Baltimore bridge collapses after being struck by cargo ship
The Francis Scott Key Bridge along I-695 in Maryland collapsed into the Baltimore harbor following a “ship strike” early Tuesday morning, setting off a search and rescue mission for those who plunged into the chilly waters.
A livestream of the bridge at about 1:30 a.m. showed a cargo ship colliding with a support beam, causing the bridge to break apart and fall into the Patapsco River. Multiple vehicles were on the bridge at the time, but no update on casualties has been offered.
Eight members of a construction crew that was doing routine work filling potholes on the bridge fell into the water, Paul Wiedefeld, secretary of the Maryland Department of Transportation, told reporters. Six of these members were unaccounted for, while two were rescued. One of the rescued members was in the hospital, while the other refused treatment.
When asked about how many vehicles went into the water and the condition of those people that were in the vehicles, Weidefeld said no information was available at this time.
If this had happened in the daytime, I’m fairly certain the toll would have been much greater.
I know next to nothing about bridge design or the navigation of cargo ships. But when I heard this news, I wondered whether there’s a way to make bridges less vulnerable to a single strike such as this one. Here’s a relevant article:
The bridge did not appear to have pier protection to withstand the cargo ship crash, according to a professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Professor Roberto Leon, of Virginia Tech, said he reviewed the video of the crash Tuesday.
“If a bridge pier without adequate protection is hit by a ship of this size, there is very little that the bridge could do,” Leon said.
Maryland recently retrofitted another bridge with pier protection devices for about $100 million, he said.
It’s expensive, but the price would pale in comparison with expected losses from the damaged bridge, including additional miles driven, fuel and business costs, he said.
Yes, but this sort of event is highly unusual, isn’t it? And since no one could predict which bridge would be hit, the protection retrofitting would have to be done for every bridge. It still might be worth it, though – and my guess is that the ultimate cost of last night’s collapse could definitely include lawsuits by families of the dead and injured.
The cargo ship is reported to have lost power before hitting the bridge. Of course, a ship can’t stop on a dime even with no power; it will keep going for quite some time.
The ship’s crew issued a mayday call moments before the crash took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge, enabling authorities to limit vehicle traffic on the span, Maryland’s governor said.
It appears to have been an accident, but I’ve seen plenty of chatter online speculating otherwise. I subcribe to the accident explanation.
This bridge was completed in 1977, and lacked the protective designs which began to be built after the collapse of the bridge over the entrance to Tampa Bay in 1980. Retrofitting costs about $3 million per pier, but that should be worth it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13240663/Engineers-blame-structural-fault-protected-Francis-Scott-Key-Bridge.html
I believe this is a video of the same or a very similar MAN B&W 9S90ME-C9.2 — 9 cylinder low-speed diesel 2-stroke crosshead engine which is said to power M/V Dali (5:08), and which appears to have failed in some as yet unknown respect: https://youtu.be/kuEHNCIBH9o?si=AnoKZRHUNozYNxn5
The only question I have is why a ship of this size in such a narrow water way – and having a bridge span that waterway – is not required to have tugboats guide the ship out into more open waters.
According to reports, it was under tug control as it left its berth, and the tugs had been disconnected because it was past the place where guidance was needed. The problem appears to be a loss of power and therefore steering control.
JohnTyler and Kate,
It seems a near certainty tug guidance until beyond the bridge will be the protocol at this port going forward. Although it is also a near certainty that the replacement bridge will have very well protected piers.
Port authorities in NC (Wilmington, Morehead City) are pointing out to shipping company inquiries that access to both ports does not require going under bridges.
Here is an article which claims that this was a deliberate, very well planned, and executed attack.*
As with many incidents over the last few years–decades?, the loss of trust in the authorities and what they tell us is the truth is so great, that many of use will probably never be able to trust that, if these authorities declare that it was an “accident,” it really was an accident.
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/was-it-accident-lara-logan-intel-sources-claim/
Sal Mercagliano is holding a youtube livestream Q&A beginning at 8:00pm tonight, right now, with a guest ship captain along to help inform: https://www.youtube.com/live/b-t5EZov7b0?si=viOMzj9f07fDcarV
As Kate notes, you can protect the towers to a point, but most ships of this size need to be under the central span to avoid hitting the bottom of the spans. Make a bridge taller, and engineers will just make taller ships. Consider Royal Caribbeans newest ships have exhaust stacks that can be lowered to get under certain bridges.
