Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapses after Ship Strike

[Vanadium 50]

bring it back up to code

That's the part I don't get. To me, that sounds like "Hey, let's use AWG28 wire from the main diesels! What could go wrong?" Obviously that is not what they do.

If you mean "the ship doesn't move until we find the root cause", well, under that rule you'd have a lot of ships permanently stuck in the harbor. How often have you had the experience of fixing something by taking it apart, finding nothing wrong, and putting it back together to find everything works.

If you mean "do they have a checklist?" They probably do, and it should have been properly filled out. If not, there will be much trouble ahead. But checklists are not perfect either - we almost lost a multi-million dollar SC magnet by following the checklist. The magnet got into an impossible unforeseen state and the checklist was exactly the wrong thing to be doing.

 

[gleem]

If you mean "the ship doesn't move until we find the root cause", well, under that rule you'd have a lot of ships permanently stuck in the harbor

That would depend on the importance of the problem relative to the mission and safety of the ship and crew.

But checklists are not perfect either - we almost lost a multi-million dollar SC magnet by following the checklist.

Your magnet was a new piece of equipment. Ships' electrical and mechanical systems are decades old and have accumulated a lot of information to make checklists reliable.

If you haven't discovered the reason for the power failure then you stay in port until you have corrected it, and documented it. If the correction was sketchy in that it was not fully understood then considering the consequences of losing power/steering in a confined channel a competent captain should be alert to the possibility of another failure and should have had a backup plan.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Ships' electrical and mechanical systems are decades old and have accumulated a lot of information to make checklists reliable.

You could say the exact same thing about pitot tubes, and yet AF447 still crashed.

Taking an already low level of failure and making it even lower is difficult and can often have unwanted side effects.

In this case, you have an electrical problem. People fixed some things. They thought things were fixed. All tests (that we know of) were good. How long do we hold them in port to ensure they really truly fixed things? A day? A month?

 

[DaveE]

I doubt that any complex working vessel is currently "up to code", even if they were once. It's a bit naive to think that things actually are the way they are supposed to be.

But the portions that have been recently repaired certainly should be. But even this may be unrealistically optimistic.

 

[gleem]

I doubt that any complex working vessel is currently "up to code", even if they were once. It's a bit naive to think that things actually are the way they are supposed to be.

Anyone who has worked in any enterprise knows that not all rules are followed. Most of the time these lapses have no effect or serious effect except perhaps a fine or citation by a regulatory or certification authority. But serious effects do happen and often are very costly in life, property, or money. And apart from not following protocol mistakes are made.

In this case, you have an electrical problem. People fixed some things. They thought things were fixed. All tests (that we know of) were good.

Anchors aweigh!

In DALI's case who knows? Two successive incidents. Were they fixed to everyone's satisfaction? I guess we will find out. Considering the captain is responsible for the crew, ship, and cargo. one would think nothing would be left to chance. But then again maybe we do not have high enough standards for ship captains. One would think when you have situations like the EXXON Valdez and Costa Concordia incidents, they weren't just errors they were failures of competency.

 

[Vanadium 50]

they weren't just errors they were failures of competency.

Will that kind of error be fixed by more rules, more paperwork and more bureaucracy?

I have seen management try to increase safety by more paperwork, and I have seen them try and increase it by more punishment. Neither has worked.

My takeaway is:
(1) Nobody wants an accident. Your best protection is to have people on the spot with good judgment and who are allowed to use it.

(2) Low probability events follow a Poisson process, and trying to measure if changing things helps, harms or did nothing is difficult and time consuming. Not to mention error-prone. If you have an accident ever 12 months, made a change a year ago, and haven't had one since, what can you conclude?

(3) Punishing people for being unlucky makes Management feel like they are doing something, but it doesn't help the situation. It may make things worse by diverting attention from systemic issues.

 

[Borg]

Based On my personal experience, there are a lot of sloppy electricians out there. My current home has a single circuit connected to two different breakers on the panel (I keep one off).

My previous home had an electrical circuit running out to the garage like a clothesline - complete with an outlet halfway across. The wiring that I found in the attic was even worse

Both of the homes passed 'inspection' so not only was the work bad but the inspectors didn't know what they were doing either. Hearing about a ship leaving port with messed up electrical systems doesn't surprise me much.

 

[gleem]

(1) Nobody wants an accident. Your best protection is to have people on the spot with good judgment and who are allowed to use it.

Exactly. Was DALI's captain under pressure to get going to keep a schedule? Many professions are taught to serve one master but real life gives them another. They often have to make a choice and take the consequences for not choosing the first.

Let's not leave out the ship's engineer who fixed the problem, verified it was fixed, or said it was fixed as well as documented it. Two episodes of electrical failure 10 hrs before leaving the pier is not a rare event. The first was not fixed. The second...? In any event, there should have been a lot of corroborating (CYA) documentation.

 

[BillTre]

Bad things often happen due a combination of more than one things going wrong all at once. In this way redundancy is bypassed.

