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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Late Night Open Thread: Rebuilding the Baltimore Bridge

Late Night Open Thread: Rebuilding the Baltimore Bridge

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  1. 1.

    J. Arthur Crank

    I would think that whoever owns the ship that caused the damage should pony up at least part of the dough.  More likely, its insurance carrier will probably the one who ponies up the dough.

    @SosoTheWanderer in that last tweet seems to be one of the dimmer bulb on the Christmas tree.

  2. 2.

    eclare

    It is so good to see a full press and united government response.  Hopefully the House will not derail that when funding bills come up, fingers crossed.

  5. 5.

    Martin

    So, you would now (not common practice back when that bridge was built) protect the supports by using dolphins – basically pilings that extend out from the supports that look a little bit like breakwaters. They’re built like a ring around the support and are anchored and reinforced with large rocks, basically creating a large mass that is designed to take a ship impact and divert it downward.

    Dolphins have a fairly sizable footprint and so a bridge like that, designed before dolphins were a proper feature, and for a port that served much smaller ships, likely couldn’t be retrofitted with them and still accommodate the larger ships like the one that hit the bridge. Back when this bridge was built, the only ships remotely close in size to this were aircraft carriers, and if one of them hits the bridge, that’s on the federal government, and you’d know pretty damn well if there was any reason for a carrier to go under that bridge (pretty sure there isn’t).

    Steel truss bridges fail all the time, but they are cheap as shit to build and go up fast. (They have bad failure modes – almost any damage results in the bridge completely collapsing because every element is dependent on every other element.) If you want infrastructure cheap, that’s what you build, and we build a lot of them. If you want bridges to be more durable, you employ different designs that are much more expensive and take much longer to build (and also cause you to avoid infrastructure changes because they’re so expensive). Normal decision making that is made every day: Good – Fast – Cheap: pick any two. Value engineering is not a bad thing. If you have limited money, your choice may be a bridge more susceptible to failure or no bridge at all. We both like to believe that the US has unlimited money, and complain about every goddamn penny that the US spends. But the reality is that when the bridge was built, they almost certainly did a statistical model for the size of ships at the time and the consequence of one hitting it.  The largest container ship ever made in 1977 was 2900 TEU (how many shipping containers it could carry). The Dali was 4x that size. Engineers in 1977 had no concept of a freight ship of this size or how strong the bridge would need to be.

    The decision to accommodate ships of that size were made by the port, and the port was expanded to take them. Did they realize that the larger ships were a risk to the bridge? Almost certainly, but that was deemed acceptable because the economic cost of not accommodating those ships was too great. In the end we got the free market solution – a port expanding to Pareto optimal economic value, a ship deferring maintenance to Pareto optimal economic value, and a bridge that we could largely ignore because any costs that might be incurred there were unknown and in the future. Somewhere at Maersk there’s an actuary pulling out some tables that will show their boss that the expected payout to families and the state of Maryland for the collision is still less than the cost of avoiding it. And when congress looks to authorize money to rebuild the bridge, they’ll value engineer that number down as well.

  6. 6.

    Viva BrisVegas

    I don’t know Baltimore, but is there any reason why you wouldn’t have tugs escorting ships out of the harbour?

  8. 8.

    Martin

    @J. Arthur Crank: Ah my mistake above – it’s Grace Oceanic that owns the ship, not Maersk. There will almost certainly be a payout by the owner or their insurer. It won’t cover the economic impact on Baltimore or the port, but it’ll help pay for a new bridge.

  10. 10.

    Martin

    @Viva BrisVegas: You don’t need them. You use tugs when you need to maneuver a ship that it doesn’t have adequate control authority for. Besides, these container ships are so huge that tugs can’t really move them that much off of their course.

    The problem here is that the mechanical problems on the ship were known but it had a schedule to keep and they tried to get underway while those problem were still happening. That’s negligence, and possibly criminal given that people died.

    Navigating the channel should have been trivial for a ship like this without the use of tugs, plus, that would slow down passage and make port operations more expensive. This is a really protected harbor – there’s no currents making navigation difficult.

  11. 11.

    piratedan

    @Viva BrisVegas: they did have local harbor pilots at the helm when they lost power, those folks know the channels and the depths that are present, but once you have something like that in motion and no engine power to slow down or maneuver, well you got a whole lot of inertia and kinetic energy to deal with.  That had tugs in play to help it leave the port berth, but my understanding is that the harbor pilots take it down the length of the river span to get to the Ocean, then relinquish control.

