Severn Bridge, a Main Route Between England and Wales, Shuts as Drone Flown From Tower (bbc.com) 162
A main route between England and Wales was closed after a man climbed a bridge and flew a drone from the top. An anonymous reader shares a report: Traffic was stopped on the M48 -- the older of two Severn crossings -- because of "concern for welfare," police said. The man, in his 20s, came down voluntarily from the 47m (154ft) bridge tower and was arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance. Highways England said it was deeply concerned and that "a person has put their life at serious risk". "The incident was quickly spotted on our security cameras and reported to police and thankfully there was no injury or worse on this occasion," it said. "Appropriate security is in place on the bridge, we are liaising with Avon and Somerset Police and will be undertaking investigations to determine if any damage was caused during the incident." Police said: "Officers attended the M48 Severn Bridge at 08:10 this morning after concerns were raised for a man who appeared to have climbed one of the towers and was flying a drone off it."
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Damn helpful cops and safety laws to protect stupid people.
They're the reason we don't have nearly enough Darwin Prizes.
Re:It's a shame... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but they're not shooting their dicks off in the meat section of an Arizona Wal-Mart.
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Are you trying to imply that PopeRatzo can't have any dairy products?
Re: It's a shame... (Score:2)
Ammosexual. On the first day of the new year I learned a cool new word! Thanks!
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If there are traitorous things, sure.
If not, it was a colossal abuse by one political faction to use the gearwork of government to harm a political enemy, which is a sad thing, just like it was for Bill Clinton.
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Re:American cops... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking up traffic for hundreds of people isn't hacking and it isn't a prank. It's just being a dick and causing problems because you can.
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A few years ago this wouldn't have been a problem. Police would have just waited him out and arrested him for being stupid. But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more. They police where not acting on the drone, they where acting on the fool flying the drone.
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Quite the opposite - deaths due to terrorism by christians has gone down significantly over the last few decades. As have killed the greatest numbers by an order of magnitude or two in the UK, I'll presume that's the certain religion you're talking about.
https://researchbriefings.parl... [parliament.uk]
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Only because the spud-munchers are having a time out - a situation which may well change due that lovely Mr Farage.
Re: American cops... (Score:2)
Concentrated in a small insignificant corner of the country yes. Involved in a localized Civil War. That is not the same. They mostly killed each other and did not often kill random civilians outside of the area in which they lived. Well not much anyway.
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Concentrated in a small insignificant corner of the country yes. Involved in a localized Civil War. That is not the same. They mostly killed each other and did not often kill random civilians outside of the area in which they lived. Well not much anyway.
Yeah, they never killed any random civilians in bombings in London or Birmingham or Guildford or Manchester or...oh wait, yes of course they fucking did.
Re:American cops... (Score:4, Insightful)
But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more.
When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones.
They police where not acting on the drone, they where acting on the fool flying the drone.
Crime rates have declined dramatically since the 1990s, for reasons that have nothing to do with "policing", yet today we have more police than ever. So they have to fabricate and exaggerate "crimes" to justify the inflated cost of over-policing.
Come election day, when you receive a mailer that says a candidate is endorsed by the police chief, you should vote for the other guy.
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"When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than dornes"
Absolutely true. In fact, pressure cookers are a far bigger risk than recreational drone flying (3 dead, hundreds injured by pressure-cooker bombs in the Boston Marathon attack) -- so why is it that in most countries, people owning drones weighing more than 250g have to be registered yet people owning pressure cookers don't?
This incident, plus the Gatwick one shows that the hysteria over "dangerous drones" has reached unacceptable and
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The article doesn't say how the person was flying the drone but it is possible to fly it so that it pops in front of someone's windshield causing them to make an unexpected motion such as slamming on the brakes or swerving into another lane. Just think of how people behave when a bird flies too close to the car.
