The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after a container ship collided with it on Tuesday has triggered urgent questions about how the incident happened and why it had such a catastrophic impact.
Wes Moore, the governor of the state of Maryland, has declared a state of emergency after the elevated roadway’s disintegration into the Patapsco river. Six people are presumed dead, according to state police.
Here are some significant points raised by the disaster involving the cargo ship Dali that occurred at about 1.30am local time.
Rare — but the US accounted for most of the 35 bridge collapses caused by a ship or barge between 1960 and 2015, according to a 2018 report from the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure.
The risks have risen as international trade in goods has increased and ships have grown larger. The volume of containers moving through US ports nearly doubled in 20 years, to more than 62.2mn 20-foot equivalent units in 2022.
The Dali was one of the new breed of bigger vessels designed to capitalise on a larger set of Panama Canal locks finished in 2016 — and the vessel’s size could have played a role in the collision. Container ships as large as the Dali did not routinely call at US east coast ports until the Panama Canal lock upgrade in 2016, said Simon Heaney, at London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants.
The large, sheer sides of these container ships can also make them more vulnerable to high winds.
Entry into and departure from ports are danger points in a vessel’s journey — so ships navigating in confined waters typically take on a pilot with local expertise. The Dali was using such a pilot in Baltimore.
A catastrophic outcome was highly likely once a vessel the size of the Dali had crashed directly into the bridge, engineers said — although several questioned whether there were sufficient collision prevention safeguards.
The crash suggested the protection around the bridge’s piers — or main supports — from ships was “inadequate”, said Robert Benaim, a fellow of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering. Normally features such as artificial islands or steel “sacrificial dolphins” embedded in the river floor would be built to divert vessels on a collision course, he added.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge was opened to traffic in 1977 and so may not have been built with the size of modern container vessels in mind, experts said. “Ship impact is a key consideration in modern, large span bridges in busy navigation areas,” said David Knight, specialist adviser to the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers.
The Baltimore collapse comes nine years after the Department of Transportation deplored the “dire state of disrepair” of the country’s roads and bridges. A 2021 “report card” by the American Society of Civil Engineers found that 42 per cent of bridges were more than 50 years old and 7.5 per cent were “structurally deficient”.
Bridges have suffered from a mix of intensifying use, the increasing age of assets constructed during the US’s mid-20th century economic boom, and lack of funding for repairs.
The most superficially similar previous incident in the US to the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster took place in 1980, when the bulk carrier Summit Venture went off course and collided with the Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa, Florida, causing a collapse that killed 35 people.
More recent collisions have been blamed either on design faults or poor maintenance — or a combination of the two. Among those was the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi river, which killed 13 people. That was blamed on a weak bridge with too much load.
In 2022, the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed with five vehicles on it. Investigators blamed inadequate inspections and maintenance.
More than a third of US bridge spans need significant repairs and should be replaced, according to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association. That would cost more than $319bn, Artba said in a report in August. It said about 4.6 per cent of Maryland’s bridges were rated as structurally deficient, including one constructed in 1958 that, like the Francis Scott Key Bridge, carries the Interstate 695 highway.
The federal government will — according to President Joe Biden. The cost is as yet unknown.
The insurance sector is expecting a hefty bill. Several industry figures that spoke to the Financial Times said it was still too early to give a reliable estimate, but insurers could compensate significant losses including damage to the bridge, disruption to the port and any loss of life.
One focus is likely to be the protection and indemnity insurance covering the ship, a must-have liability insurance intended to pay out for crashes, oil spills and other disasters, the people said. This cover is provided in the first instance to the Dali by Britannia P&I Club. Britannia said it was “working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally”.
Britannia is one of 12 mutual insurers that make up the International Group of P&I Clubs, which take the first $10mn of losses from any one incident themselves, share another slice of losses with the wider group, and then reinsure losses above that at Lloyd’s of London.
One marine insurance expert said the liability insurance payout, including bridge damage, could rival the approximately $1.5bn paid after the crash of the Costa Concordia cruise ship in 2012, a record.
Maryland officials said on Tuesday that shipping traffic into and out of the port would be suspended until further notice.
Although the port is smaller than those of New York and New Jersey, it is the main east coast entry port for imported cars, according to the Maryland governor’s office.
In 2023, the port handled a record-high 52.3mn tons of foreign cargo, worth $80bn. This included more than 847,000 cars and light trucks and 1.3mn tons of farm and construction machinery. About 140,000 jobs are linked to the port’s activities. It is also the US’s second-busiest coal export facility.
Car companies including General Motors and Ford said on Tuesday that they would work to reroute shipments to nearby ports, while Nissan said it did not expect significant disruption. Toyota said some exports might be affected, while Volvo and JLR also use the port. Volkswagen, which also owns the Audi and Porsche brands, uses the Sparrows Point port, which is east of the bridge and therefore unaffected.
Analysts warned that the tragedy comes at a time when the shipping industry is beset by problems such as drought in the Panama Canal and conflict in the Red Sea.
“It is likely other larger US east coast ports such as neighbouring New York/New Jersey and Virginia can handle additional container imports if Baltimore is inaccessible, which may limit any impact on ocean freight shipping rates,” said Emily Stausbøll, market analyst at Xeneta, a shipping data firm.
“However, there is only so much port capacity available and this will leave supply chains vulnerable to any further pressure.”
Additional reporting by Peter Campbell and Claire Jones
Letter in response to this article :
Baltimore disaster must address totality of risks / From Richard G Little, Visiting Research Scholar Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, US