  12. 12.

    Ten Bears

    Where are/were the bumpers? Most bridges have bridge embuckments fore and aft, big concrete bumpers, to guide wayward boats around the critical support structure. I don’t see any

    I’ll bet Republican manufactured budget-cutting hysteria is at the root of it …

  13. 13.

    NotMax

    @Viva BrisVegas

    As I understand it, not exclusively but generally tugs are emplyed when maneuvering into and out of berths. That minimizes the possibility of damage to infrastructure and to other craft from the turbulence of a massive ship under power.

    it’s like the tractors which tow planes from the jetways at many airports so as to avoid damage from the big engines to the structures and other planes.

  14. 14.

    Jay

    @Martin:

    @piratedan:

    The Port of Vancouver requires tugs, for and aft, on the way in, on the away out. A single modern Harbour tug can haul an Aircraft carrier, easily.

    Two tugs, one fore and one aft, can steer a ship like the one involved, easily.

    But, they cost money.

    The Port used to require two tugs out to the bay, but dropped that requirement, in the early 90’s, as it cost the Shipping Companies money.

     

    @Ten Bears:

    The Bridge had dolphins, (protective barriers), but they were not upgraded to deal with the massively larger tonnage of ships using the port.

    Again, money.

  15. 15.

    KrackenJack

    There may be other pockets at risk. Were any of the critical systems maintained by a third-party? Were any of the parts defective? Was there a problem with the fuel?

  16. 16.

    Jay

    Weird, despite writing it in the text, WP won’t publish fore, instead it publishes “for”.

  18. 18.

    Dangerman

    @Martin: The problem here is that the mechanical problems on the ship were known but it had a schedule to keep and they tried to get underway while those problem were still happening.

    As with the Challenger shuttle.

    Who will be this tragedies Richard Feynman (who, BTW, was at Los Alamos with Oppenheimber)?

  19. 19.

    Jay

    @Doc Sardonic:

    SosoTheWanderer, after becoming an expert on vaccines, global affairs, etc, they did their own research and has become an expert on structural engineering.//

  21. 21.

    JWR

    DW News had a bridge guy on talking about what could be done to prevent such an event in the future, and while he did say that it will always be a risk, there are things that could be done, such as building small islands around the bridge pylons, (which in any rebuild should probably be placed further apart), because if you want to stop a ship of this size, land will stop it faster than anything else, transferring the forward momentum into the vertical. Can’t find a link right now, so I hope I didn’t mangle what the guy had to say.

  24. 24.

    JWR

    Why is it that nearly any time Hunter Biden walks into a courtroom, a FedSoc judge pops up? (From Politico):

    LOS ANGELES — Hunter Biden’s effort to dismiss the federal tax charges against him got a chilly reception in court on Wednesday, as a federal judge sounded skeptical that the president’s son was a victim of a politically motivated prosecution.

    The president’s son was not present in the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, as his defense attorneys, led by Abbe Lowell, put forth a variety of arguments to gut or shut down the case entirely.

    “There is nothing regular about how this case was initiated [and] investigated,” Lowell said, making an overarching argument that Biden has been unfairly targeted by special counsel David Weiss.

    But Judge Mark Scarsi, a district judge in California’s Central district, continually pressed Lowell for firmer proof that Biden was subject to selective, vindictive prosecution.

    Silly judge, that’s what you get for missing the last FedSoc meeting! Take note, we’re still on the smear the Biden’s beat!

    Oh, and from Wikipedia:

    Scarsi noted he became a Federalist Society member in 2017.[3]

  26. 26.

    bjacques

    @JWR: wouldn’t it be better to approach the prosecution to revive the original deal if it was rescinded on the basis of perjury from that Russian spy?

  27. 27.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @JWR: I guess they designed around the hazards they knew about at the time, and it’s tough to scale up the threat protection by a factor of, oh, ten, after the thing has been built. At least it’s not as bad as the lifeboat rules at the time of the Titanic, where the White Star Line took pride in providing 25 percent more lifeboat capacity than the rules demanded, not taking into account that the Titanic was bigger than the rule’s tonnage threshold by a factor of about five (and didn’t even take into account the ship’s passenger capacity versus lifeboat capacity).

    But yeah, the new bridge crossing that span will have to have a different design than the old one.

  28. 28.

    anitamargarita

    @Martin: is there any type of bridge that could withstand a freighter like this crashing into it? Seems like it would have to be massive.