The article doesn't say what type of drone was being used so we don't know if it was a small one under 250 grams like you assume. It could have been a larger one with a camera attached. Maybe he want
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There are countless cases when a corrupted official with a modest official salary built himself a palace hidden behind a high wall, or a respected businessman pours into a river contaminated waste to gain more profit, and so on and so forth.
Now all this dirt instead of being well hidden is being filmed and published readily avail
Re: American cops... (Score:2)
Sounds much like the hysteria about nuclear plants. Question: how many people died because of Fukushima? Answer: Zero. None. Zip
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it is possible to fly it so that it pops in front of someone's windshield
ANYTHING is "possible". It is possible that the bridge will be struck by a meteor next week. So should we close it, you know, just in case?
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I read that there are still in England the aristocratic lords living in luxury castles placed in vast fenced parks.
Yes, absolutely, England is currently the only country in the entire world with extremely wealthy people living there.
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When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones
What was he using the drone for? What if he was using the drone to scout out soft targets to shoot at? Granted, he probably wasn't but you can't be sure. Again, this isn't about the drone. It's about the idiot flying the drone. The drone just just small part of a bigger issue.
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What if he was using the drone to scout out soft targets to shoot at?
Why would he need a drone to do that?
Again, this isn't about the drone. It's about the idiot flying the drone.
Actually, it is about the idiotic over-reaction by the police. That is what made this newsworthy.
The drone just just small part of a bigger issue.
The bigger issue is that we have way too many police, and they don't have enough real work to do, so they go around manufacturing crises.
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But with the increasing body count from the followers of a certain religion you can't be that way any more.
When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than drones.
The problem here isn't the risk of terrorism on the M48 Severn crossing, rather the risk of some idiot falling out of a bridge tower (or throwing himself out) which would shut down the motorway for hours here in the UK. Although this might explain why the M4 was so clear on the 31st... Everyone was using the M48.
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Nothing to do with terrorism. They have been doing this for years every time some kid starts throwing stuff off motorway bridges.
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Interesting... Is the troll mod for suggesting that it might not be Muslim terrorism?
Is Islamic terror really some kind of blanket that snowflakes cling to to justify their hatred to themselves?
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Interesting... Is the troll mod for suggesting that it might not be Muslim terrorism?
Don't be silly. Of course that is what it is. You dare to insult or even imply an insult to the lefts favorite barbaric superstition. Just look at how many jump to defend even an implied insult the muslim pedo based cult. But are more than happy to bash christan based superstition.
Fucking hypocrites the lot of them
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That'd be Christianity, would it? Most American terrorism is from rabid redneck Christians attacking people who differ from them in skin-colour, religion, or which bits of their body they rub against other people for fun.
Re: American cops... (Score:2)
Well, since you are on the subject of child molesting pedophiles... the catholics have a bad score in that department. It is really a little ethically dubious to judge Mohammed on his behaviour according to the cultural norms in the 5th century. The west was not any better at the time.
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Well, if you believe that a 500g drone (Score:2)
can destroy a 100 ton airliner, why wouldn't you believe that it can also destroy a bridge?
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This! Exactly how is a quad copter going to damage a bridge?
I think the concern would be that the (drunk?) drone pilot might fall off the bridge and injure an innocent car driver or cause an accident when someone swerved to avoid the body.
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Wait are you talking about the person or the cops? Because I honestly can't tell.
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Computers (Score:3)
But buying a computer and posting on forums isn't?
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Because you just take it out of a box and put batteries in it and use it to create Youtube videos for revenue.
That bird has flown. It's difficult enough to monetize YouTube videos even if you're producing content people want to watch. Without the knowledge and luck required to become a successful content producer, a drone will just be tits on a bull.
Video game streaming is the same way - a few people do make money doing it, but the majority don't.
Re:American cops... (Score:5, Insightful)
But only to a point. Nice to meet you, idealism. I'd like to introduce you to my friend, reality.
