Go to ground.news/plainlydifficult to give it a try. If you sign up through my link you’ll get 40% off the Vantage plan, which is what I use to get unlimited access to all features. I think Ground News is doing important work and I hope you’ll check them out. ►Thanks for watching, check out me other bits! ►My new EP: madebyjohn.bandcamp.com/album/retail-simulator ►Outro Song: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/grCGgdeQ19upemQ.htmlsi=KaHhrFbCex3kJBKk ►Instagram: instagram.com/plainly.john/ ►Patreon: www.patreon.com/Plainlydifficult ►Merch: plainly-difficult.creator-spring.com ►Twitter:twitter.com/Plainly_D ►Sources: www.legalscandal.info/ls_eng/tjorn_bridge_disaster.html www.legalscandal.info/ls_eng/Star_Clipper_Tjorn_1980.pdf www.bridgesofdublin.ie/bridge-building/disasters/tjoern-bridge-sweden-1980 kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fqlzfJBel6ran6s.html

Just wanted to mention: I'm here BECAUSE of the dodgy cartoons. For people without your experience it's really easy to see a photo of a disaster and just be overwhelmed by the sheer mess of it. Your cartoons strip away all the excess visual clutter and focus on the objects at play in the scenario.

'Massive Container Ship Crashes Into Bridge' does not narrow it down as much as it should.

"Maritime induced unintended deconstruction". This strikes me as a very British way of saying a ship wiped out a bridge.

“Maritime induced unexpected deconstruction” You sir, are truly a wordsmith.

I legitimately assumed this was about Baltimore, and thought, "Damn, aren't they still figuring out how to even rebuild that?"

Yay! Swedish viewer here! Thanks for covering this! It was a huge deal when it happened. The lorry driver that parked across both lanes of traffic was interviewed and he said he had a weird feeling when he didn't see the bridge rails as he usually would. Upon driving slowly forward he realised what happened and parked across to stop any casualities from his side. I'm currently in the town Uddevalla (you did great in the pronounciation of it) you mentioned. We have road signs to Tjörn from here. :-D

Plainly Difficult still amongst the top 3 documentary channels on here. This and Brick Immortar are superb and very special experiences but totally contrasting in their approaches. Even with all the cr@p that’s on here, it shows that quality can still thrive. Thank you John Max, in a currently (thank goodness) warm and sunny Yorkshire, England.

I live i Gothenburg and I remember this disaster. One of my co-workers almost drove off the missing bridge but he managed to stop right at the edge. He saw several cars plunge into the deep from the other side, turned on his hazard-lights and started to flash his headlight to warn people coming from the mainland. If he wouldn't have seen that the bridge was gone a lot more lives including his own would have been lost.

The dodgy cartons is part of what makes the channel awesome

"lol fart" Yeah, as a Swede, that's cracked me up a few times as well haha!

"Emergency response was blamed for their lack of speed" That is because the nearest police station and police unit was pretty much 20 minutes away from the scene at the time, even at full speed for a police vehicle at the time. Also note that on the island side of things, there were ZERO police units in service. Luckily enough, there was an off duty officer sleeping on the islands, who had to get up and drive to the police station to pick up a police car and then rush to the bridge. That took a whole hour! It is true that response time would have been faster if the ship had a working radio, but the vehicles that fell off the bridge would have done so regardless as they fell off in the following 40 minutes after the accident. The last one to plunge off the bridge came from the island side of things. And there were no-one there who had noticed the bridge being out, a total of 4 vehicles fell off on the island side. The ship tried deploying a life boat to set up a road block on the island side, but the life boat could not maneuver in the ice packed waterway. And the flares did have an effect in stopping a trucker on the island side... That trucker then decided to carry on right off the edge of the defunct bridge. In short, it was all a major clusterffff and Swedish motorists learned something that day. If you see signs of something being off, something is probably off! Like a whole bridge being off it's supports.

More evidence that if you put a bridge where a ship can hit it; eventually a ship will hit it

The female reporter that did the Swedish news segment in 1981 about the accident make modern reporters look like children. It was extremely factual and sensible questions and answers where given, she also interviewed experts.

Johnny, Johnny, Johnny... I'm one of your million, but you're my one in a million. Your voice is the last and the first thing I hear every day. The greatest disastrous/nuclear/dark-sided lullaby I could imagine.

Greetings from this Swede (now living in Norway). This was a *major* thing, I wasn't born yet, but at least in my school we talked about this in several different classes and my parents (who are just as nerdy and information-hungry as me) told me about this accident while growing up. I was born in 1990, so I don't know if schools nowadays see this as something important to teach kids about, but at least it was when I was 13 or 14. Thank you for this video! It was amazing!

"Less Crashable" is going down in the annuls of history of dodgy but oh so appropriate phraseology! Congrats on the almost 1 million subs. Well deserved.