  31. 31.

    piratedan

    @bjacques: there you go thinking that GOP fuckups require any consideration…. I fully expect them to exact whatever petty revenge they can justify, all in the name of fairness and accountability.

  32. 32.

    The Thin Black Duke

    Zillionaires are babbling about shuttles to  Mars but don’t want to spend a dime on infrastructure. Make it make sense.

  37. 37.

    LiminalOwl

    @Martin: That was so interesting to read; thank you.

    (I am constantly amazed at the variety and quality of expertise on display here.)

  39. 39.

    Martin

    @anitamargarita: Oh, yeah. Two solutions:

    1. Big dolphins. Around the supports you build basically a stone jetty which effectively grounds the ship – transferring its inertia down into the seabed. This would impede on the shipping channel so you want a wider span as a result.
    2. If possible, eliminate the need for supports that are in the water.

    One problem with steel truss bridges is their main span can’t be very big. In fact, this bridge was the 3rd largest steel truss in the world. So the supports need to be close to the shipping channel, which limits how you can protect it. By comparison a suspension bridge can have a span 5x longer, which is enough in this case to put the supports on land – leaving nothing for a ship to crash into. Similarly, you can investigate a tunnel and put the cars below the water – again, nothing for the ship to crash into. And even if you don’t want to build a suspension so long that the supports are on land, you can build one large enough to move the supports far enough apart that you can accommodate the shipping channel and the support protection.

    So, this is exactly what happened to the Sunshine Skyway bridge in Florida. It was destroyed just a couple years after this bridge was completed when a cargo ship crashed into a support. The replacement bridge was a cable stay bridge with a longer span and substantial dolphins built around the support columns beside the shipping channel. You can see the old and new bridges in this photo.

    But even this much more modern bridge wound up being a bit shortsighted as modern cruise ships are so fucking big they can’t fit underneath it, and so can’t use Tampa Bay as a port. That has economic ramifications. Should they have built a taller, more expensive bridge to accommodate ships that hadn’t even been considered? This is why infrastructure is hard to do.

  40. 40.

    Ramalama

    @Martin: I always wondered about the Dolphins. Not an engineer nor do I own a boat. I just watched a ton of the tv show series “Below Deck.” Getting luxury yachts out to sea often a nail biter in part due to incompetent crew and many of those Dolphins.

    But seriously, nice explainer.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    I am sad now that I realize there aren’t any actual dolphins out there protecting our bridges.

    ETA

    They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning
    No one, you see, is smarter than he

  42. 42.

    mrmoshpotato

    @frosty:

    If the House decides to derail the funding, Baltimore will sic David Simon on them. Bunch of PABs. 

    Yup! 😂

    They’ll rue the day.

  44. 44.

    eclare

    The woman who just won in the AL special election is going to be on Morning Joe today.

  45. 45.

    raven

    @Martin: From WAPO

    The rudder may have gotten stuck in a position that caused the ship to turn, said a senior retired maritime official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while waiting for more details on the incident. It’s also possible that an incoming tide could have been a factor, he said.

  49. 49.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Martin:

    Should they have built a taller, more expensive bridge to accommodate ships that hadn’t even been considered? This is why infrastructure is hard to do.

    And (this isn’t aimed at you, Martin) this is why all the dumping on Soso the Wanderer here bugs me.  Most people have no idea how enormous and massive cargo (or passenger, for that matter, unless you’ve been on an ocean cruise lately) ships have become, nor should they really be expected to have kept up with that.

    Sure, people on the Internet are going to comment about a disaster like this, but that their ideas of the forces involved are decades out of date doesn’t mean they’re particularly stupid or ignorant.  Maybe they should know better than to say anything at all, but really that’s a bit much to expect. Taking one such person and making an example out of them just seems rather cruel and disproportionate.

  50. 50.

    Marleedog

    One wonders if the Bay Bridge that spans the Chesapeake at Annapolis is adequately protected?  Or will be scheduled for upgrade?  Would hate to see a twofer catastrophe.

  51. 51.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist:

    The problem wasn’t that the opinion was uninformed. The problem is that the tweeter immediately jumped to accountability because they were so sure they were right. These sorts of people are a real problem on social media.

  52. 52.

    kalakal

    Muskrat to the rescue! He can build a tunnel. 1,000s of Teslas in an endless loop could easily carry all all the traffic. Just unload the semis, load up a Tesla, problem solved, easy peasey! /s

    I will not be at all surprised to hear the Boring Company being talked up as a solution with all the fanbois “If only they let Muskrat fix it”

  53. 53.

