Bridge Derangement Syndrome
USACE Chief of Engineers Lt. Gen. Scott Spellmon views damage of the fallen Francis Scott Key Bridge that collapsed in Baltimore, March 26, 2024. In accordance with USACE’s federal authorities, USACE will lead the effort to clear the channel as part of the larger interagency recovery effort to restore operations at the Port of Baltimore. Photo by David Adams, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
On Wednesday, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was hit by a cargo ship and collapsed. The tragedy closed the port of Baltimore indefinitely and brought out the usual suspects to explain why, through six degrees of separation, the bridge tragedy was linked to their favorite talking points.
The facts of the story as we currently know them are that container ship Dali was leaving port at about 1:24 am on the morning of March 27. The ship had a “complete blackout” that caused it to lose both electrical power and propulsion. The cause of the power loss is currently not known, but backup generators restored electrical power quickly while engine power was not restored. The ship reportedly had “routine engine maintenance” while in Baltimore.
When a large vehicle like a ship loses engine power, it still has inertia. A car that loses engine power will coast to a stop fairly quickly but a container ship weighing 100,000 tons takes a lot longer to stop due to its large mass and the minimal friction of the water on the hull. As you may remember from physics, force equals mass times acceleration, which means that the ship would hit a lot of force, even at its slow speed of 8 knots (about 9 mph or 15 kph). Losing power in the confined waters of Baltimore Harbor was a worst-case scenario.
Steering would have been interrupted when the ship lost power. The Dali, which was not using tug boats but did have a harbor pilot on board, would have become at least temporarily uncontrollable when it lost power. The track of the ship shows a slight altering of course before the ship hit a bridge abutment supporting a span of the bridge, but this is likely due to currents and the possibility that the rudder may not have been straight when it lost power.
The ship made a Mayday call when it lost power in the narrow channel. This enabled police to stop most traffic, but there were less than two minutes in which to react. The only fatalities seem to be six workers who were repairing potholes and could not be warned in time. As I write this, two bodies have been recovered and the remaining four are presumed dead. Two other men working on the bridge were rescued shortly after the collision.
Almost immediately, the conspiracy grist mill geared up. One of the first conspiracies I heard was that the Dali had a Ukrainian captain. It was implied rather than stated that the captain might have steered the ship into the bridge for some unknown reason.
Multiple outlets quickly debunked this claim. In reality, the captain and the entire crew at the time of the accident were Indian. (The ship itself is Sri Lankan and flagged in Singapore.) Per the AP, a Ukrainian man was listed as captain of the Dali for five months in 2016 on a jobs website.
Logically, it wouldn’t make sense for a Ukrainian captain to ram his ship into a bridge anyway. Ukrainians would probably want to improve relations with the US, not cause an economic catastrophe. Further, an American harbor pilot was on board and would have been controlling the ship at the time.
Another Dali conspiracy theory involves the Netflix movie, “Leave the World Behind,” which was produced in 2023 by Barack and Michelle Obama. In the movie, a ship loses control and crashes into land. Some internet users have questioned whether this was an example of “predictive programming,” as Fox News noted.
I had never heard of this movie, but you can watch the scene on YouTube. The problem with the movie comparisons is that the ship in the movie is an oil tanker, not a container ship and it runs aground on a beach due to a cyber attack rather than hitting a bridge. Other than being completely different, it’s eerily similar.
It isn’t unheard of to find parallels in fiction for real events. I can name two books that I read before September 11 that talked about using airliners as terrorist weapons (Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor and Dale Brown’s Storming Heaven, both from 1994). An 1898 novel was more predictive of the Titanic sinking than the movie was of the Dali disaster.
And speaking of cyber attacks, a number of attention seekers have claimed that the accident was due to a cyber attack or some other sort of sabotage. The investigation is ongoing, but so far there is no evidence of any foul play.
That statement includes claims that there was an explosion on the ship before it hit the bridge. Video from a different angle shows that the smoke came from the ship’s smokestack rather than an explosion. It was probably a result of trying to restart the engines.
