You can, if you're prepared to pay for it. You could halt shipping while people are working on the bridge. You could make tunnels instead of bridges.
The question is simple: who will pay for it? Apparently we are ok with this kind of risk, if we weren't we would not be doing this at all.
There is a similar thing going on in my country with respect to railway crossings. Every year people die on railway crossings. But it took for a carriage full of toddlers to be hit by a train before the sentiment switched from 'well, they had it coming' to 'hm, maybe we should do something about this'. People don't like to pay for risks they see as small or that they perceive as that they're never going to affect them.
This never was about technology, it always was about financing. Financing for proper regulatory tech oversight (which is vastly understaffed) on the merchant marine fleet, funding for better infrastructure, funding for (mandatory) tug assistance for vessels of this size near sensitive structures, funding for better educated and more capable crew and so on. The loose wire is just a consequence of a whole raft of failures that have nothing to do with a label shroud preventing a wire from making proper contact.
The 'root cause' here isn't really the true root cause, it is just the point at which technology begins and administration ends.
The question is simple: who will pay for it? Apparently we are ok with this kind of risk, if we weren't we would not be doing this at all.
There is a similar thing going on in my country with respect to railway crossings. Every year people die on railway crossings. But it took for a carriage full of toddlers to be hit by a train before the sentiment switched from 'well, they had it coming' to 'hm, maybe we should do something about this'. People don't like to pay for risks they see as small or that they perceive as that they're never going to affect them.
This never was about technology, it always was about financing. Financing for proper regulatory tech oversight (which is vastly understaffed) on the merchant marine fleet, funding for better infrastructure, funding for (mandatory) tug assistance for vessels of this size near sensitive structures, funding for better educated and more capable crew and so on. The loose wire is just a consequence of a whole raft of failures that have nothing to do with a label shroud preventing a wire from making proper contact.
The 'root cause' here isn't really the true root cause, it is just the point at which technology begins and administration ends.