    Geminid

    Rep. Annie Kuster announced she will retire after this term. Age 67, Kuster represents New Hampshire’s 2nd CD which covers the west and north of the Granite State, and I think Joe Biden carried the district by 9 points. Kuster is chairman of the more moderate New Democrat Coalition.

  54. 54.

    eclare

    @Marleedog:

    There was an article in our local Memphis paper discussing any dangers to the I-40 bridge over the Mississippi.  A lot of barges travel the Mississippi.  The people interviewed said no, the river is very wide and straight here.  Plus I can’t imagine any barges here weigh as much as the Dali.

    There are two bridges that cross the river here, if both of them shut down, IIRC, the closest one is about 100 miles away.

  55. 55.

    lowtechcyclist

    One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the commentary I’ve read so far is what is meant by a ‘container.’ I’m ignorant here myself, but AIUI, each one is the size of a railway freight car, and are designed to essentially become a freight car by being transferred directly onto the chassis of one, so that cargo can go seamlessly from ship to rail and vice versa.

    So if I have this right, when they say the Dali carried 4700 containers, that’s the equivalent of 4700 freight cars, all loaded up and full of cargo.

    Totally surreal to me that a ship could carry that much stuff.

  56. 56.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: Even that is something of a systemic problem: this behavior is all over social media because the incentives of social media favor it. Make a statement in tones of great certainty that tells people how to be outraged, and it’s more likely to get engagement and reposts. In a Twitter-like environment, that’s going to cause it to be automatically promoted as well, because the system likes things that get engagement. All this trains people to post this way, if they weren’t doing it already. You can feel the pull if you’re active.

  58. 58.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​

    The problem wasn’t that the opinion was uninformed. The problem is that the tweeter immediately jumped to accountability because they were so sure they were right.

    Sorry, not seeing this as a critical distinction here.

    These sorts of people are a real problem on social media.

    Can’t say I saw any evidence of that on Twitter before Elmo bought it and ruined it. More like just one more ‘down in the white noise’ level problem.

    Anyway, what bugged me in particular was the way people in this thread were jumping on this person – ‘can’t find his ass with both hands’ and all that.  This person isn’t a ‘real problem’ here at BJ.  And I’m smart enough to have a PhD in math, but I’m sure I’ve said equally ignorant things on the Internet.

  59. 59.

    eclare

    @eclare:

    I googled, the next closest is around 75 miles away.  But if both bridges were shut down, there would be major disruptions.  Dyersburg is the next closest, not really equipped to handle all of the eighteen wheelers if they were suddenly rerouted from I-40.

  60. 60.

    Splitting Image

    @The Thin Black Duke:

    Zillionaires are babbling about shuttles to  Mars but don’t want to spend a dime on infrastructure. Make it make sense.

    They want money spent on them, not on other people. Other people use roads and bridges, but the zillionaires would be the only ones using a shuttle to Mars if it were built.

  61. 61.

    Matt McIrvin

    @lowtechcyclist: Yes. These containers are intermodal–you also often see them on the road, strapped to a different chassis to become the semi-trailer of an 18-wheeler.

    The standardization of these things absolutely revolutionized shipping and is what makes international supply chains as we know them possible.

    Where the vertical clearance allows it, sometimes the railroad cars even carry them stacked to double height.

  62. 62.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Sorry, not seeing this as a critical distinction here.

     

    It’s the difference between being wrong and demanding action based on being wrong. When you do the latter, you invite people to shut you down.

    ETA: of course, being wrong, in certain contexts, can also be a source of misinformation, which is problematic in its own right.

  63. 63.

    Another Scott

    @Martin: It’s not just engineering and cost/benefit considerations – local sensibilities are there too.  When the Wilson Bridge replacement design was being considered, one design included raising it something like 15 feet above the final design to eliminate the need for a drawbridge.  But locals in Alexandria screamed that it would be too big and tower too much over the city.

    So, it’s the largest dual-span drawbridge in the world (or was at the time).  It’s higher than it was originally, and isn’t opened more than a few times a year, but when it is it can be hugely disruptive to travel times…

    I ass-u-me that in this case they’re going to get the channel and port open ASAP and put up a new cable stayed bridge that is much higher with supports much farther apart (rather than trying to cobble together a temporary bridge from what’s left).  It will be safer, not a choke point, and able to address expanded port traffic by larger ships and sea level rise safely.