Left unexplained in the conspiracy theories is why nefarious bridge attackers would make a movie about their plot. And why make a Mayday call or hit the bridge at 1 am rather than rush hour if you want to inflict maximum damage?
Ships crashing into bridges is not unheard of. In fact, a ship crashed into the same Baltimore bridge in 1980. That ship was smaller and did not do as much damage, but there is a long list of ship-bridge collisions in the US alone. The Dali was involved in a previous accident in Antwerp in 2016 when it hit a stone pier. That accident was ruled to be the fault of the pilot.
A more out-there conspiracy theory is that the accident was caused by DEI. It isn’t clear how diversity, equity, and inclusion can be blamed for the accident [insert your six-degrees-of-separation explanation here] when the crew of the ship was Indian and unaffected by American DEI programs. The only conceivable link to DEI would be if the American harbor pilot was an unqualified diversity hire, but there is no evidence of this.
The DEI attacks seem to be an attempt to link Baltimore’s mayor to the accident, but he had nothing to do with the crash. I haven’t seen anyone blame Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
President Biden did say that the federal government should fund replacing the bridge. This is both reasonable and constitutional since the bridge was part of the interstate highway system and interstate commerce is the domain of the federal government.
Finally, some are making much of the fact that the six people apparently killed in the accident were immigrants, although I haven’t heard anyone blame the victims. It is true that the bridge victims were all immigrants from Latin America. At least one, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval of Honduras, came to the US 17 years ago.
The fact that these men were all immigrants underscores the fact that immigrants, legal or illegal, often do jobs that Americans won’t do. Filling potholes at 1 am on a cold morning is a good example. This underscores the fact that we need reform to fix our broken immigration system.
One thing that isn’t a conspiracy is the economic impact of the bridge collapse. A few years ago, I took a picture of Baltimore as I flew over. You can see from the photo that the bridge is the only route across the harbor and that the collapse would completely block the channel. It may take years to replace the bridge, creating hellish commutes for many Marylanders.
The port of Baltimore will be closed until a channel can be cleared for shipping. That won’t be a quick or easy task, but it might be quicker than you think. Stephen Flynn, a professor of political science and civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University, told USA Today that enough debris might be cleared to begin incrementally opening the channel to ships within a few weeks.
Baltimore ranks first for imports of cars and trucks per CNN but is also a major hub for coal and sugar. The good news is that experts say that damage to the US economy is likely to be minimal since there are many other ports to which ship traffic can be shifted. Baltimore, cut off from its shipping income, will bear the brunt of the economic impact.
The Dali destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge is almost certainly a tragic accident. We won’t know the exact cause for a while, but we can be thankful that it wasn’t worse with a higher loss of life and a greater economic impact.
“predictive programming,” Oh god this. Hadn’t heard the term before but have seen people doing it. Just crazy pants. That evil doers scatter the world with devious clues to be found is the most James Bond ripoff made in Italy in the 70’s idea ever but somehow people think it’s really happening. It’s always over things that happen frequently so there is always an example.
Good piece.Report
It’s borderline miraculous that stuff like this doesn’t happen more often! Those ships are enormous and water is volatile!Report
CNN is reporting that the NTSB is going to interview the pilots. So I imagine we’ll get a report eventually.
Is it normal that the names of the people involved have not been made public? Is that something that we could reasonably expect? Is this too different from the Exxon Valdez to expect the equivalent of “Joe Hazelwood” punchlines in the nighttime show opening monologues?Report
No idea if this is normal but prob is. I’m fine with holding off on the names for a few days since they will get a zillion gigawatt LED pointed right at them. Maybe at least find out if they might have f’d up everybody turns them into a meme about f’ing up.Report
*SOMEBODY* f’ed up. Whether it’s the people who let the ship come to the US in the first place, the people who let the ship leave the dock, or the guys who took over the second the ship stopped touching the dock, it’s important to find out who.
Because, I betcha, there were procedures in place to prevent this sort of thing.
