Baltimore's Key Bridge destroyed by cargo ship allision

LaRea

Happened overnight, and wow is this ever a disaster.  Many deaths.  And it will shut down not only a major shipping port, but also a major highway.  [EDIT: collision = ship hits a moving object, allision = ship hits a stationary object]

This video shows the allision.  The ship was out of the channel and just rammed directly into the bridge support.  She had two harbor pilots at the helm.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kw1hH5XCYU

Aqua_Aura

I just read this article and thought "I wonder if larea posted something" sure enough. This is very bad and almost unbelievable a major ship would just run into a bridge support. Clipping the underside is somewhat understandable but how does no one see they are heading directly for the bridge support? 

aero3113

Prays to the families  🙏🏻 
It was heading out of port, 2 pilots were in control. Only 20 minutes into its journey. Mind boggling how this happened. I’m thinking mechanical failure.

Aqua_Aura

Mechanical failure makes sense to have an accident like this. 

Liberty44140

Made me sick to see that, even at 1am there had to be a dozen or two vehicles on it. Crazy that the entire bridge collapsed with one support taken out. So sorry to see this. 

LaRea

This vid starts earlier.  It looks like she was in the channel, then turns -- FAST -- directly into the bridge support.  It would take full thrust to make a ship that big turn that fast.  Look at the black smoke from the stacks before the turn starts.  

https://twitter.com/i/status/1772527800387330120

Dream_Inn

Definitely devastating!  Fortunately at 1:30am, so traffic actually was minimal as they are stating 7 vehicles were on it.  I just can't believe how quickly it fell down.  I couldn't tell you the number of times I've been under and over that bridge.  It was always fascinating going under it on a cruise (which we are doing this fall - it'll be strange going thru there now) and how close the ship is to the bridge.

halifax212

Sad news for sure. It could have been so much worse. I was pretty sure we had people on the site from this area. Prayers to the families 

aero3113

Looks like they had a power failure. You can see all of the lights on the ship going out and coming back on a couple of times before impact.

aero3113

Amazing, the ship did call out a mayday and the DOT was able to stop traffic before impact. So many lives were saved because of this.

aero3113

https://www.instagram.com/p/C4-i7SorF0Q/?igsh=MTg1eXV0cGZxcmdlNw==

davidbrooks

The news articles are saying that they were reporting power failures.  This is getting a little too common place now with some of these freighters.  Running aground, power or equipment issues...  My company has a lot of involvement locally in things like bridge inspections and we had to scramble to make sure we didnt have anyone on the bridge when this happened.  The good news is that all of our trucks have GPS monitoring so we were able to quickly determine we didn't have anyone in the area at the time.  There were crews on the bridge doing pothole repairs though from the state.

LaRea

They still don't know the cause, but this vid gives a bit more detail on what happened.  They were apparently trying to take off way by reversing the engines, but nobody knows whether they had steering control.  

https://youtu.be/N39w6aQFKSQ

halifax212

Thanks for posting. Very informative.

Formulaben

Horrible, just horrible.

Sad to hear workers were on the bridge doing patchwork, but luckily very few cars on bridge that late at night.  Will be interesting to see what caused the ship's propulsion failure.

The only good that will come from this is improved emergency/abnormal procedures and a more modern bridge design with "dolphins" to avert the next one...and there sadly will be a next one. 

LaRea

The bridge operator's decision to stop traffic came just in time.  The last vehicles barely got across before the bridge collapsed, but the workers had no chance to escape.  It's amazing that two of them survived the fall.

MarkB

I am an engineer. Necessary on EVERY project to conduct what we call a HAZOP (Hazard and Operability Analysis). We go through a list of deviations (colder than normal, hotter than normal, poor maintenance, too heavy, too much wind, accidents, etc) ... a ship running into the bridge would be one of the easiest things to identify, especially considering a time frame of 50 years or greater ... and we don't care how, we just ask can it happen (the how is not relevant ... and it gets you caught in a debate of justifying how it can happen, which is short-sited ... these things happen because unfathomable situations occur ... situations we cannot predict easily)?.  We then rank the risk in terms of probability it will occur and the consequence if it does occur.  The product of these two gives a risk ranking, and if we are above the threshold, we MUST mitigate the risk.  A ship hitting the bridge causing catastrophic damage would be above the threshold because the consequences are too high (lives could be lost, economy effected, etc).  No doubt.