    We’ll see what magic the federal government can do when there’s a need to work fast and work smart.  I’m so glad that “F U pay me” guys like Christie and Blago and TIFG aren’t anywhere near this now…

    Cheers ,
    Scott.

  65. 65.

    Gin & Tonic

    @kalakal: Since you can’t have hazmats in a tunnel, the Key Bridge was the only trucking route through Baltimore they could take. Building another tunnel in its place doesn’t help ( there are already two under that harbor.)

  66. 66.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud:

    If the facts as you understand them imply that action needs to be taken, why wouldn’t you advocate for that action?

    It still comes back to the offense being “someone is wrong on the Internet.”

  68. 68.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: The common unit measure for these containers is TEU, or “Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit.” Most shipping containers are forty feet long, or two TEUs which I think is still smaller than a standard box car.

    Note: You were complaining the other day about how three weeks ago, “people here” were saying that there’d be a ceasefire in Gaza by the following Monday. I knew I had not said that, but it took me a while to figure out who did. It was Joe Biden, and that was reported here..

  69. 69.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Baud: Plus the tweet above is blaming the wrong entity. Pretty sure that bridge was a State/Federal project as most major infrastructure projects are. Maybe the city was consulted on the design but blaming the city smacks of the same casual racism wherein predominantly black cities are blamed for everything that goes wrong within them (implication is THOSE PEOPLE are too dysfunctional to do anything right) whether it’s the city’s responsibility or not.

  70. 70.

    Another Scott

    @Matt McIrvin: It’s a guy seeking clicks pathology.  It’s the same thing as the 9/11 truthers.  “Airplanes are aluminum and aluminum can’t go through steel and concrete therefore bomb…!!!”. It’s stupid (water and light can go through steel and concrete, given enough power, of course).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  72. 72.

    kalakal

    @Gin & Tonic: I know, it’s a stupid idea, that’s why Musk & his fanbois will promote it. I did end it with a /s tag.

    Semi seriously I can see the Musk worshippers and the GOP boosting it to criticize the gov’t rebuilding program.

    “Biden bridge still not finished, if only Super Elon had been put in charge” sort of shit

  73. 73.

    Princess

    @lowtechcyclist: Shipping all that freight around the world seems increasingly unsustainable to me, not least because of climate change— sea freight produces a huge amount of our greenhouse gases— but also for issues like this bridge collapse, Houthis in Yemen etc. But I don’t know where we go from here.

  74. 74.

    Another Scott

    @Princess: I get where you are coming from.  Ordering, say, gift chocolate from Z Chocolate in France seems really really indulgent and wasteful no matter how good and convenient it seems.  But international shipping via containers is amazingly efficient.  There has to be a limit, but I don’t think that we are there yet.

    Much more needs to be done to reduce the CO2 from the ships and trucks though, and quickly.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  75. 75.

    EarthWindFire

    @lowtechcyclist: It isn’t reasonable for anyone to keep up with cargo ships. But it is reasonable to assume that any structure has a load bearing feature that, if taken out, risks full or partial collapse of the structure. We have them in our own homes. This is why I think Sosothewanderer is a dumbass.

  76. 76.

    Geminid

    @Princess: This problem is being addressed through mandates for carbon-neutral ship propulsion. As usual, the EU is leading the way. There is a lot of reporting at our fingertips if we look up “carbon-neutral shipping.”

  78. 78.

    Geminid

    @Baud: The EU is also the one of the largest shippers and receivers of maritime freight, larger than the US, and their mandates have force because of this. They cover all ships docking at EU ports..

  79. 79.

    lowtechcyclist

    Thinking about the ‘tugs cost money’ comment earlier, I suppose another thing that could have been done was require a lower speed for ships inside the harbor, or approaching the bridge from outside.

    That would have cost money too, of course, since time is money, but probably less than a couple of tugs capable of guiding that massive a ship.

    But one thing going on is that it’s hard to balance nearly infinitesimal probabilities of extremely disastrous events. In 47 years, probably hundreds of thousands of cargo ships had gone under the bridge, so this was a far more routine event than, say, space shuttle flights were by January 1986. What value do you put, what cost do you assign, to reducing further the risk of an event that’s that unlikely to begin with? It’s hard to get people to be willing to spend money on that, even if the cost of being wrong is potentially hundreds of lives (thank goodness this didn’t happen at rush hour) and billions of dollars.