Those responsible for timing of leaving port, three types come to my mind:

• the captain,
• the chief engineer or electricians (people with specialist knowledge.
  (The chief engineer often gets paid more than the captain.)
• and the owners or their reps. who may just want the cargo to go.

Who decides when the ship leaves port?
Not clear to me who might have said time to go and who could have vetoed it.

 

[russ_watters]

So, how long after fixing a power failure do we wait before moving? If 10 hours isn't enough, what is the right number? (Keeping in minf that conditions in port are not the same as conditions at sea.)

Define "fixing". If a breaker trips and you turn it back on, is it fixed?
[edit]
Reading the report now. The cause of the blackout the day before was crew error in leaving a generator's exhaust damper closed. It is very unlikely to be related to the crash except that when restoring the electrical system, a different set (redundant pair) of breakers were closed between the high and low voltage busses, since the other set had been in use for several months.

You could say the exact same thing about pitot tubes, and yet AF447 still crashed.

AF447 was crashed by a bad pilot, not an iced pitot tube. It's different from the Boeing MCAS crashes, which also had a precursor issue of a failed pitot tube. For the Boeing planes, the poorly designed control system (MCAS) crashed the planes.

 

[gmax137]

In any event, there should have been a lot of corroborating (CYA) documentation

documentation for who to review? I don't know anything about maritime operations. Maybe the insurers?

Define "fixing". If a breaker trips and you turn it back on, is it fixed?

Exactly. It depends on the breaker.

 

[gleem]

Who decides when the ship leaves port?

The captain should be. He is responsible for the safety of the crew, ship, and cargo.

documentation for who to review? I don't know anything about maritime operations. Maybe the insurers?

The ship maintains a log of pertinent information regarding the ship and its voyage.

Regulations for maintaining a log are summarized in https://www.bullivant.com/the-law-o...tle 46 of the United,the Atlantic Ocean and a

an excerpt of the article includes the following

Contrary to what might be expected, federal statutory law does not require the official log to contain entries about the weather and/or sea conditions encountered by the vessel, the vessel’s geographic position, or the vessel’s work. Rather, the master must make entries about such things as pre-departure testing of the steering gear and propulsion systems, fire and boat drills, draft markings, hatch checks, and testing of lifeboat winches. The master must also make entries about the vessel’s crew including among other things, convictions and punishments, deaths and illnesses, and the name of each seaman whose employment is terminated and the circumstances thereof. Finally, the official log must contain information about marine casualties. Some types of vessels, such as tankers and passenger vessels, have more particularized requirements for log entries.

Ramifications of False or Missing Log Entries
The importance of maintaining a properly completed and accurate log cannot be overstated. When a log contains erasures or lacks the required entries, the consequences can be devastating for the vessel owner. While courts have held false log entries are not “gospel”, false entries are likely to have a “considerable effect,” as one court said, on the outcome of a case. Moreover, the absence of entries in the log that should be there, raises a presumption the entries would be unfavorable to the vessel owner. In what has become an often quoted summary of the law about logbooks, the judge in Capehorn Steamship Company v. Texas Company , 152 F.Supp. 33 (E.D. La. 1957) said:
Suffice it to say that under the law of the sea, when a party comes into court with log entries which will not stand the test of credibility, that party’s chance of success in the litigation is little short of nonexistent.

Such information as may be of interest to insurers or authorities should be included and recorded in ink. I would think that if an entry is not accurate it should only be struck through leaving it readable and corrected as desired.

 

[Vanadium 50]

ink

Do they still use that? I haven't seen a real logbook in the sciences in decades.

This also may not solve the problem. At Lab A, the culture is to "writ down everything, and annotate after the fact if necessary". At Lab B, it's "don't write down problems until you have a solution" - e.g. "replacing unit FG2 caused warning KL8 to stop - it had been doing that for an hour".

They capture different information.

 

[berkeman]

Do they still use that? I haven't seen a real logbook in the sciences in decades.

A ship's log is not "in the sciences", and yes, logs are required in many emergency-prone situations. I know that per the Incident Command System (ICS) used in most EMS and Fire systems, logs are required to document all of the contacts and actions. I'm most familiar with communication logs used in Amateur Radio support of Emergency Communications when our "Served Agency" is Fire or EMS. We use the attached form...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...UQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0b4GOlGmVXFu2GSsb_U2MQ

 

[Vanadium 50]

A ship's log is not "in the sciences"

True. But do they still use pen and ink in this day and age?

 

[berkeman]

We do, when filling out ICS 309 during incidents. We can type into online forms, but we usually will also keep a hard copy backup (for us, the possibility of loss of power and computers is too high). Obviously 911 Dispatch will use online logs and records most of the time.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm talking more about ships logs and not radio logs.

The big advantage of a ship's log being electronic is that you can automatically keep copies at multiple sites - especially not on the ship. If you lose the ship, you keep the log. OK, maybe its stale by an hour or a day, but you still have it.