Huge numbers of people rely on public infrastructure. There are rules that govern how people behave in public spaces, since the actions of one person can have a bad effect on large numbers of others. An irresponsible drone operator on a bridge could easily crash a quadcopter into a car, leading to a chain of accidents that could result in death. This guy clearly needed to be arrested and slapped with a fine large enough to deter him from doing it again.
Make public rules too loose, and the result is chaos that renders expensive infrastructure useless. Make public rules too tight, and you restrict personal freedoms of movement and expression. Yes, there is a sweet spot in the middle. No, we haven't quite found it yet for drone operation. Using a public bridge like a personal jungle gym, however, is firmly in "idiot" territory.
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the result is chaos that renders expensive infrastructure useless.
That is what happened in this case ... except it was the actions of the police, not the drone operator, that caused the problem.
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It is a shame that people are not able to fundamentally grasp that the government is in the wrong here. No wonder government constantly oversteps its bounds, people are just so used to letting police overreact to every little thing.
Many places have had to write laws to stop police from automatically starting a grand chase if a person they are chasing is not shown to be an immediate & serious risk to everyone around them. Instead get the plate and track them down later. Too many times police will unne
Re:American cops... (Score:5, Insightful)
When the cops chase a speeder and cause an accidental death, people decide that cop chases are the root of all traffic accidents. This only makes sense if you ignore the fact that speeders cause tons of death themselves.
When an ultra-rare adverse immunization event causes a death, people conclude immunizations are evil. Forget the fact that immunization has been absolutely proven to save more lives than..... well, pretty much anything else, with the exception of perhaps antibiotics.
Seat belts occasionally decapitate someone, so some idiots conclude that seat belts are fascism. Seat belts actually save tons of lives? Irrelevant! One guy died from them and that makes people mad.
Some teenage monkey with social media on the brain and wwwwwaaayyyy too much testosterone in his veins climbs a public bridge and launches a drone. The cops close the bridge in order to deal with it safely. Your conclusion - cops are bad! Possibility he might fall? Drop something onto a car below? Gawkers create a multicar pile-up in the middle of the bridge? Cops or safety workers might get hit by a car while dealing with the situation? Nah, all irrelevant. Most people don't like being told what to do and everyone has seen a Youtube video of some guy being abused by a cop! Screw The Man!
We're not islands. We live in large social groups. We're governed by a complex, evolving, imperfect set of rules that allow *most* of us to get along *most* of the time. Occasionally the rules are arbitrary or just plain wrong and lead to stupidity. When that happens, people need to call out the flaws in the rules so they can be modified. Cops aren't perfect, and authorities sometimes make bad calls. The cops probably called this one right. Hard truth: occasionally your freedom to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, gets curtailed in order to keep you from putting 150 people around you in danger. That's what happened here. Boo hoo.
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When the cops chase a speeder and cause an accidental death, people decide that cop chases are the root of all traffic accidents. This only makes sense if you ignore the fact that speeders cause tons of death themselves.
Nonsense. Nobody is saying we should just let people speed. But there is also no need for cops to chase offenders at high speed through residential neighborhoods. The proper thing to do is to run the plates, and go arrest the guy while he is watching TV later than evening.
Same thing with the guy on the bridge. One cop could have waited at the bottom of the tower and arrested him when he descended. There was no need to involve half the police force and inconvenience thousands of people. They only did t
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Don't you think arresting someone whose car's been stolen is adding insult to injury?
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It is a shame that people are not able to fundamentally grasp that the government is in the wrong here.
They would be if it were true. But the reality is that a person had climbed a structure not meant to be climbed and posed a danger to himself and the people underneath it. In what world does closing the bridge until that person is off the structure not seem like the normal response?
There's nothing wrong with protecting the life of stupid people as well as those they may impact (if he fell). The fact that a drone was involved is clickbait and irrelevant.
Too many times police will unnecessarily escalate situations complicating matters in ways that just are not necessary to resolve the problem.
