed boat. But location at when it starts to go up for large ships to pass make that a wierd location for a seaborne charge

ORAC

Good photo from within the last 30 minutes.

Fire on the train is spreading from fuel car to fuel car and the steel and concrete of the bridge will be vastly compromised.

You can clearly see 2 spans if the road bridge have been dropped with no sign of cratering on the spans themselves - must be shaped charges rather than a missile attack - interesting the other lane wasn’t dropped.

Catching the train as it passed would suggest they charges were either set off remotely as it passed.

Beamr

Russian state media claims now that it was a TRUCK that was blown on the bridge and causing the span to collapse.

also, Russian officials are working to set up a ferry crossing over the Kerch strait.

https://rg.ru/2022/10/08/reg-ufo/nak...tomobilia.html

uffington sb

Not a good place to stop and video. If one of those tank wagons has a bleve, you’d probably get more than just singed eyebrows .

ORAC

Russian Telegram channels are sharing this video which is allegedly CCTV footage of the explosion.

The truck may be a red herring - just at the wrong place at the wrong time. If you look below the bridge in the moment before the detonation you can see a high speed boat appearing. A UKR remote?

uffington sb

Nutty. I don’t think that’s a boat tied up alongside. On GE there’s a structure that’s part of the bridge, probably for maintenance .

fdr

Russia will go nuts, about as effectively as they have previously, and will likely fire indiscriminately into civilian population centers in Ukraine. Hope everyone has their cellars stocked, and their hard hats. Attacking civilian centers doesn't change the basic situation, that Russia just lost Crimea as it stands. Ukraine didn't even need to take out the canal, which is good.

Yes, Russia can go feral, and cause more loss of status, or they can cogitate their position, and politely leave Ukrainian pre 2014 territory, or they can try to escalate by going silly. They do not have an existential threat to Russia that doesn't come from their own destruction of the Russian military, that will come back to be a problem with their other states unless they protect and conserve what is left of their forces. Going "whole hog" apart from being a bad idea for the planet, will bring forward the collapse of Russia faster than anything else. Right now, if I was an advisor, I would be texting in to Vlad, rather than visiting him on the 6th floor with the panoramic windows. The advice would be the same, leave Ukraine under a cease fire, protect the forces you have, and cobble together the states that make up the federation. Vlad has a bit of kiss n' cuddling to do there, he used up a lot of good will by using the minority states as cannon fodder. That is coming back to bite him if he continues to squander his forces on his ill considered vacation in Ukraine.

Golly!

This may not have been missiles, it could easily be charges on the bridge.

uffington sb

ORAC. But it appears under a span that’s not damaged. There’s a lot of white capped waves seen in the video.

petit plateau

If it was a missile strike then it is odd that no SAM systems went off. Videos of them would be all over social media. I'm not saying it wasn't a missile strike, but if so the absence of SAMs is most odd. An accident to a train doesn't affect a roadbridge. Which tends to leave SF operations.

It would be fascinating to see the edge of the roadbridge span that is underwater. There appears to be no damage whatsoever to the adjacent span (in photo foreground), and you can even see some undamaged bridge girders sticking out. What we cannot see are the main bearing points on the abutments either side. Hard to imagine something cleaved those abutments and didn't touch the adjacent span at all. Which leads to wondering if something disrupted the beams in the bridge deck that dropped, but that bit is now underwater. Hmmm....

The adjacent roadway bridge spans (to the side) seem undamaged. So this is a loss of 2 from 4 road lanes. The other 2 road lanes are still operable.

Whatever safety factor is left in the rail bridge after fuel tank trucks have been burning for hours has got to be questionable. If there is sufficient strength left in the railspan it'll take a while to get the train out of the way and repair the rails/ etc - and the danger pay for the train staff from now on will be amazing.

Do we have any idea how many of the civilian population are left in Crimea ? I seem to recall that Russia has stopped all males from leaving Crimea between 18-55 yrs. Some pretty large traffic jams have got to be on the cards quite soon.

Beamr

Why was the fuel train on a stand still on that spot? A freight train needs kilometers to stop to a halt.

reg. the truck, the driver must've been suicidal or made his peace with his/her maker to go on a mission like that. Ukrainians seem a lot wiser than your average suicidal bomber looking for their 72 virgins.

There must be more to this story.

petit plateau

This video (the one that is 44-sec long and is from the surveillance cameras looking East along the centreline of the road highways, explosion is at 33sec) suggest the truck was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something seems to go off in the space between the bridge pier and the bridge deck, on the Russia-bound highway (I think that is the South one). The debris that blows S-N must be something lighteweight as the wind is also blowing S>N (we can see that from the smoke on the railtanks). I think the train may also have been happenstance. Actually I am unsure, maybe two piers are carrying explosives ?

This is the ideal location for Ukraine to pick. It is undeniably in their teritorial waters. It is not in the shipping channel which a) they want open and b) they want to avoid legal hassle over).But how did explosives get there ? Not necessarily placed by Ukraine given the factional infighting in Russia ?