When worlds collide
This isn't the first time a ship has hit a bridge
On March 26th the container ship Dali rammed the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, instantly collapsing the structure. But you already know that. What we don’t know with 100 certainty was whether this was an aquatic 9/11 without the heavy death toll, or a remarkably unfortunate accident.
Given that the captain of the ship is Ukrainian, and the Moscow terror attack happened so recently and Russia wants to strike back at whoever they felt was to blame, I wasn’t ruling out nefarious intent. However, one detail stands out to me which indicates that the bridge collapse was likely an accident. The Dali was carrying two pilots.
It’s standard practice for pilots to come onboard large ships to safely guide them in and out of ports. The pilots are intimately familiar with the local channels, underwater hazards and boat traffic, and they instruct the helmsman where to steer the ship. The likelihood that two American pilots conspired to crash the ship into a bridge is so vanishingly small that (unless new details come to light) I’m firmly in the accident camp. The power went out. When it came back on the crew tried to reverse the ship, which caused it to drift to starboard into the bridge and that’s all she wrote.
Furthermore, what happened in Baltimore is not unprecedented. Anytime you put bridge supports and large ships within striking distance of one another there’s always a risk of collision.
The Skyway bridge collapse
On May 9th, 1980, the freighter MV Summit Venture collided with one of the support columns for the Skyway Bridge, a key link between Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida. A 1,200-foot span of the bridge collapsed, killing 35 people. At 19,735 gross tons, The MV Summit Venture was a baby-faced scamp compared to the Dali’s 95,128 gross tons. The Skyway bridge’s collapse reveals just how vulnerable these structures are to getting rammed by ships.
The accident happened due to inclement weather that had reduced visibility to several hundred feet, making it difficult for the crew to keep their large ship in the channel. The Skyway bridge collapse falls far out of the realm of conspiracy and straight into the purview of accident.
The engineering response to the bridge’s collapse was excellent. When they rebuilt the bridge they added dolphins (protective concrete structures) in front of all the major support tiers. You can easily spot them in this picture below. Furthermore, the two main supports are encased in a small island of concrete, further protecting them from ramming.
The dolphins for the Skyway bridge cost taxpayers $41 million in 1980 dollars, roughly equivalent to $100 million today. That’s a lot of money upfront, but a rounding error compared to losing a bridge. The damage in Baltimore will spiral into the billions of dollars, and that’s not even considering the loss of human life. We’re incredibly lucky that the Baltimore bridge collapsed at night, as the death toll would have been far higher otherwise.
The Tasman bridge collapse
In 1975 a 416-foot span of the Tasman bridge collapsed after the bulk carrier ship Lake Illawarra crashed into two of its piers. The ship was catastrophically damaged and sank several minutes later, taking seven crewmen with her. The accident was attributed to poor visibility and inattention on the captain’s part. Also, the Lake Illawarra was not being guided by a pilot at the time.
Twelve people died as a result of the accident. The seven crewman, plus five people from the bridge. It’s frightening to note that no cars were on the section of the bridge that collapsed. Rather, the inattentive drivers naively believed that a bridge would exist where it always existed, and simply drove off the edge and plummeted to their deaths 150 ft below.
A more attentive driver managed to brake just in time and his car, a 1974 Holden Monaro GTS, saved his life when the auto transmission casing snagged on the edge of the bridge.
The car, a gorgeous automobile in my opinion, now sits in a Tasmanian automobile museum.
Conclusions
It took seven years to rebuild the Skyway bridge in Tampa. I expect Baltimore will rebuild their bridge faster than that, but who can say. Modern construction techniques may be no match for entrenched bureaucracy. We cannot possibly build a bridge until we do a detailed study on how its construction will impact the mating cycle of the yellow winged gully bird in Ghana. I’m almost certain, however, that the new bridge will include a set of the most robust dolphins ever devised.
One of our failings as a species is our irrational distaste for spending money on disaster prevention. For the cash we’re going to spend cleaning up the Baltimore disaster and rebuilding, we could have dolphinized all of the bridges spanning major port channels in the North East.
I don’t know if we’ll ever work up the guts to retroactively dolphin our most important bridges, but I am hopeful that we’ll find the gumption and political will to spend a bit extra and protect all of our new infrastructure going forward. At some point Americans are going to grow weary of their deteriorating infrastructure and demand that our political leaders do more than just bicker on Twitter.
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