"maritime induced unexpected deconstruction" made me lol

honestly, thank you right back at you for providing so many fun, informative and laid back mini documentaries throughout the years.

those hard left and right turns really are the death blow of bridges in shipping lanes

You still have the best prononciation of Swedish names of any English speaker I follow.

I live 30 km or so from tjörn! :) I will pause the video and go get a cup of coffe for this one! Hälsningar från Sverige!

Jon: "...The time honored tradition of maritime induced unexpected deconstruction." Me: Translation-- negligence, incompetence, and/or stupidity. 😒

Just realizing you only have 9k more subs to go to hit 1 million! You deserve it dude, all your hard work and time definitely shows.

Speaking of Sweden. Would be cool to see the Hallandssås tunnel construction disaster. Horrible, but interesting nonetheless.

I also assumed it was the Baltimore bridge collapse. I always love your videos Mr Plainly

MIUD is a valued addition to the acronym catalog. Rolls off the tongue and perfectly evokes what happened.

My dad lives on Tjörn, i think about this disaster often as we drive over the new bridge. Thanks for covering!

Things crashing into bridges (ships, trucks, airplanes, trains even) seems to be a recurring theme down through history.

Greetings from Uddevalla! As others have mentioned this was a huge accident here at the time. To add, Uddevalla had one of the biggest ports and dockyards in Sweden at the time, and much of the Swedish merchant marine were holed up in the area outside Tjörn and Orust during WW2. The dockyard went out of business in the 80s.

I don't know when I sub'd, but I do miss your videos when the algo messes up and doesn't tell me you posted. I haven't paid enough attention to know if you have a schedule for videos, but I do notice if a week has gone by and I haven't seen anything from your channel. Some of the things (not many) you tell about, I have already heard about. Just, you tell a different perspective and cover things others don't bother with. The train signals, for example: you explain how they work in that area in that time, but some others have glossed over it with "it was because of a signal fault" (even if it wasn't actually the signal, but the people's fault). I hope you make it to 5million! Much love from Missouri USA

as a Swede, i didnt know about this! thank you for the interesting video! and got a good laught out of the "oh blimey" before having to pronounce the Swedish company name!

History repeats...

I certainly like my bridges to be a uncrashable as possible. So, well done with the improvements!

As a sailor worked on ferry ships for two years, hearing accident like these break my heart, so many things that can be done to avoid this, the pilot knowing the ships capability releasing anchor ordering the ship to run a ground, big ships have huge momentum so we are taught not to change/altered the engine, changing the engine speed or even reversing have a very huge chance of stalling the engine making the problem worse, big ships equal ship takes long time to respond, limited visibility means high alert watch out, using radar a watchman at the very end of the bow, communicating with everyone on the bridge what they can and cannot see, asking to have at least two tugboat to accompany, after the accident they could have turned on all the lights use the ship foghorn to warn drivers

Really cool to see one of your videos about something I saw up close, I grew up a few kilometers away from this place and actually visited the site later the day after the bridge collapsed. One minor error though, this was (as evident from the pictures), not a container ship, but a bulk loading ship.

I wonder how the ice fouled the steering? Ship steering relies on water being pumped over the rudder by the screws. It's why you can't really control a ship going backwards and you have to be turning the screws to steer (Remember, No Gear, No Steer) Maybe it's because the ice was on one side, causing asymmetric drag? So the ship no longer steams true so it limits the amount of steering you have in one direction?

Just a note, the "tj" is pronounced like the "s" in the name Sean. And "ö" is pronounced like the "ue" in the island of Guernsey.

OMG. I’m so happy for you John! I’m so happy to see so many are now appreciating your content for what it’s worth! This milestone truly snuck up on me, but I’m so happy for the community that has grown around your great channel! Please take time to celebrate such a remarkable milestone, and realize your hardworking has and continues to pay off! ❤🎉

Thank you John for continuing to make factual, intriguing, unbiased accounts of disasters around the world. Your videos are always amazing

This accident took place about 40 km from where I live. Really looking forward to hear your take on what happened. ETA Overall I think you did well with the pronounciation, a few sounded a bit odd, but I understood what you where trying to say, so 👍