They reduced risk at the cost of a bit of traffic. A te
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In what world does closing the bridge until that person is off the structure not seem like the normal response?
The more sensible one that your parents grew up in. The one before 'out of an abundance of caution' became a thing. When more sensible people balanced public safety with public inconvenience and did not always shut down entire cities or highways or airports because an unplanned paper airplane was launched.
Everyone is so afraid now. Is it the fault of the helicopter parents who raised the current generation who never let the kids play out of their sight? Now those same overprotected kids have grown up and ap
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The more sensible one that your parents grew up in.
Horseshit. People have been closing roads due to risk from climbers for as far back as anyone can remember.
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How is that any different than on a [street|highway|parkinglot|freeway|interstate|tunnel|parkway|train|etc]?
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What people need to realize is there is no singular sweet spot. No perfect balance which results in the optimal outcome for all cases. Any level of restriction you pick will be too much in some scenarios, not enough in others. So no matter what sweet spot you pick, nay-sayer
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the world doesn't need more pranksters, particularly pranksters who think their mission is to wreck other people's lives. consider what the role of the trickster in society was, a thousand years ago, and then ask yourself if we need an entire society of pranksters constantly trying to shock everyone into thinking differently. the role is popular with teenaged boys because wrecking someone else's shit is empowering. it's why there are so many games about being an assassin.
nobody ever got rich with a video g
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They probably would have just shot down the drone, anyway, and then gave the drone pilot a fine for flying it in an unauthorized area if they were feeling extra mean.
It's still better than shutting down traffic on a major interstate and creating a headline news story about it, anyway.
GIFT for drones (Score:2)
There must be a quad-copter owners' version of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory... DOFT?
Drone seems incidental here... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it's the hot thing to bring up drone related closings - but in this case, wasn't the road closed because there was some guy far above it that might have fallen or dropped things on the road from above, rather than the drone being a factor?
The drone doesn't seem to be a reason for the closure, at all.
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I was thinking the same thing. I can understand shutting down an airport because the drone can actually cause damage to an airplane motor or other sensitive parts, but shutting down the bridge in this case seems like something you'd have to do anytime there's people around.
Re: Drone seems incidental here... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the "drone" aspect was just played up as clickbait due to the recent (alleged) drone incident at the airport.
Click Bait (Score:2)
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The funny thing is, I was also thinking about alternate headlines - but they aren't really that much less interesting!
I actually would read about a guy climbing to the top of some really well known bridge, the drone factor adds that extra twist for sure, but the basic story itself is still unusual enough I would be interested (as I've read before about people climbing to the top of the Golden Gate bridge for example)..
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Would you bother to read 'Bridge closes when man climbs to top'?
Because it is a major bridge (one of the two motorway bridges into South Wales), and taking your "you" to mean me I use this bridge most days.
Geeze (Score:2)
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Well SirAsshole - if this asshole (a relative perhaps?) had fallen from the tower onto the road below and caused a bus full of school kids to swerve and crash you would probably be saying something different.
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Meaningless whatifism...
The same could have happened to a sick person walking on the side walk and stumbled into the street as well. Are you going to write a law and hire a legion of police enforcing that law and removing infirm people from the side of the road?
As usual someone like you failed to understand... it's not the enforcement of the law that is being "assholed about here" it is folks like you more than willing to let government run amuck in response to someone doing something more inconvenient and
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Would be much cheaper if government just ignored this slob or waited for him to come down an arrest him without all of this "over reactive BS".
Would it be cheaper if he fell? Hit a car causing a chain of accidents that took hours to clear and closed the bridge for a significantly longer time?
Check yourself before you wreak yourself man. That anti-government anger vein on your forehead looks like it's about to burst.
Drones always close down British infrastructure (Score:1)
I once had a dream about a drone. I called the Mayor of London to tell him and he closed down the entire city for 6 days!
We Brits take our drones very seriously.
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Jeri Ryan once visited London, they closed down the city for a week.
