A federal agency recommended in 1981 that bridges near ports and harbors be assessed to see which ones needed better protection. In 1983, a report echoed the call, advising states and other bridge owners to evaluate spans for their ability to withstand a ship strike.
Neither happened.
On March 26, the extremely-unlikely-but-seemingly-inevitable happened: One of those bridges got hit. The container ship Dali lost powerand crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing the span, killing six people, gashing the regional economy by choking the Port of Baltimore and necessitating a rebuild that will cost roughly $2 billion.
It also prompted federal authorities to — decades after initially considering it — launch an inquiry into critical port infrastructure, such as bridges.
A thirst for efficiencies in the supply chain has created larger and larger cargo ships in recent decades. But many bridges, built long before the advent of 100,000-ton ships, never fortified their defenses. The result is a growing pain. Many of the country’s bridges, including some in Maryland, are ill-equipped for the threats that modern vessels present.
The risk has always been there. But once the Dali, in a precisely disastrous series of events, lost power and reared its destructive head, that risk was realized.
The Maryland Transportation Authority is analyzing upgrades to the protection system of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a southern neighborto the Key Bridge that is also transited by heavy freighters. It has a protection system in place, but so did the Key Bridge, calling into question the strength of many of the nation’s bridges.
Others, like the transportation authority’s Thomas J. Hatem Memorial Bridge in Northeastern Maryland, are transited by much smaller vessels. However, the Hatem Bridge lacks a system to protect its support piers from any vessel and inspection reports say that aspect of the bridge has needed re-evaluation for decades.
It’s up to each individual bridge owner — states, cities and other entities — to protect spans over navigable waterways. Some have protected their assets with sizable financial investments, while others have rolled the dice, given that calamitous ship strikes remain low-probability events. And every decision is made with money in mind; upgrading a bridge to be safer could mean less money toward other transportation needs, like tunnels and roads. It creates a complex calculus.
The collapse of the Key Bridge, however, illustrated another variable: just how impactful a disaster can be. Six laborers died. Billions will be spent on the clean-up and rebuilding the bridge — a figure that does not contemplate the economic loss Baltimore has suffered while its blocked shipping channel limits port activity, nor the traffic issues that will persist during the four years it takes to construct a replacement.
To prevent a similar disaster, the head of the National Transportation and Safety Board, an agency known for meticulous, long-running investigations, has preached urgency in the two months since the crash.
“I keep reiterating this,” NTSB Chair Jennifer L. Homendysaid before Congress during a May 15 hearing. “If you own a bridge, if a state owns a bridge, or other entity owns a bridge: Look at the current structure. Do a risk assessment. You can do that now. You don’t have to wait until we issue an urgent recommendation or come to the conclusion of our investigation.”
Prompted by the Baltimore disaster, federal agencies are taking steps to solve a bridge problem that lingered — quietly, for the most part — until the Key Bridge fell.
The Federal Highway Administration is now making a list of bridges that span navigable waterways transited by large cargo ships, and the Coast Guard has launched a “board of inquiry” to evaluate “the risks to critical port infrastructure posed by larger commercial vessels and increased traffic density.”
In the case of the Key Bridge, it’s debatable whether any protective system could have prevented a collapse caused by the extreme force from the Dali. But the catastrophe’s ripple effects on bridges and how to protect them have only just begun.
The University of Maryland and the American Society of Engineers hosted a roundtable Wednesday to discuss “Lessons Learned from the Key Bridge Collapse,” bringing together experts from around the country. Over the course of two dozen presentations, industry insiders and professors spoke about the growth of cargo ships, calculating and mitigating risk, traffic impacts and, most crucially, what can be gleaned from the tragedy of the Key Bridge.
“This won’t be the last disaster,” Norma Jean Mattei, a civil engineer at the University of New Orleans, told colleagues in College Park. “This won’t be the last time you and I sit in a workshop talking about some type of disaster. So how do we bounce back from them in a better way?”
An old warning
The cover of Jean-Paul Rodrigue’s most recent textbook, published last month, depicts a massive container ship gliding under a bridge. And as part of his more than two decades studying the intersection of transportation and economics, he’s seen ports and bridges all over the country and world.
Earlier this month, his work came to him.
The Texas A&M University-Galveston professor was commuting May 15 when a boat collided with a bridge while he was driving on it. He saw the barge approaching and noted its proximity, but it wasn’t until a few minutes later that he realized the vessel had struck the bridge. There was no collapse or injuries, but the Galveston span was damaged and the barge spilled some oil into the bay.
“I did, unintentionally, some field work,” he joked in a phone interview with The Baltimore Sun.
Ships have collided with bridges for centuries. From 1960 to 2015, there were 35 major bridge collapses worldwide due to vessel collision and 18 of those were in the U.S. Simply based upon quantity and probability, vessel strikes will continue, emphasizing the importance of bridge protection.
Federal authorities have sought previously to protect against the threat. A container ship infamously destroyed the Sunshine Skyway in Tampa, Florida, in 1980, prompting the NTSB to recommend that the nation’s bridges get a check-up.
The NTSB formally suggested that the Coast Guard and Federal Highway Administration analyze which bridges over navigable waterways leading to ports and harbors were “not equipped with adequate structural pier protection.” That idea died in 1988, however, after the Coast Guard told the NTSB that it did not have the “authority to determine the adequacy of any structural bridge protection system.”
If that study had been done, the Key Bridge likely would have made the list.
In 1983, the Transportation Research Board (a division of the nonprofit National Academies of Sciences) published a report entitled “Ship Collisions with Bridges” that studied 133 bridges, including the Key Bridge. It found that, in the U.S., “no agency or unit of government is responsible for the safety of overwater bridges against ship collisions.”
“A national policy needs to be formulated,” the report stated.