And these procedures were not followed.Report
You can’t assume that anyone made a mistake.Report
So one would think, but we’re talking about Jaybird here.Report
I admit: That’s my starting assumption.
I mean, let’s start with “no mistakes were made”. What conclusions follow from that starting place? One of them seems to be “this couldn’t have been avoided”.
That strikes me as absurd on its face.Report
I used to know a forensic mechanical engineer. He always told me that a surprising number of physical things just break and that my opinion was biased by the amount of time I spent around software.Report
Physical things break, unlike software which comes pre-broken.Report
Often, people come pre-broken as well.Report
Risk is unavoidable. Didn’t we talk about this for two years?
Risk is asymptotic to effort. You can, let’s say, double the effort to avoid risk and halve the risk. You can double it again and halve it again. You can’t eliminate the risk. Checking the bolts of an airplane? Smart move, but it doesn’t guarantee the flight. Not checking the bolts of an airplane? Dumb move, but it doesn’t guarantee a crash (depending on the bolt in question).Report
Eh, here’s from The Daily Mail talking about a CNN interview with someone there:
So I went to CNN to go straight to the horse’s mouth and maybe link to some video.
And here’s what CNN says:
So I dunno.
Are there logs about stuff like that? If something like that happened, wouldn’t you want someone to write it down?
I wonder how far back the black box goes. Does it discuss stuff that happened a day or two before?
Because there’s risk and there’s *RISK*.Report
Of course I wouldn’t be stunned to find out that someone made mistakes.Report
Well yeah i’m pretty sure one or more people badly failed that day. We should get all the details and names. I’m sure we will. If we dont’ know the pilots names for a few days we’ll be fine.Report
The black box stopped recording sensor data for a bit there. Jump ahead to about 2:05.
“At zero-one twenty-four and fifty-nine seconds, numerous audible alarms were recorded on the ship’s audio… bridge audio. About the same time, the uh sensor data ceased recording. Although the DVR audio continues to record, using a redundant power source. At around zero-one twenty-six and two seconds, the uh resumed recording sensor data and during this time there were security commands and rudder orders recorded on the audio.”
So we lost a minute and three seconds there.
These things happen.Report
Just eyeballing the video that would be consistent with the visable power loss in the video from the channel cam we haveReport
What I’ve also seen is that it’s permissible (and, in fact, typical practice) for these sort of recording boxes to have a lost-power mode that operates on a battery and only records voices rather than the full suite of sensors.
So it doesn’t reinforce any conspiracy theories to point out that the data was not recorded; that’s actually to be expected in a situation like this.Report
On the subject of “diversity hiring,” it bears repeating that DEI in hiring, as with affirmative action before it, nowhere requires a relaxation of job qualifications, particularly regarding professional competence or safety.
That doesn’t mean people can’t screw it up, but the characterization that a more-qualifed white dude candidate is going to be passed over for a less-qualified not-white not-dude candidate ought be at minimum caveats that the less-qualified not-white not-dude candidate is nevertheless a candidate who meets or exceeds the stated qualifications for the position.
I realize that nuances an argument of White Dude Grievance perhaps to the point of dismissing it, but, well, I mention this to underline that immediately after a disaster like this there were people using it for propaganda purposes and that alone ought to be registering on your bullshit detection devices.Report
Having been marginally involved in ships moving in and out of fuel terminals, my suggestion going forward is that any vessel big enough to damage infrastructure in case it looses power or steering (itself a not uncommon and normally not a dangerous event) has to accompanied by tugboats until it is in a place where there is no more risk of damage.
The cost of rebuilding the bridge would probably cover a century of tugboats escorting every large vessel under that bridge.Report
That makes intuitive sense, but the industry doesn’t seem to do that, and not likely because no one ever thought of it. Any idea why?Report
Because compared to the cost of rebuilding a 1.6 miles bridge, tugboats are cheap, but compared to the price of a new car, or a new house in the suburbs, renting several tugboats for several hours is quite expensive. And what do we need them for, if the vessel has its own engines and a big rudder and two port pilots?