Over-reaction (Score:4, Insightful)
If the guy climbed it with a rifle strapped to his back then, sure, take some precautionary steps.
Shutting down traffic because someone is flying an RC aircraft from the top of a bridge ?
Really ?
That stupid decision caused far more problems than it solved.
If the drivers there are anything like the ones in the States, they would not have noticed it in the first place because they are usually staring at their phones.
I swear half the planet is terrified of their own shadow these days.
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Stuff dropped into fast roads is very dangerous. A drone could do quite a bit of damage if hit at speed. Even something that wouldn't do much damage can cause people to swerve.
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Dropping a rock would do more damage than a light weight plastic drone
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Assuming it's a light weight plastic drone. Obviously the police are not going to risk it being something more substantial until they have actually made that determination. Maybe it's different where they are but they have a legal obligation here, it comes under health and safety laws.
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Assuming it's a light weight plastic drone. Obviously the police are not going to risk it being something more substantial until they have actually made that determination. Maybe it's different where they are but they have a legal obligation here, it comes under health and safety laws.
The danger is surely from a falling 100 kilogram meatsack, not a featherweight plastic toy?
Shutdowns are normal for this type of thing (Score:3)
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If the guy climbed it with a rifle strapped to his back then, sure, take some precautionary steps.
Shutting down traffic because someone is flying an RC aircraft from the top of a bridge ?
How do you know if he had a rifle? While we're at it, what makes you think the drone was in any way involved. I'll bet you a Marsbar that if you climbed the bridge without anything on you they'll still stop traffic until you're done. That's kind of text book scenario.
That stupid decision caused far more problems than it solved.
What? Reduced the chance of a chain of potential injuries / fatalities if someone managed to fall from somewhere they weren't supposed to be onto moving vehicles below? All in exchange for some slow commuter traffic? Even if the UK wasn't a nat
Model Airplane incident (Score:2)
When I grew up these incidents where called model airplane incident. When did they renamed them drones? I know this is off topic, but it is new years eve. Time to become nostalgic.
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When did they renamed them drones
When they took all of the skill out of it.
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Remote control airplanes and helicopters still exist. Drones, as this article talks about, are a different thing. They have a body with multiple, usually four, rotors attached to to the sides.
In general drone is just a shorthand for an unmanned aerial vehicle which includes all of the small hobby things and the big aircraft that are typically used by the military.
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so the model airplane I had as kid could go a lot faster than these stupid things making it more dangerous.
yeah, let's all panic over this toy flying from a bridge tower
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Yeah, but it takes a lot more skill to fly. These drones (quad/hex/whatevercopters) are the September that never ended for the RC aircraft community.
When I was learning to fly RC, I was buddy-cabled to an experienced RC pilot and he drilled in all the relevant safety info while we only flew at a designated RC field.
This idiot probably got the drone for Christmas, tried it out and said "wowee that's easy to fly" and immediately went somewhere he wasn't supposed to and did something he wasn't supposed to.
Sept
Someone wants more anti-drone regulations (Score:3)
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
Looking more and more prophetic and correct by the day.
Pics or it didn't happen (Score:2)
The only reason for flying the drone was for the "epic" selfie he'd post to the soc-nets. Only reason the BBC mentioned the drone was so they could add a few paragraphs about the airport incident before Christmas.
It's like the media elites don't want the rest of us invading their airspace. They paid big bucks for those helicopters and here you come with your Mavic Pro. Better make them illegal so the 'beeb can go back to their monopoly on TV.
practicing for a hard brexit? (Score:2)
On March 29, the UK will shoot itself in the foot. A well rehearsed drone campaign with disruptions to infrastructure and transportaion networks could insure that the wound festers properly.
He's doing it wrong... (Score:2)
You're supposed to have the drone fly up to the top of the towers so that you don't have to climb up to get the photo.
Its the new planking (Score:2)
Not the first time it's happened (Score:1)