Francis Scott Key Bridge and the Dali, Confusion Factors, How did We Get Here?

Musings

Once again we have a situation which is hard to understand. A large container ship leaving the Baltimore harbor struck a massive bridge across the harbor entrance, collapsed the bridge and killed 6 people in addition to the property damage to the ship, the containers and the bridge. This is a major infrastructure tragedy. Some number of people from the respective agencies are now scurrying around to try and determine what caused the problem and I do not have the background to sort that out. Perhaps there was some failure of the steering and propulsion systems on the ship, or shoddy maintenance, and other matters that will be investigated with regard to the preparation of the ship to leave the port to transit down the harbor. Hopefully that will be solved soon. I do not think that is the biggest concern. I am trying to contemplate how we got into this situation to start with.

Contemplations

This was a massive ship it was apparently over 1000 feet long and weighed, loaded, over 100,000 tons of displacement. I believe that is about the size of a nuclear aircraft carrier. It does seem that many of the cargo container ships these days are loaded with such containers being shipped around the world. Apparently, the Dali was a Singapore owned ship on its way from Baltimore to Siri Lanka. That almost seems incomprehensible but that is also the way the world's shipping systems work today.

When you see these ships loaded down like that, they appear to be totally unstable, and perhaps are, but the shipping industry has a fairly decent history of safety. What I am not sure of is how often these containers fall off the ship and are just left to float around the ocean and sink. I presume that's much more than anyone tells us. If we found out I believe we would be appalled.

What I am trying to comprehend is that these overloaded ships are omnipresent and we are building all these port facilities to accommodate them in effect encouraging more and more of the same and bigger and bigger. Presumably that means that our government is doing something to adjust our ports to be able to handle these monstrosities. I am dubious that is being done.

It seems to me that United States is the most desirable location in the world to ship to and because of the size of our cargo traffic we can set some standards. I am curious what we have done to establish those standards with the shipping industry to limit the size of the ships, their safety redundancies and the cargo stacked on top of them that can enter our ports. I understand that the shipping companies will all immediately complain if they have to downsize and reorganize their stacks of cargo (such as secure certain dangerous cargo ) the cost of the shipping per unit will go up and everything will be more expensive. True. Presumably if you get some control over what's going into your ports you also will avoid some accidents like the Dali and the Bridge.

Regulations and inspections still need to ensure that the ships are doing their maintenance and their pre sailing reviews to ensure that they are ready to depart, and or to come into port, but at least you downsize the size so they fit under the bridges and if there are a few containers that get left for the next ship, well that happens but you can only have so many Francis Scott Key Bridge disasters before you defeated the whole process. This accident happened too easily.

The tonnage and height clearance of the ships that want to use our ports must be regulated. I believe given the demand of the US market container ships will promptly begin to downsize. It probably won't hurt any of them. They won't lose as many containers and they will now fit better in the Panama Canal. As we know with the weather changes the ships are having to lighten themselves just to go through the Panama Canal because of insufficient water level in the Canal. This all ties together but it doesn't seem to be clear that anyone is coordinating the entire thing and establishing standards that must be followed.

Also, the construction of the ships should be mandated to ensure that they have the redundancies that we want for safety if they're entering our harbors. The Dali was apparently going at 8 knots ( 9 miles an hour) which I believe is probably an appropriate speed leaving the harbor but once you get to that much weight going, at that speed, it takes a number of miles for it to come to a halt no matter what you do to try and shut it down. Officers that have commanded United States Navy ships know that you need multiple rudders and propulsion systems and react to situations. As far as I know the Dali had a single rudder and a single propeller to move something the size of a nuclear aircraft carrier. That seems incomprehensible to me. I don't understand why The United States government doesn't mandate that ships over a certain size have those control and saftey redundancies built into the ship.

Thoughts

As I try to contemplate this situation it seems to me that once again, we have a lot of focus on the accident and the only step beyond that people are saying is that we need to reinforce bridges and such. Well, yes that's true. But the greater failure is there is not sufficient government oversight and regulation to ensure that the companies using these harbors, that are built with public funds, are using them in a manner to suit the public and not just trying to increase their shipping profits. No one likes regulations, no one likes taxes, but we don't want to spend more taxes to fix broken bridges. We need regulations to ensure that the shipping companies have built their ships in a manner which suits us for use of our harbor facilities.

Obadiah Plainman

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