    Speaking of which, have they determined how many cars were on the part of the bridge that collapsed, and how many people were in them?

  80. 80.

    DrDaveChemist

    @eclare: Where I live in Rhode Island we’re dealing with a problem like that right now.

    In December, an inspection revealed serious problems with the westbound span of I-195, leading to its complete closure. The nearest alternative is a much smaller bridge that’s connected to city streets on both ends. Until the eastbound span was converted to two-way traffic, the result was often delays of more than an hour getting off the highway and then back on after crossing the river since the local streets were gridlocked.

    To the south, you would have to drive about thirty miles out of your way to Newport to cross the Narragansett Bay on the Pell and Jamestown Bridges. The roads along that route are a mix of highways and local roads, so not really suitable for truck traffic.

    The river gets narrower and has multiple crossings to the north, but the only way to get there on a highway would be to connect to I-495 which runs from Cape Cod to connect with I-95 about halfway between Providence and Boston. Call it about 20 miles on local roads.

    Bottom line: it’s a big mess and getting between east and west sides of Narragansett Bay is going to be problematic until the westbound lanes get replaced. Best case estimate for that is two years. Blech!

  82. 82.

    lowtechcyclist

    @EarthWindFire: ​
     

    But it is reasonable to assume that any structure has a load bearing feature that, if taken out, risks full or partial collapse of the structure. We have them in our own homes. This is why I think Sosothewanderer is a dumbass.

    We do? If one load-bearing wall of my house collapses, the others will go down as well?

    Wow, I had no idea.

  83. 83.

    Geminid

    @Princess: The figure commonly given for maritime shipping’s share of total global carbon emissions is 3%, about the share of aviation.

  85. 85.

    Suzanne

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR:

    I guess they designed around the hazards they knew about at the time, and it’s tough to scale up the threat protection by a factor of, oh, ten, after the thing has been built. 

    This is the story of everything that we build. Bridges, roadways, hospitals, airports, etc. As people, equipment, vehicles get larger, existing stuff often can’t grow along with it.

    I know that I’m biased, but I think we really need to revive a spirit of building in this country. We seem to have this attitude that we built something once and it should make do forever…. but we don’t do good maintenance or design with upgrade in mind, and then we are surprised by failures and shortages. That’s fucken dumb. We should replace things proactively.

  86. 86.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @raven: “It’s also possible that an incoming tide could have been a factor, he said.”

    Except that (IIRC) low tide was sometime after 0200, and the accident occurred at about 0130. The Dali was trying to get out of the harbor before the tide changed directions (and for all I know may have waited for near low tide because that pile of containers on deck wasn’t very much below the level of the bridge itself).

    The anonymous source should have consulted a tide table before he shot his mouth off.

  87. 87.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: Aviation is inherently harder to decarbonize– “sustainable aviation fuel” is a thing, or at least a concept, but it’s hard to make economically feasible. And while hydrogen airliners exist in nice computer renderings, I’ll believe them when I see them.

    But… would our civilization collapse if aviation volume dropped to a fraction of what it is? It would not. A lot of work-related international passenger travel can be substituted with communication, as we’ve seen. And for many types of shipping, the speed you get with air is more nice-to-have/ competitive advantage than an absolute necessity.

  88. 88.

    Timill

    @lowtechcyclist: You can’t slow ships too much, or they’ll no longer have steerage way, and might hit a bridge…

    From videos I’ve seen, the police did a really good job of shutting down traffic. Unfortunately the best was on the Baltimore Sun’s site (I think) and doesn’t seem to be linked any more.

  89. 89.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: Democrats in the last Congress considered a mandate for carbon-neutral aviation fuel that would have been phased in starting later this decade. They set the proposal aside, but it may be enacted sometime this decade. Carbon-neutral fuel will be more costly and will tend to depress air travel or at least make it level off.

    Hydrogen might never be used for larger planes, but we’ll probably be seeing smaller fuel cell-powered planes in a few years, maybe as large as 40-seaters. This is an interesting field easily accessed by looking up “hydrogen fuel airplanes.”

    Carbon-neutral fuels are also worth looking up if this topic interests you.

  90. 90.

    Ken

    I’m not finding it, perhaps I saw it on Bluesky*; but someone recently quoted the NYT PItchbot nailing this. Something like “Having mastered vaccine science, submarine rescue, (etc.) I will now turn my attention to bridge engineering.”  The “etc.” was a long list of recent events where people had immediately leaped in with their hot takes on how this happened and what everyone should have done.