This would mean mitigation methods must be put in place ... protect the support. I agree, that bridge came down way too easy.  It's unacceptable in my opinion.

LaRea

Cargo ships are bigger now.  I wonder if it's even possible to build a dolphin structure that will stop a 1000-ton ship going 7-8 knots.  [edit, I left off a zero!]

Aqua_Aura

The best solution I see is having tug boats following ships in and out of hazard areas like this. We live on the Columbia River and my wife works on these ships here and in the Puget Sound so we are familiar. There are tugs all over the waters constantly moving ships in and out of docking seems not difficult to have them near the bridges to make sure the ships get thru ok, the bridges are next to the ports where the tugs are. We have two bridges on the river they need to go under that resemble the same style bridge as in Baltimore, only difference is that ours 60 and 95 years old and seem to be on borrowed time already. 

Dream_Inn

LaRea said:

Cargo ships are bigger now.  I wonder if it's even possible to build a dolphin structure that will stop a 100-ton ship going 7-8 knots.  

Try a 1000 ton ship!  They said the weight is over 2 million pounds.

I agree with Aqua, except at this point, it was all a straight line out of the channel.  Not really a need for a tug.  And if there is a need, then there would also be a need either thru the C&D or thru both the bay bridge & bay bridge/tunnel.  Which is 200 more miles from Baltimore.

aero3113

It looks like there were dolphins in place. I’m sure it was like a toothpick to that ship though.

LaRea

I read that the ship's first radio call was for tugs, but apparently none were close enough to help.  Also the captain dropped the port anchor but it didn't grab.  

My theory is that once the ship's bow got a little outside the channel, she ran aground, which turned the ship directly into the bridge support. Wiki says she draws 49'.  The wall of the channel is almost vertical going from 52' to only 36' at the bridge support.   

@aero3113 - I think the dolphins you mentioned are the power line poles.  They are way outside the channel in 25 feet of water.  Here's what it looks like in Google Earth:

aero3113

@LaRea take a look at this picture. Could the power poles are mounted on them? The there’s two on the opposite side.

LaRea

Good catch, I saw them on the chart but didn't understand what I was seeing.  They are not labeled -- just four little squares.  They are way outside the main channel in 30' of water.  I guess they might slow down a ship that is small enough to navigate in 30'.  

davidbrooks

This continues to capture everyone's attention here along the Chesapeake, Annapolis and definitely Baltimore. The company I work for has a roughly 50 yr history in the local transportation engineering world and actually had a subcontractor on the bridge at the time of the accident.  When the ship struck the bridge there were 8 individuals on the bridge.  7 were from a paving company doing superficial deck repairs.  One was our inspector.  Our sub was one that made it off the bridge without harm, one of the contractors was injured but rescued also.  In addition, they have found 2 of the missing 6.  There are a couple of items that I have come across that I thought would be of interest.  There is an article in CBS News that does a decent job at showing the path and timeline.  Note that there was literally 3 minutes from the 3rd time they lost power to when it hit the bridge.  The Capt dropped anchor after the 2nd power loss, called for tugs and sent out a Mayday.  It was only for the instant response by the emergency crew at the bridge to shut down vehicular access that this wasn't many orders of magnitude worse. 

I come from a world that has focused on mapping so looking at an issue from a map perspective always speaks to me.   Here is one that has a nautical map overlay. Myshiptracking is cool in that you can watch things moving in near real time as well as play back the last 3 days. Finally, Vesselfinder gives you a few more options for overlays.  All of them are better looked at on a larger screen so I would advise not using your phone to hit the links.  They all integrate with AIS data as the source.

LaRea

@davidbrooks - thanks, I'll go through these links.  Your connection to this accident goes much deeper than idle interest.  

MarkB

LaRea said:

Cargo ships are bigger now.  I wonder if it's even possible to build a dolphin structure that will stop a 1000-ton ship going 7-8 knots.  [edit, I left off a zero!]

Well, if the problem is identified, then there has to be a mitigation, so if you can't build it strong enough, you'd have to do other things, like a protective pier, or as others say, you can fix it via protocol, for instance tug boats.