For this to be implemented, it needs to come as a regulation, either from the maritime national authorities, or from ship classification authorities or maritime insurers, that would make vessels uninsurable unless they hire tugs to navigate close to critical infrastructure.
In cases like this, the profit (not renting the tugboats) belongs to the ship owner, the losses (rebuilding the bridge) are paid by society. The damage is orders of magnitude bigger than the vessel’s insurance policy limits, or even the value of the ship itself.
Usually each vessel is owned by a separate special purpose corporate vehicle. The most the owner, and its lenders, vessels of this nature are highly leveraged , can lose is the ownership of the vessel itselfReport
I am curious, are the ship owners not, at all, liable for the destruction of the bridge? Or is it simply that they’re structured so there’s no money in the legal entity that would be liable?Report
From what I’ve read, according to Maritime Law, the people shipping stuff are on the hook. The owners of the stuff in the containers, I guess.
This is not something new, apparently. It dates back to prior to the Constitution.
Or so I have read.Report
All vessels that I know are owned by companies that ONLY own that vessel, so any liability and risk (for the owner)
is limited to the value of the vessel.
A separate operating company (frequently, but not exclusively, an affiliate of the vessel owner) runs the vessel for a small fee, and its liability is limited to the total amount of the contracting. Both the operator and the owner carry liability insurance and whether the root cause is a machinery breakdown (a term of art) or faulty maintenance should define if the owner or the operator liability insurance is supposed to cover the loss. Above the insurance limit, and any excess liability insurance than might sit on top (*), your only recourse is against thinly capitalized (that’s it, little money) owner or operator company.
The fact that the vessel was under the authority of the port pilots adds another potential liable agent to the mix, and for sure both owner and operator will bring the pilots and whoever employs them to the dispute.
Jaybird above is also at least partially correct, but I’m not sure if the consigners (the guys sending cargo) would be involved in this case. See my answer to him.
(*) You can, if you want, and you are prudent, have several layers of liability insurance, with a primary level covering claims from zero (there’s normally no or de minimis deductible in a liability claim) to X dollars, and one or more excess layers covering claims above x up to y, above y up to z, and so on. Each layer is cheaper than the one below because the possibility of such large claims is very small. But even the largest excess liability policy you can think about contracting won’t cover the cost of this accident.Report
You are for sure at least partially right. I’ve only been involved in one such claim, and we the consigners were liable for cost associated to tow and repair a vessel that had a failure in high seas due to bad weather.
At least in that case, the argument is that bad weather is an act of God and all of us sending cargo had to pitch in in the cost of repair . But that was a property damage claim (the vessel itself was damaged, not third party property or lives). I have my doubts, but cannot vouch, that the consigners are liable for damages the vessel caused to third parties.Report
Useful to note that the question of “when a ship sinks who pays for it” is a question so complicated that answering it involved the invention of the corporation as a concept.Report
All vessels that I know are owned by companies that ONLY own that vessel, so any liability and risk (for the owner)
is limited to the value of the vessel.
A separate operating company (frequently, but not exclusively, an affiliate of the vessel owner) runs the vessel for a small fee, and its liability is limited to the total amount of the contracting. Both the operator and the owner carry liability insurance and whether the root cause is a machinery breakdown (a term of art) or faulty maintenance should define if the owner or the operator liability insurance is supposed to cover the loss. Above the insurance limit, and any excess liability insurance than might sit on top (*), your only recourse is against thinly capitalized (that’s it, little money) owner or operator company.
The fact that the vessel was under the authority of the port pilots adds another potential liable agent to the mix, and for sure both owner and operator will bring the pilots and whoever employs them to the dispute.
Jaybird above is also at least partially correct, but I’m not sure if the consigners (the guys sending cargo) would be involved in this case. See my answer to him.
(*) You can, if you want, and you are prudent, have several layers of liability insurance, with a primary level covering claims from zero (there’s normally no or de minimis deductible in a liability claim) to X dollars, and one or more excess layers covering claims above x up to y, above y up to z, and so on. Each layer is cheaper than the one below because the possibility of such large claims is very small. But even the largest excess liability policy you can think about contracting won’t cover the cost of this accident.Report
Thank you J_A, I suspected something along those lines would be the case just the same way most home builders dissolve and reform their companies after a few years to dodge construction defect claims.Report
Not disagreeing, just extending the discussion.