It used to be ships this big had to have tugs navigate them under the bridge, but then ships were built with bow and stern thrusters that did the work tugs would do. They were considered safer than ships that needed tugs. However, tugs are not just thrusters but alternative power sources, then again, they can lose power too and possibly drag a vessel.
Tunnels tend to be the better solution.
A procedural barrier in the oil and gas business, ships that have “dp” dynamic positioning (the ability to hold station on their own) have to prove the system is fully up and functioning before approaching with 500m of an offshore platform. Maybe a little more rigor in checking the vessel’s operation before setting sail?
More info here: https://www.marinesafetyforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Marine-Operations-500m-zone-guidance.pdf
Overall, this is why NTSB tends to wait a year to provide final reports on incidents. The best fix will depend mostly on the root causes. Lack of protection of the bridge can be a cause, but I think many will focus on what caused the vessel to lose power and navigational control.
Look at the photograph. It’s like an army tank ramming a children’s swing set.
https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/03/918/516/Baltimore-Bridge-Collapse-Photo-16.jpg
It’s not a swing set problem.
I’m asking Casey Stengel’s question about the 1962 NY Mets:
____________________________
Can’t anybody here play this game?
____________________________
Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention but I don’t recall these big screw-ups with big ships in the past.
There are several reports that this particular ship had a troubled history.
I presume, but do not know, that the ship was single screw, with no propulsion redundancy.
It seems a bit sketchy that such ships passing under such a strategic bridge would not be required to at least have a tug escort.
If propulsion, and backing power, were lost their options were problematic. You can not drop anchor with any way on, or you will lose the anchor. Of course the water depth can also be a factor. I imagine that circumstances surrounding the decision not to use the anchor will be addressed.
Ironically, pictures of the immobile ship under the bridge wreckage show the anchor deployed.
I was in the carrier John F. Kennedy, and once the bridge miscalculated whether the ship was absolutely DIW, and lost an anchor with all of its chain. It was recovered in a touchy operation by a repair ship with divers and cranes, but very, very embarrassing in a foreign port.
“. . . the decision not to use the anchor will be addressed.”
Sal Mercagliano has reported that the portside anchor was deployed while underway, but without effect, as to be expected. So.
“I know next to nothing about bridge design or the navigation of cargo ships. But when I heard this news, I wondered whether there’s a way to make bridges less vulnerable . . . .” [Neo]
Bridges are a balance of tension and compression. The forces are focused on the piers (and uprights) and anchored on either end. If you look at photos of the Francis Scott Key bridge before its collapse, it looks like a bridge bulit on a pair of stilts. It wasn’t a bad design since the bridge stood for almost 50 years, but it was a vulnerable design (think World Trade Center).
There was a game we used to play. We balanced ourselves on one foot on an empty soda pop can, reached down and touched both sides of the can with our fingers; the can would immediately collapse and compress underfoot. It was strong enough to hold our weight until the sides (the structure) were compromised. From the tape of the accident, that is what appears to have happened today. Struck from the side on one of the piers (stilts) the stresses in the bridge were no longer evenly distributed and this imbalance brought down the entire structure.
To make bridges less vulnerable build piers less susceptible to side impacts (not “stilts”) and keep shipping traffic away from those piers.
I am kind of surprised the ship was stopped by running into the piling, rather than right through or over it. But perhaps it ran aground on its deeper foundation (if there was no ground build up leading up to the support structure)?
The bridge structure laying across the bow does not seem robust enough to “capture” the ship and hold it in place (by itself) if it did not run aground on something.
But 8 knots is a pretty slow speed.
Of course.
Biden said yesterday that he traveled on the rail line over the Key Bridge many times.
There’s just one leetle problem with Biden’s statement.
As anyone who has traveled over this bridge can attest, this bridge was built for and only carried car and truck traffic, there is no rail line crossing over on this bridge.*
Will the MSM call Biden on this obvious lie?
I doubt it.
P.S. How can you tell if Biden is lying? Does he have an obvious “tell?
Yes, when he opens his mouth.
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/old-joe-biden-says-he-took-train-across/
It might not be possible to predict. Except we do know where cargo ships of that size go. Like 12 ports. Not every bridge needs it. Just those that have routine passage by ships that big.
Leland @ 8:14 p.m. points out very sensibly that a primary focus of investigation will be on why the ship lost power and control. Uninformed people, like me, tend to think of these large ships as pretty reliable, or they ought to be.
Snow on Pine,
That’s Joe Biden. He centers everything and anything that happens onto himself. When there is no correlation with him or his life he fabricates one.