As usual, great video, thanks! Some background and further details: 1) There was and still is a lot of ship traffic under this bridge, but not just to Uddevalla, but also to the much more adjacent town of Stenungsund which is the site of Swedens largest concentration of petrochemical plants. Today the commercial ship traffic to and from Stenungsund outsizes that to and from Uddevalla by a huge margin. This is still a very busy ship lane. 2) When the bridge was planned there were a lot of people arguing for a suspension bridge, precisely because of the problems of the design choosen. But suspension bridges was more expensive, and would also take a longer time to build. 3) Looking at the map at 8:59, note the shape of Källön (the island to the right from Star Clippers point of view). Back when this accident happened, the southwestern (wooded) cape of this island had a much pointier shape which protruded a lot further into the ship channel. Notice how it is now kind of chopped off ... Because a large portion of it was dredged away the year after the accident, reducing the severity of the S-turns ships have to make to get around Källön. 4) There is one silver lining in the timing of this accident. Roughly half an hour earlier a bus carrying 50+ people drove over the then still standing bridge ... 5) Already the day after the accident a couple of passenger ships showed up from a shipping company further up north along the coast. People at the shipping company heard about the accident on the news early in the morning and - correctly - assumed people on Tjörn needed to get to and from the mainland. They quickly manned a couple of ships (who were somewhat idle for the winter) and just went there and started ferrying people. There are always people around who do not need to be told what to do in an emergency. 6) The new bridge was built at record speed, it was ready to open more then six months before the planned time. And well under the budget. And as mentioned it is still standing there 🙂

1:32 Ah, the Woolwich ferry. Two things I'm pretty sure I will never see in my lifetime: a bridge in East London and the Bakerloo extension.

oh hell yeah! a new PD vid to start my morning! :D

Let's get this Brit his million subscribers!🎉

"Today we will be talking about a ship running into a bridge. No not that one. No, not that other one either!"

I love your videos but I wish you would discuss your choices in terms of the disaster scale and effects, directly.

Love your videos! I like to read the bingo card at the end. In future videos it may be helpful to leave it up just a little bit longer and then people who want to read it have a better chance to pause and compare. Congrats on getting close to 1 mill! I know you’ll make it soon!

Whoa!! That is the Tjörn Bridge disaster! I remember that one actually, it was nationwide news. Damn, I am old... Pronunciation correction: Tjörn is spoken "churn", with a softer attack on the "ch". The ö is not an o, it is actually a separate letter with its on sound. Same with å and ä.

I meet The driver of The truck that stopped. Anordning to him The road was pretty much invisible in The dark night, even With full Breams on. What made him stop was that he NO longer could se The railing. It wasnt untill he jumped out and walked to The edge that he relized The bridge was out. Also The bridge wasnt really that old when it colapsed

"Don't put bridge parts where ships could interact with them." It really took us a few decades to figure that one out, huh?

Finally someone covering this! Thank you!

John, you should used a thicker, more legible font on your Disaster Bingo Card. For those of us watching on mobile devices, the squares without yellow dots are hard enough to make out, the squares with them, forget about it.

Unplanned but not unscheduled. Thank you John!

Congrats on (almost) a million! Your charming accent and quirky technique deserve it.

You DESERVE all the subscribers ❤❤❤

You're doing awesome work. You narrate very clearly and have a wicked sense of humor. Fun to listen to....

Never heard of this “accident”. Thanks again for another great episode. You’re one of the best!

Thank you from a (currently) warm corner of Wiltshire in South-West England!

Congrats on hitting a millie! You've been by far my favorite entertainer that talks about past disasters. You got me hooked from all the past nuclear disasters and I love how diverse you've gotten since then. Look forward to more videos in the future!

Godamn, surreal to watch a video you made talking about a accident my dad was involved in. Dont remeber what job he had on that boat. Think it was mate or lookout. He retired from the sea decades later as a captain. He said he saw the cars drive of the edge, into the water and for a few brief moments you could see the lights flicker underwater. My uncle is still pissed at the swedish police, for how they treated the sailors of the boat. The sailors got isolated from each other and then interrogated about the accident, but no shrink or priest to talk about the trauma they had experienced. Just got released and told to go away.

Good luck getting 1M subs soon - you deserve it, thats good content. Thank you for that

My favorite part of this channel other then the cartoons is how clear the closed captioning is. I use them because I’m mostly deaf.

I can’t even remember when I joined this channel, but I think it was very early days. Amazing to see you jumping from achievement to achievement now!

I am from Sweden and when you named Tjörnbron I recalled that disaster immediatey but only as a faint memory of something being mentioned very long ago. Then when you said the year it happened - 1980, I got the reason for it just being a faint memory - it happened 1 year before I was born in 1981 so I probably only heard of it from some news history I happened to overhear on the TV some year/years after the disaster and also maybee my parents mentioning it sometime also when I was just a very small kid and thus I have more or less forgotten all about it now. I also dont remember reading or hearing anything about the disaster more recently then that so for me it´s just been a faint childhood memory of some bridge that collapsed. Interesting to see it covered in detail! Some more good info: a boat pilot is known as a "lots" in swedish. Skanska Cementgjuteriet means Skanska Cement castings. I think its a bit fitting they are named Skanska as in Skandal = scandal as there have indeed been some really big scandals involving that company including the Roca Gil disaster at Hallandsåsen (an event you maybee can cover in another episode) wich brought the chemical acrylamide into the entire worlds vocabulary list of dangerous substances as well as giving birth to the discovery that fried potato chips and fries also contains acrylamide (starch converts to acrylamide from high heat) wich caused a world wide panic for a while about eating fried potatoes and fried food in general. And yes speed = fart in swedish! lol! We use to say - Its not the fart that kills but the smäll = bang/impact. :)

