Bridge Disaster
By 
A container ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday at 1:30 a.m. local time, immediately collapsing the 1.6-mile-long structure. The nightmarish collision reportedly sent seven cars plunging into the water below, all of which Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace reports have yet to be extracted. Two people have been rescued so far, though authorities claim to be searching for at least seven more individuals.
Video of the Dali—the name of the container ship owned by the Singaporean Synergy Marine Group—shows it billowing thick smoke from its main stack as it approaches the bridge. Reports claim that the ship suffered a mechanical failure and lost power ahead of the collision, though this has yet to be confirmed.
Economic impact will be significant:
With the collapse of the Key Bridge, one of Maryland’s major sources of personal and business revenues is at a halt.
The Port of Baltimore has created about 15,300 direct jobs, with nearly 140,000 jobs linked to port activities, according to a statement from Gov. Wes Moore in a February news release.
Moore said in the statement the port ranks first among the nation’s ports for volume of autos and light trucks, roll on/roll off heavy farm and construction machinery, imported sugar and imported gypsum.
The Port of Baltimore handled 847,158 cars and light trucks in 2023 which led other all other ports in the nation in the 13th consecutive year, according to the February release.
The Dali container ship that caused the collapse of a key bridge in Baltimore is recently built and flies under Singapore’s flag.
It was constructed by the Korean Hyundai shipyard in 2015 and is 300 metres long (985 feet), 48 metres wide and 24.8 metres tall, with gross tonnage of 95,000 tonnes, making it an average-sized container ship.
It had left Baltimore port at 1 am local time Tuesday for a roughly month-long voyage to Colombo in Sri Lanka, according to the site Marine Traffic. It hit the bridge at 1:28 am.
In the kind of comparisons that sophisticated LGMers don’t typically make, that’s twice the size of RMS Titanic and about as hefty as a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. “Not Intended to Be Collided with Bridges” is probably a warning sticker somewhere on the bridge. 22 crew members aboard, including two pilots; no indication so far of injuries to the crew or whether the failure was human or mechanical. And of course we wait to see if there was any kind of systemic failure in port procedures or with the mechanisms that are supposed to keep giant ships safely away from giant bridges.
… yo this is some statistical wizardry