    * I even tried Twitter, but apparently if you don’t pay for a subscription it shows the tweets in random order?

  91. 91.

    Another Scott

    The engines on these giant shipping container ships are huge. E.g. Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C:

    The Wärtsilä RT-flex96C is a two-stroke turbocharged low-speed diesel engine designed by the Finnish manufacturer Wärtsilä. It is designed for large container ships that run on heavy fuel oil. Its largest 14-cylinder version is 13.5 meters high, 26.59 meters long, weighs over 2,300 tonnes, and produces 80.08 megawatts. The engine is the largest reciprocating engine in the world.

    80 MW is 107,000 hp.

    2-stroke engines are dirty, especially when they burn “bunker fuel”. Small 2-stroke engines are being phased out in many places for use in lawn equipment (being replaced by electric motors). As Ruckus said a few days ago, bunker fuel is basically crude oil with the rocks filtered out (it’s the dregs when the valuable stuff has been refined out – slightly above asphalt – and has lots of sulfur (which causes various air pollution issues)).

    Some rough calculations indicate that a large container ship is about 15x more efficient than a semi-trailer truck per container.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  92. 92.

    Suzanne

    @lowtechcyclist:

    But one thing going on is that it’s hard to balance nearly infinitesimal probabilities of extremely disastrous events. In 47 years, probably hundreds of thousands of cargo ships had gone under the bridge, so this was a far more routine event than, say, space shuttle flights were by January 1986. What value do you put, what cost do you assign, to reducing further the risk of an event that’s that unlikely to begin with? 

    This is exactly why it’s hard. We can (and do) think of all kinds of random, crazy things that could happen. But…. are we gonna design everything to withstand a one-in-a-God-knows-what chance?

    I mean, technically, an asteroid could hit your house today.

  94. 94.

    frosty

    @lowtechcyclist: I’ve been following the Baltimore Banner and WaPo. The ship pilot sent out a Mayday to MDTA that the bridge was in danger. MDTA police were stationed at each end, routine for night construction. They were called and immediately stopped traffic. One minute before the bridge fell.

    I haven’t seen any reports that there was traffic on the bridge other than something about an 18-wheeler. Sonar found one of those, a concrete truck and a few cars at the bottom. The cars are most likely those of the construction crew. So very very fast work by MDTA kept traffic off the bridge.

  96. 96.

    Another Scott

    @frosty: In the video above, one can see the cars and trucks moving across the bridge.  The last two moving from right to left were about 30 s (roughly) before the collapse.

    It’s very good they stopped the traffic in time.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  97. 97.

    Uncle Cosmo

    FTR the Key Bridge is was owned and operated by the Maryland Transportation Authority, part of the Maryland State Department of Transportation.[1] In fact most of the bridge is was in Baltimore County, a totally separate political entity; only the western highway approach to the bridge and about 1/3 of the former span were within city limits.[2]

    Baltimore CIty did not design or build the bridge, was not responsible for its upkeep, and collected no tolls from its traffic. In fact the Key Bridge was built so semis and hazmats (which cannot use either of the tunnels that run under the Patapsco River) could avoid the city on their way up or down I-95, thus keeping massive amounts of truck traffic off city streets.

    It therefore pisses this “Baltimoron” off to no end that an ignoramus like SloShmoTheBlunderer used the disaster to take a shot at my majority-African-American city, which has become a punching bag for the maggoty MAGA crowd. Fuck them and the hearse they’ll ride out on!

    [1] Note that Baltimore is one of the few cities in the USA that is not a subdivision of a county (parish in Loweezyanna) but is a separate county-equivalent subdivision of the state; thus any entity that reaches beyond city limits is normally handled at the state level. MDOT also owns and operates the bus system, light rail and metro throughout the Baltimore metropolitan area.

    [2] That plus a short stretch west in Anne Arundel County are the only parts of the Baltimore Beltway that are not also located in Baltimore County. In fact the stretch that used to run east from I-95 south of Baltimore across the Key Bridge to I-95 north of Baltimore wasn’t even part of the Interstate system like the rest of the Beltway [I-695] but was designated MD-695.

  98. 98.

    louc

    The Washington Post had the police emergency dispatch conversation recording but seems to have taken it down. It was shocking how fast everything happened. One of the officers closing down the bridge was going to head up the bridge to warn the construction crew once another cop car could take over at the closure. He was about to head up there but the bridge collapsed. If he’d left 10 seconds earlier he would have been dead too.

