A portion of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has collapsed after a large boat collided with it early on Tuesday morning, sending multiple vehicles into the water.
At about 1.30am, a vessel crashed into the bridge, catching fire before sinking and causing multiple vehicles to fall into the water below, according to a video posted on X.
“All lanes closed both directions for incident on I-695 Key Bridge. Traffic is being detoured,” the Maryland Transportation Authority posted on X.
Matthew West, a petty officer first class for the coastguard in Baltimore, told the New York Times that the coastguard received a report of an impact at 1.27am ET. West said the Dali, a 948ft (29 metres) Singapore-flagged cargo ship, had hit the bridge, which is part of Interstate 695.
That’s the ship that hit the bridge. It’s still there as I write this, but there are a bunch of tugs on scene right now.
Marine traffic can show you all the active AIS contacts in real time.
That sounds like a traffic armageddon around Baltimore for the next few years…
Not just Baltimore. This is also a major cargo port. That harbor will be blocked for a long time. Get ready for supply chain disruptions and more rising prices.
I doubt the harbor will be blocked that long, maybe a week or so at most.
That’s a crime scene and a death scene. It’s not going to go quickly. The good news is that it’s a critical roadway and waterway intersection so the feds and state government have motivation to make haste.
Except there is no mystery as to the deaths part. Investigations take a lot of time when there are a lot of questions. The only question here is “why did the boat plow straight into the bridge?”. There’s very little question how/why the bridge collapsed(it got hit directly by a massive cargo ship). No one’s going to question the physics of it. The only question will be “was it captain error or ship error so we know who to fine”. Recovering the ship will be part of answering that and the rest will be communication and maintenance logs.
The investigation report is going to be interesting. While bridges can only take so much punishment, they are usually designed to survive some collisions with their pylons. I wonder what the state of the bridge was, prior to the collapse. If it’s anything like the rest of the infrastructure in the US, it was probably not good. Though, this may also be a case that the designers in the 70’s planned for a collision with a cargo vessel of the times, which were tiny bath tub boats compared to the super container ships we have now. The Dali was built in 2015 she is a 300m ship capable of carrying 116851 tons. That’s a lot of mass for the pylon and it’s barriers to stop.
- in the '70s* planned
- and its* barriers to stop
I had to find a map, yeah, this is going to be a major cluster fuck in the morning. It’s possible to route around it, but the next crossing is aways away:
Just looking at that map makes me crack up as someone from Ireland. Baltimore is a small town here on the south coast of Cork. Dundalk is up in Northern Ireland. Pasadena is a place in California.
I just think it’s funny when America has random place names taken from elsewhere.
If you want a laugh, check out cities in Texas. We have a Moscow, Paris, etc.
As does Maine. I’ve never looked it up, but I think Maine might be the state with the most places named after another place.
As an Engineer I am looking forward to seeing how this plays out on future construction as well as retrofitting of existing bridges. Not only that, but also Emergency alert systems on cargo ships and maybe a more redundant power set up? But RIP to all those who lost their lives. Tragic.
The bridge is just gone now, one tap and the whole thing fell like dominos!
Those constructions rely on all parts being where they are, otherwise the whole thing collapses. You’d need a different kind of bridge for the single stretches to be independent.
It’s bad enough that the transportation infrastructure is falling apart across the country due to poor maintenance. But when the bridge was built in the 1970s, I don’t think container ships that big even existed. It’s the same problem with old roads and modern cars or old airports and modern jets.
I hope that whatever replaces the Key Bridge is designed to fail in segments and take a good beating before it does.
That would be extremely expensive. I think that money would be better spent toward getting ships to not hit the bridge at all.
