Container Ship Hits Baltimore Bridge

Government incompetence
The magic word !!
we have tons of it all over now

This picture found online shows 4 round structures too far from the bridge to protect it

Tampa skyway they built little sandbars around the fenders. should be standard design mandatory after what happened in Tampa.

I am curious if they can dig a tunnel in this part and get away from a bridge ?

Just watched a video viewing the ship/bridge from the west, ships side. The fender I thought the ship clobbered was UN-touched and far away from the ship.
UseLess dust collector.



IMO, if installed closer to the channel, may have been able to push the bow over away from the bridge support.
I kind of think that is what they are there for.

Again asking for a real bridge designer to help with my red-neck reasoning.

There are already two tunnels. Hazmat trucks cannot go in the tunnels.

If that was her track, how was she trying to make a hard starboard turn throughout the two blackouts.

There are a few foundational islands for overhead high voltage poles.

I see the fenders you're referring to. I believe their purpose is to protect this type of impact from a ship that is only mildly straying. I don't understand why the ships don't have an escort beyond harm's way. I'm still somewhat confused by what I first witnessed as the ship's path as it first lost power.

Mildly straying?? This was pretty mild, just a few degrees off.

Out of harms way when the tugs pulled away 15 minutes earlier. Once a ship has some speed, tugs can not come close again.
Say even if a tug was available to intercept the ship, it probably would of turned into a suicide mission. At 7.5 kts, the tug may have been sucked under the ship.

I watched another video that may shed some light on this.
1, falling tide, low but current still flowing out.
2, Wind on her port beam.
3, The big one; Bank suction/pressure. There was another channel (deep water) to her stb rite after she lost power.
With less bank pressure on her she would turn to stb naturally.
4, Emergency power did not help rudder control. Even when the lights came on, steaming light did not, NUC..

If emergency power would at least offer rudder control, she may of corrected and avoided the bridge.

Just before she hit, the bow did start to move back to port, just way to late.
Not sure if rudder control was found or bank pressure was pushing her back to deeper water.

There has been some speculation that the anchor dropped on one side and the full astern power, with a single screw, caused enough prop-walk to change course and have the bow head straight
for the bridge support foundation, like a perfect storm of bad luck and more bad luck.
22 crew and officers onboard, all Indian nationals and 2 pilots, 1 for docking and one for the river.
Looks like the main engine was running all the time but the generators kicked off, then on and off
Enough to lose steering, that and a strong current, and the bad luck attributed to a worst case scenario.
(The above is just speculation, maybe this is what happened, maybe not)
One of the pilots called dispatch on his cell phone to have them close the bridge and stop road traffic
In the nick of time, well done.

Very much agreed brother.
But as we do here is SWAG and speculate, hopefully in a peaceful manner.
It will be over a year before an official (USCG and/or NTSB) statement will be released.

It is interesting that when stuff hits a fan and we SWAG and speculate on past stuff, our conclusions are not far off from the final reports.

Yup, some of these crashes and accidents are pretty basic, no evil conspiracy or a complex set
of circumstances, just holes in the Swiss cheese lined up.
The underlying circumstances in this case should be interesting however: Why did they lose electrical and consequently hydraulic power?
This ship would typically have 3 huge generators, 2 running in close quarters with 1 standing by,
OR all 3 running approaching and leaving port: Probably a more conservative approach, no extra points for saving 500 gallons of diesel for 2 hours?

Easy to speculate, and I feel sorry for the Captain, he may be driving taxi cabs in Mumbai for the
Foreseeable future..

It is not a far boat ride from my house at all, yesterday afternoon I went into the river and it just looked so crazy not being able to see the bridge from the distance at all. I stayed well off the area as to not want to get in the way of emergency vessels doing there thing and helping etc.

Viewing it with binoculars showed just how bad and horrific the entire scene is. Huge amounts of twisted steel, roadbeds half in the water, knowing there are people that did not go home that day/night and their loved ones and family are forever without them now. Very very weird feeling for sure.

My father worked on that bridge ( retired ironworker and welder) during its construction and has many photos and old polaroids of it and of the route 50 bay bridge as well. A local news group is doing an interview with him scheduled for air tomorrow on a local news channel.

A good friend of mine is a chief engineer on large ships like this one and I have had a few conversations with him regarding this incident and also many conversations prior in just pure fascination with big ships and systems etc.

Many many systems many back ups so many scenarios etc. so much detail, too much for typing here etc...

they all take some time to bring back up on line etc and they simply didn't have time to get things right they were totally NUC, loss of power at the worst time.

Absolutely heartbreaking! The workers on the bridge had no chance and may not have even recognized the danger in time to try and evacuate the area. One can only imagine what was taking place on the ship's command bridge as they are drifting toward the structure at 8kts and are powerless to change course or slow the ship. The Pilot who put out the Mayday call leading to the closure of the bridge deserves credit for saving many lives.

I suspect there are many more bridges that could suffer the same fate with a direct hit such this. My fear is that as this tragedy fades, we won't see any significant change is how the bridges are constructed or protected from this sort of disaster.

That second one from the left (which would have been the only one that could have been impacted) was the one I tied up to one day. I don't know that it would have done any good considering the size and speed of that ship.

I have a hunch those smaller structures were never designed to protect the bridge. I believe they were former bases for the high voltage lines that appear to have moved to the larger base locations in the past few years. They appear to have recently been relocated in 2020-2021, and you can see that work happening in aerials of 5/2021.

Possibly so. My experience there was back in the late 90's (I moved away in 2001) I know there used to be a large underwater power cable that ran along the east side of the bridge and I didn't remember that large transmission line with it's protected bases being around back then.

What I thought were big fenders in my post #15 pictures were the current power line tower bases.

Some tid-bits I have discovered;
50 year old bridge. Long before these larger ships were designed and built.
Fenders were installed just a lil after the bridge, still long before these larger ships were designed and built.

The ports just finished spending hundreds of millions of dollars improving the docks, cranes & infrastructure for even the bigger ships.

Not a dime was spent on the bridge. Somewhere, some how I would think somebody would of thought; Bigger ships, we need bigger fenders.

What part of big government don’t you understand ? At best problems are addressed years if not decades later. In the wake of the Tampa accident you d think other states and the federal government would have realized bridges over waterways leading to busy ports needed protection. But many states have more important priorities than infrastructure…. Things like DEI, and social issues.

I understand well, preacher.
Many of us here in the choir, hear you, very well.

I think this youtube video discussing the timeline of the event and relevant ship operations is very useful. Much better that media talking heads speculation.