At the time the bridge was built, there were 90,000-ton bulk cargo ships already sailing capable of taking out the bridge piers as designed. Everyone knew bigger ships were coming.
The state/federal highway authorities chose to build a bridge downstream* from all of the port’s cargo terminals. If one of the consequences of that should have been a new requirement for tug assistance over much greater distances, who should pay?
* Baltimore has small tides, but sufficient to affect the current**. Also holds true, I suspect, for extreme precipitation effects.
** Years ago when I was supervising a group of high-powered tech experts the building was on the edge of a “river” that was actually a tidal estuary. One of the big guns in the group — meaning one of the top three or four experts in the field in the country — lived on the other side of the estuary and his commuting choices were drive several/many kilometers, or canoe 200 meters. His preference for much of the year was to canoe. He couldn’t paddle against the peak tidal flows. If we were hosting a meeting where I needed him, I consulted the tide tables to see if I could schedule things to accommodate him.Report
I’m going to go way out on a limb here and suggest it was a cascading series of failures because things like this almost always are.
A flaw in the design, a failure to staff properly, a failure to follow protocol here and a cut corner there and so on and so on.
Not unavoidable, but not “Hey, lemme just leave the wheel for a bit and go take a leak what’s the worst that could happen.”Report
A useful primer on liability issues:
https://www.kreindler.com/library/shipowners-limitation-of-liability-act
There’s a similar useful article on insurance issues, but I couldn’t copy-and-paste both here, so I’ll send a separate post.Report
The insurance article:
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2024/03/27/766713.htmReport
I have had over the years a nodding acquaintance with admiralty law and lawyers (which has been enough to make me the office’s go-to guy for our extremely rare maritime cases) and one thing I learned that surprised me was how common ship collisions on the high seas (not in crowded ports or rivers) are.*
This seems odd because, relative to the ocean, even the largest ship is a mere speck. But most of the ocean has no ships to collide. Most commercial maritime traffic is in relatively confined, logical shipping lanes that allow quick passage and minimal fuel consumption, so the relevant parts of the ocean are far more crowded than one would think.
* “Common” in the sense that, although statistically almost insignificant (like airline crashes), they happen far more often than uninformed common sense would lead one to expect.Report
I took maritime as a filler elective my last year in law school and there actually is a pretty active little bar for that kind of work it in Baltimore. Damned if I remember anything substantive from it but your comment reminded me of the day the prof played us 30 minutes of the stupidest collisions caught on camera, many of which were clearly right off the coast of Italy.Report
Is the bar called “Rum, Sodomy And The Lash”?Report
Heh, slightly different type of bar but I am certain there is a watering hole in fells point with that name.Report
I used to have a recurring dream in which I had to attend a fourth year of law school. Maybe that’s a nightmare. In any case, in the dream I was looking for courses to take. When I was in law school, Admiralty was offered in alternate years and, as it turned out, was offered in what would have been my nightmare fourth year. So I signed up for that. I don’t recall what else I signed up for.Report
Apparently the US 59 Bridge in Oklahoma was hit by a barge yesterday.
So conspiracy theorists need to calm down. This sort of thing happens all the time.Report
It does happen all the time. The only odd thing here was the massive size of both vessel and bridge. A smaller vessel would not have taken such a big structure.
I once asked an admiral why a midsize navy vessel was not doing what I had expected it to do. His answer: “Vessels don’t have brakes”.
Meaning, once they are moving, it’s very difficult to stop or steer them. Both need lots of space and time. Piloting them in closed waterways like in Baltimore requires specialized pilots, and even so, stuff happens.Report
Barges hit Mississippi River bridges multiple times each year. Sometimes multiple times in a month. The old Mississippi River bridge at Vicksburg by itself seems to average multiple collisions per year.Report