I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been for the people who drove off the bridge. Driving normally and then suddenly falling because the road isn't where it's supposed to be

I've been waiting for someone to cover this ^^

Not a container ship this is a bulk carrier

Hi, congrats john! And thank you!

My favourite part of John's video?? Seeing the little black and white box in the top right corner prior to an ad😂 Takes me back to watching TV as a kid!!😍 #genX #gettingold

You got me! I naturally thought this was about America's most recent bridge/ship disaster -- the MV Dali hitting the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster. So glad to hear it wasn't us again. Lol

Haha,, for years I thought this was a quirky but small channel. Always interesting and witty in a way that only English people can pull off. Almost a million subs is crazy and very well deserved. Just shows that good research and zero clickbait is the best way to run a channel. Got a plan for when you cross a million??

dont ever change brother, thats how you got to 1m. been here from the beginning and ill be here til the end!

You will be pleased to know that "Skånska Cementgjuteriet" later changed their name to just "Skanska"

Super nerding out here...saw the new video upload and ran to put my Plainly D RBMK shirt on while I listen! Kind of the same idea as wearing the shirt of the band you're seeing hehe.

also, i’m so thrilled your channel is growing and almost at 1M!!! you definitely deserve it. your channel is unlike others. i found you separately to Qxir but you two are among my top 5. i enjoy putting your videos on to relax. something about your voice, your candor, the information presented easily and comfortably, makes for highly enjoyable videos. i always give your videos a like before getting through the intro because i’ve never once been disappointed with one.

Sam at Brick Immortar is superb at long form serious things like this. And, of course, this is excellent too.

As soon a I saw the thumbnail I knew what it was, as a kid I was very fascinated by this disaster as I often would travel over the new bridge. Nice video!

I remember when that happened. I was nine at the time and it was the only thing on the news for what seemed like forever. Scared me silly. I seem to remember grainy footage of car headlamps disappearing off the edge but I've searched for it and I'm unsure if it something I actually saw or if it was a nightmare that just stuck with me hehe.

If you're a fan of Swedish disasters, you might want to look into the Hallandsås Tunnel construction

Appreciate ya. Thanks for sharing.

Another banger! Thanks, P-Diff.

Good morning! Fingers crossed for that 1 millionth sub ASAP!! Cheers!❤️

Got a huge chuckle out of the "Oh blimey" at the swedish company's name.

Unexpected deconstruction always gets me. Thank you.

9:35 - I recommend that you either use checked sources or leave out translated terms altogether. The term _omvänd_ means "reverse", "turned", "inverted" or "converted," suggesting that they should make a 180° turn or flip the boat on its axis. The term you looking for is _bakåt_ ("backwards") or _backa_ ("back up, reverse").

A 2min add, on a 10min video, feels like a gut punch specially when listening as a podcast

Coming from a place that had a fairly spectacular bridge deconstruct of its own...this is great.

Congratulations on almost one MILLION!!!!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉😊

And, now you're at 992K! Well deserved!

The new bridge was inaugurated on 9 November, 1981, less than two years after the collision. It's a nearly 700m long cable-stayed bridge! That's insane. That's the video i want to see.

In these kind of nautical situations I'm always curious about how difficult would it have been to install flared out guide bumpers in the ship lane? Would something like that even work?

I love that you use the word balls whenever someone's done something wrong😅

Been watching the Bali deconstruction since it started. Really good and fast work they do

Nicely done as always!

One of Abraham Lincoln's first court cases was when the Effie Afton collided with a bridge, back when boats powered by a motor were fairly new period, nevermind managing to hit the ONLY bridge crossing the Mississippi. (theories hold that it wasnt all that accidental)

Thanks 😊

This event proves that nobody could have predicted a ship impacting a man made structure, like a bridge. MV Dali was first ship to ever do anything like that, so nobody knew bridge piers needed collision protection.

Being an American I’ve never heard of this disaster. Thanks for the video.

I find this type of disaster especially chilling for some reason. Suddenly discovering that the bridge I'm driving on doesn't go all the way across is a thing I've had occasional nightmares about since I was little. I think I can trace this to a childhood encounter with the bridge over to Deer Isle in Maine, a relatively short span that had to be built ridiculously tall in the middle so as not to inconvenience some bougie yacht club nearby.