The nation’s bridge code — which is decided upon by a group of state government engineers, with each state getting one vote — was updated in the 1990s to include protection from vessel collision. But there was never a national mandate to enact any of the public or nonprofit recommendations from the 1980s to evaluate existing bridges for the same thing.
In the case of the Key Bridge, it’s akin to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but the federal government is taking a collective look now. The Coast Guard stated in a May 15 memo its intent to assess risks to infrastructure at 10 U.S. ports that it will identify within a month. Its report is due next year.
“The size and complexity of ships has grown over the years, placing greater demands on our marine transportation infrastructure that may not have kept pace with the increased risk that these vessels pose,” Coast Guard Vice Adm. Peter Gautier told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on May 15. “It’s time for us to more broadly understand these risks.”
The probe could put some federal pressure on bridge owners, although some had decided to reinforce their assets even before the Baltimore bridge collapse.
Authorities in Delaware and New Jersey considered upgrading the Delaware Memorial Bridge as far back as 1969, when an oil tanker damaged the “fenders” on support pillars of the structure, which carries Interstate 295 and U.S. 40 over the Delaware River in the northern part of Delaware.
But it wasn’t until last year that — buoyed by a federal grant covering roughly a quarter of the cost — the Delaware River and Bay Authority began a $93 million project to install eight “dolphins” (artificial protective islands) with a diameter of 80 feet. For comparison, the Key Bridge had four dolphins, each 25 feet across.
There are myriad ways to protect a bridge from vessel strikes, either by placing supports far from the borders of any shipping channel, fortifying piers, or building dolphins and fender systems to deflect objects. Each decision comes with weighing the costs and the odds. How much money should be spent to prevent an, all things considered, low-probability event?
The Maryland Transportation Authority, owner of the fallen Key Bridge, is considering options to improve protection of its Bay Bridge, which has a fender system, but no dolphins.
Asked Tuesday about any potential upgrades to the Bay Bridge, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore responded with a general answer about the importance of fortifying “every single critical infrastructure asset.”
“We’ve seen what happens when one of our major arteries takes a significant hit. And so there has been and continues to be a focus for our state to make sure that our critical infrastructure is strong, that our critical infrastructure is secure,” he said, “and I know it’s not just happening in Maryland, because I’ve been in conversations with governors around the country who are very much going through the same process.”
The Key Bridge’s pier protection passed its most recent inspection. But that was simply a measure of its condition — not the strength of its outdated protective system. The Bay Bridge has similarly passed inspections, but some engineers are still wary of its ability to withstand a cargo ship strike.
“I think those risk analyses need to be conducted,” said Mehdi Shokouhian, a civil engineer at Morgan State University, when asked about the pier protection of the Bay Bridge and Hatem Bridge.
Of the country’s 4,207 bridges over navigable waterways listed in the U.S. National Bridge Inventory, there are 845 that received concerning scores for pier abutment on their last inspection, including nine in Maryland. Among them are the Chesapeake City Bridge, which was built in 1948 and crosses the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal in Cecil County, and the Hatem Bridge, which was originally built in 1939 and links Harford and Cecil counties over the Susquehanna River.
Although traffic under the Hatem Bridge is mostly limited to small vessels, inspectors have suggested that its support piers be analyzed.Each routine inspection — typically done every two years and reported to the Federal Highway Authority — since 1994 has stated that the bridge has no pier protection and that “re-evaluation [is] suggested.”
The Maryland Transportation Authority did not reply when asked whether the Hatem Bridge has been assessed for vessel collision or if there are any plans to evaluate its pier protection.
Growing pains
During his 1974 and 1975 summer breaks while a student at the University of Virginia, Joseph Bracken poured concrete on the Key Bridge. He fondly remembers more seasoned laborers calling him “College Boy,” getting a cold beer at a Dundalk bar on Fridays and, most of all, the endless amount of concrete they poured.
“I put so much concrete into that one. So many buckets of concrete. Tons of concrete,” he said of one of the bridge’s piers, pausing before emphasizing the point once again: “Man, so much concrete.”
It didn’t matter. The 124,000-ton Dali decimated it.
Bracken also recalled looking down, at the time, at the recently completed dolphins. They looked huge.
“Now that I look at those dolphins — they look pathetic because of that giant Dali,” he marveled. “[They] looked big when we did it.”
Economies of scale dictate that larger loads create efficiencies and cost-savings and, thus, the cargo ships of today are more than four times heavier, on average, than one from when the Key Bridge was designed. The Dali alone carried 1.8 million gallons of fuel.
One way, in theory, to prevent the next Key Bridge-esque disaster could be to limit the size of container ships, but that’s far from feasible. If the U.S. were to ban ships of a certain size, for example, it would hamstring the economy, Rodrigue said, and potentially lead to more frequent ship transits under bridges — which might cause more collisions.
“You’d be shooting yourself in the foot,” he said.
A report by the NTSB is likely to eventually explain why the Dali lost power, causing the crash.
But the onus alsoremains on bridge owners — as encouraged by federal authorities — to protect their assets over waterways. For some bridges, that could mean retrofitted additions; for others, it could mean precautions, like using tugboats to keep vessels on course as they clear bridges, to mitigate risk. In the case of the new Key Bridge, which is expected to be completed by 2028, it is expected to be a much more fortified span.
The Federal Highway Administration now has a “preliminary list” of bridges nationwide it’s looking at, according to its administrator, Shailen Bhatt.
“It’s examining all the threats and doing that cost-benefit analysis of: What protections are sort of quickly deployable?” he told the House transportation committee. “How do we get these bridges protected? And then how do we update design standards, given the ever-changing nature of the vessels going underneath them?”
Baltimore Sun reporter Jonathan M. Pitts contributed to this article.