  99. 99.

    Steve in the ATL

    @eclare: it would suck if people couldn’t get to Pancho’s in West Memphis.  Why have you forsaken me, cheese dip?

  100. 100.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @Another Scott:

    The reason they were able to stop traffic so quickly was that police were already there at each end of the bridge because of the repair work being done on the bridge.

  101. 101.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Maybe they should know better than to say anything at all, but really that’s a bit much to expect.

    That’s right, sir, but this is, after all, the internet.

  102. 102.

    dnfree

    @lowtechcyclist: I think it’s understandable for an uninformed person (as most of us are when it comes to bridge engineering, shipping practices, etc.) to raise questions.  We can ask if there were “dolphins”, if someone failed to plan correctly, if corners were cut, whatever.

    Thats not what this commenter did.  They leapt to conclusions that are false, and then they falsely assigned blame to the city and “politicians”.  It’s the certainty of tone combined with the complete lack of understanding of the problem that comes across.

    “The city should be held accountable for the weak infrastructure of that bridge, period. There’s no reason the whole thing should’ve collapsed. These bridges are supposed to sustain impacts just like that. Please grill these politicians.”

    At one time I served on the local school board.  There were always people saying the school board should “do something” about a particular issue that wasn’t within our authority at all.  Same for the city, the county, the state, the federal government, and even the United Nations.  People who  have a simplistic idea of a problem seem often to have an uninformed view of who should fix it.

  103. 103.

    way2blue

    Love Secretary Pete.  No fingerprinting, no sugar coating.  Just the facts, the plan, and the challenges ahead.

  104. 104.

    Paul in KY

    @JWR: If they can fix it so there’s no way the ship would reach the support (would run aground), that would help alot.

  105. 105.

    Paul in KY

    @Matt McIrvin: The one thing Adam Smith never contemplated: Giant container ships traveling at 20 knots from China & thus cheaply getting products here that were made at wages far, far below ours.

  106. 106.

    Martin

    @lowtechcyclist: So, a TEU is a shipping container. It’s a global standard – ‘Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit’. It’s a box that is approximately 8′ x 8.5′ x 20′. What we normally think of as a shipping container is a 2 TEU box – 8’x8x’40’ because that’s about what a semi trailer would be. There are variations – some taller, some longer, but 8’x8.5’x20′ (1360 cubic feet) is the international standard.

    9400 TEU would be about 4700 semi trailers or between 1175 and 2350 freight cars. A freight car is about 80′ long so can handle 4 TEU pretty easily and on some freight lines can double stack them and hold 8 TEU. Lot of bridges/tunnels aren’t tall enough for double stacked cars, and unless you do some bananas stuff, accommodating those cars prevents you from electifying the rails if you have shared passenger/freight rail.

    The Dali is a medium sized container ship carrying about 9400 TEU. The big ones carry about 22K-24K. They’re a bit more than twice as large, but probably can’t get through that port because the bridge likely constrained them (width or height) – possibly port space as well. One reason why the Port of LA is so large is that there’s _nothing_ impeding access for ships – no bridges, no islands, channels, etc. So if someone makes a bigger container ship, the port just needs to make sure it has a berth to hold it – no other infrastructure considerations needed.

    There’s are smaller categories – Panamax and New Panamax – ship dimensions that the Panama Canal can handle. The old standard was pretty small in modern terms – Dali couldn’t transit the canal. then they widened the Canal, and it can now take much larger ship (New Panamax). Suez is also widening after the Evergiven because it wasn’t wide enough for the very biggest ships to safely navigate it.

    Other ports have individual limitations due to bridges and the like.

  107. 107.

    Dan B

    @DrDaveChemist: The Seattle area has a long history of bridge collapses including two that sank.  We had our trip to the vet go from 15 minutes to 45 for several years and previously the much lower bridge to West Seattle was hit by a barge.  The captain was later murdered by his wife and buried in their yard.

  108. 108.

    VOR

    People have been asking about tugs. I saw a video tracking the MV Dali’s progress and there were two tugs. The tugs helped get the ship out into the shipping channel but departed before the bridge. I’m guessing there might be a change in procedure at other ports to keep the tugs with large ships until they are well past obstacles like bridges.

    It’s difficult to overstate the sheer size of a ship like this. Per Wikipedia, the ship is 984 feet/300 meters long, is 158 feet/48 meters wide, and is somewhere around 100,000 tons. That much mass is going to do a lot of damage to any object it hits.

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