The truth shall set you free. We are seeing lies, as our President would say, will put us all back in chains.
Except that people died:
“The Front Fell Off”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
Design of bridges and structures (use of pilings (stilts) for foundations) always comes down to what is feasible and affordable for an acceptable level of risk (safety factor).
It’s no accident that “prudent” and “paranoid” start with the same letter.
Sort of in that spirit I looked at the area of the port and further south on Google Earth.
Couple of notes; there’s one more bridge to get out of the Chesapeake. It carries US50 onto the Delmarva Peninsula. If it went down, a lot of people would be seriously inconvenienced. But it’s not a long-haul or interstate route.
Other crossings are tunnels.
By the wildest coincidence–looks around, there are no coincidences–I discovered there is such a thing as a forensic electrical engineer. Just this morning.
So there may be an investigation as to timing. What mechanisms crashed and why? But, since “coincidence” necessarily includes “coincide”, why did the timing in this collection of failures coincide with the bridge catastrophe? Could have happened while they were warming up the whole thing prior to unmooring. Or once past that and the US50 bridge, there’s a lot of Bay in which to lose control and, presumably, drift gently aground. Or maybe in the middle of an Atlantic storm.
What, given the failures, would be the distance upstream of the bridge at which corrective action could have avoided the collision? Given the momentum involved, probably pretty far in terms of getting stopped or otherwise aided to avoid one or another disaster. But, still, finite.
Presuming hitting the bridge wasn’t on the program for the evening, what are the distances involved when a ship is down bound which don’t involve hitting the bridge? The depths range, according to google earth, up to 16 meters in some places, considerably less in others. IOW, how big is the notional channel the ships was presumably aiming for? Hundred meters wide, three hundred? I further OW, why be on the path which, if not corrected, would hit the bridge? Or what would bring the unpowered ship into contact with the bridge if not initially headed there? Is there a planned course adjustment known to harbor pilots for some perfectly good reason? And they didn’t get there before loss of maneuvering?
There is likely a pretty good outflow from the river(s) feeding the Bay. I’m sure it reacts to the tides, but it’s a long way from the open ocean and that may cut the likelihood of anomalies, especially that far up. Still, is there a possibility that a ship not under power can be pulled toward the bridge?
I ask these questions in terms of likelihood. That means some version, if only short of Stat101 for non-majors, of probability theory.
A number of unlikelihoods have to coincide, and do so just right considering the timing involved, for this to have happened. I mean, among other things, if it’s going to hit a bridge, there’s another one, so it’s only a fifty percent chance to hit this one. Go on from there.
From what others have said regarding hazmat–which apparently covers a lot of ground–cargoes not using tunnels, there’s a pretty long and inconvenient detour before returning to I95 MIght well include surface streets. The cumulative difficulties might–I’d say this as having no experience with commercial trucking–mean finding some other route altogether.
What a mess.
Possibly contaminated fuel has been identified as a possible source of the power loss.
One thing I don’t understand: Apparently, the loss of propulsion was coincident with the loss of electrical power. I thought ship’s electrical systems ran off generators which were separate from the main engine(s)…even if it was a fuel contamination problem, it seems very unlikely that the bad fuel would reach both the maiin engine and the generator at the exact same moment.
There is posdef a cost-benefit analysis, but also consider — you can pretty much bet that terrorist organizations have now taken note of the idea.
Want to bet there is no possibility of a 911 on this kind of thing? Because that is now what you are doing.
The most notable example of this happened back in 1980, when a smaller ship (almost all cargo ships are much much larger nowadays) rammed a pier of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, in Tampa Bay, FL.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/florida-bridge-collapse-of-1980-freighter-crashes-into-sunshine-skyway-bridge-killing-35/vi-BB1kzWUV
The replacement has extensive berms around its pier structures, making it difficult-to-impossible to strike it.
It’s been 44 years, certainly we should have been able to slowly act to prevent this type of accident from ever happening again. Many, if not most, of the other bridges on that river have berms to prevent this from happening.
And if there are any other significant bridges in the USA which don’t have such protections — well, I think we need to add them now — *before* some terrorist group manages to take advantage of such a visible infrastructure weakness. 🙁
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}}} It’s not a swing set problem.
Not exactly. If you’re planning on running a tank past a swing set on a regular basis, it’s posdef an antitank *barrier* problem.
😉
There is zero excuse for this bridge to not have suitable berms around it. Especially if, as suggested above, they are about 3m per berm. That’s about 12m for the Key bridge, offhand… two piers, two sides — 4x3m — one hell of a lot cheaper than replacing a bridge. And a lot less disruptive, too.
}}} To make bridges less vulnerable build piers less susceptible to side impacts (not “stilts”) and keep shipping traffic away from those piers.
T, the solution to this has long been known — put concrete and earthen berms around the piers, which can actually stop and/or even better deflect an incorrectly directed ship away from the pier.
Think of them like you would bollards outside a vulnerable place. Almost all police precincts and stations these days have bollards outside, because, if nothing else, of “I’ll Be Back” of Terminator fame. This is true of even relatively smaller cities — Gainesville FL is about 125k, 250k metro area. GPD has bollards all outside the place.
The University of Florida football, basketball, and baseball stadiums also have bollards and subtly placed walls around the outside, to prevent vehicular attacks during games.
The Berms do much the same thing vs. ships as those bollards do against vehicles.
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}}} P.S. How can you tell if Biden is plagiarizing? Does he have an obvious “tell?
Yes, when he hands you a piece of paper with anything on it. 😛
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}}} The bridge structure laying across the bow does not seem robust enough to “capture” the ship and hold it in place (by itself) if it did not run aground on something.
Dude, that thing has a massive concrete structure supporting it at the base water level. Typically, there is a caisson built and the water drained out of it. Then they build whatever supporting structure is called for. This is going to be a massive steel and concrete structure these days. It just did the job that a berm should have done, and stopped the forward motion of the ship.
It is also possible to shield our grid from EMPs. Some progress has been made toward that end in the past decade, but will it be too little too late?
OBH
I don’t believe your cited calculations regarding construction of the protective berms. Three dimensions, mass required, maths, you know, civil engineering.
Other B’More worthy news today: MLB owners approved the sale of the O’s from the Angelos family to Dave Rubenstein and his consortium. Huzzah!
Most modern ships use electro-propulsion design. I can’t verify that MV Dali was designed this way, but only being 9 years old, I’m fairly confident it did. Electric drive motors give lots of benefit. 100% torque at low energy levels, motors placed next to propeller (which may not seem a big deal until you think about how to power the bow thrusters from the engine room), and the ability to change out generative power without changing out the entire propulsion system. This means the generator can be powered by diesel, LNG, maybe coal, or some other power source like nuclear. Whatever is best for the operator and the harbors they want to operate.
The draw back is if you lose power generation, you lose propulsion. You might think, “why not battery backup”? In port, maybe that needs to be reconsidered. But at sea, you would need some massive batteries to drive a propeller shaft to maintain control for the amount of time to say slow a vessel.
What I don’t understand is why only high end sports cars use a similar system. Trains use this type of electrical generator driving electric motors. Ships have them. But hybrid cars have batteries that drive motors that augment the ICE engine. You’d get better performance if the ICE ran a generator and the wheels were turned by an electric motor. That’s why high-end sports cars have this setup. Imagine a Ford F-150 that could pull like a freight train, occasionally run on batteries, but could get refilled at a gas station.
“T, the solution to this has long been known . . . .” [Obloodyhell @ 12:49]
I know, I live in Pittsburgh.
Also (H/T Stephen Green @ Instapundit, 12:44):
Leland…”Most modern ships use electro-propulsion design.” I don’t think this is correct. Electric propulsion can be useful for converting the high speed of steam or gas turbines into something useable by the propellers without needing an expensive set of gears, also some flexibility in reversing. But most modern container ships are powered by direct drive of the propeller(s) from low-RPM diesels. The Dali had a single main engine driving a single propeller.
Apparently Maersk line prefers twin-engine machinery for its own ships, but the Dali was a charter.
Re: electrical transmissions
Leland wonders why, despite trains and ships using the technology for over a century, why don’t most cars?
First off, cars don’t need the torque. It can be handy, but not to the degree it is for vehicles that mass thousands of tons.
Second, you lose energy anytime you transform it from one form to another; with an electrical transmission you convert chemical energy to mechanical energy to electrical energy and then back to mechanical energy. When you don’t need the torque, it’s more energy efficient to skip swapping the energy to electricity and back.
Third, if you’re trying to remove the mechanical transmission, the obvious place to put the motors is in the wheels. This has heating problems (even before you factor in braking) as well as putting the motors below the suspension; wheel mounted motors experience every bump in the road.
We live in a world where almost everything is designed to “carry” loads. Such a technique is very vulnerable to lateral forces.
https://twitter.com/mercoglianos/status/1773123345820614699