 

[Astronuc]

The Dali is floated and moved away from the Key Bridge collision point.
https://news.yahoo.com/crashed-ship-took-down-baltimore-133124553.html

The bridge decking and roadway did significant damage to the bow.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/us/baltimore-bridge-collapse-ship-relocation/index.html
https://news.yahoo.com/ship-destroyed-baltimore-bridge-expected-065123349.html
https://news.yahoo.com/container-ship-set-moved-8-140846686.html
https://news.yahoo.com/dali-cargo-ship-refloated-baltimore-152555453.html

 

[ShadowKraz]

How could they, realistically?

Lots of forces on a bridge. Lots of kinetic energy in a ship. A bunch of hooring and hollering by politicians and talking heads won't change that.

You can't test, but you can design for it. We design skyscrapers to resist wind sheer and earthquakes, yes? We can't test for those but we can design for them.

I worked for a time as a semi-skilled ironworker for a company in NYC. One customer in Da Bronx wanted a tree guard fabricated to his specs. It was massive, for a tree guard, and we had to fabricate and weld seven sections. Each weighed well over 100 lbs. About three weeks after it was installed, the driver of a large moving van lost control and rammed it at about 45 mph. Tree was fine and the guard was bent, not broken. We couldn't test before or after installation either, but the design was solid. Pun semi-intentional.

 

[Astronuc]

Largest channel so far opens for vessel traffic into Port of Baltimore after Key Bridge collapse
https://www.yahoo.com/news/largest-channel-far-opens-vessel-212900915.html

BALTIMORE — A 400-foot-wide, 50-foot-deep channel into the Baltimore harbor opened Tuesday after officials claimed victory over one of the largest hurdles in clearing the aftermath of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.

Updating reporters on the timeline at a Tuesday morning news conference in front of a noticeably different Patapsco River, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said the deep-draft channel would open Tuesday “for 24/7 operations.” He added that the Baltimore harbor’s main 700-foot-wide channel was still on target to reopen by the end of the month.

 

[gleem]

The Washington Post has found that a concern for a boat collision with the Keys and Bay bridges has been an ongoing discussion in the Baltimore Harbor Safety Committee for almost two decades. But apparently, the estimateld expense of protecting the bridges delayed any action.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/l...n&cvid=30e2519d0a84433596115d9afb0665a3&ei=50

 

[Vanadium 50]

But apparently, the estimateld expense of protecting the bridges delayed any action.

Great! Problem solved!

 

[Tom.G]

But apparently, the estimateld expense of protecting the bridges delayed any action.

Sounds like that old Rule-of-Thumb, "If in doubt, Don't."

 

[Astronuc]

But apparently, the estimated expense of protecting the bridges delayed any action.

From the article:

Umesh Murthy, an engineer representing the Maryland Transportation Authority, asked about the action item in 2010. Smith explained it “was developed based on Pilots concern for a bridge collapse as a result of ship strikes.” Murthy told the committee it would cost $65 million to protect the Bay Bridge against an accidental collision, saying the cost of retrofitting existing bridges was much higher than building protections into newly constructed bridges.

Earlier in the article, which may reflect a more appropriate cost estimate for protection.

Upgrades are expensive: A ship-collision protection system for the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which spans the river separating Delaware from New Jersey, is projected to cost more than $90 million.

and in the same paragraph

Rebuilding the Key Bridge will cost nearly $2 billion, according to Maryland officials.

Perhaps the $2 billion estimate includes more robust protection?

I wonder what they assumed in the risk analysis regarding the probability of a larger ship strike. And I wonder how the cost of retrofitting protection for the bridge compared with the cost of salvaging a collapsed bridge + cost of replacing said bridge (including robust protection).

Did the risk analysis assume that the ships entering and leaving the port are well-maintained and appropriately operated? Some ships may present a much greater (and perhaps indeterminate) risk.

The ultimate funding mechanism seems to be taxpayers and/or users/consumers.

 

[Hornbein]

I had a girlfriend who had been a conductor for a railroad. When the workers had demands they didn't go on strike. Instead they would follow all regulations strictly. This would slow traffic considerably.

 

[Vanadium 50]

It's called "work to rule".

 

[Vanadium 50]

Perhaps the $2 billion estimate includes more robust protection?

It almost certainly does. Why wouldn't you use the information gained since the original construction.

If retrofitting is $65M/bridge, that's the cost of building 50 new bridges. If it completely eliminates failures, it takes 500 years for this to pay for itself. If it reduces the risk by half, its 1000 years.

 

[Flyboy]

I had a girlfriend who had been a conductor for a railroad. When the workers had demands they didn't go on strike. Instead they would follow all regulations strictly. This would slow traffic considerably.

Malicious Compliance. Love it.

 

[Astronuc]

Why wouldn't you use the information gained since the original construction.

I would, but others might want to save cost and just replace the bridge. I have no idea what 'Rebuilding the Key Bridge' involves. I'd have to see the study. It would simply be replace/rebuild in-kind to a more robust design with heavier piers and more robust protection around the piers.

I'm curious about the cost accelerations since the original build. Cost of structural steel and concrete has increased considerably.

Around 2000, the cost of a new nuclear plant was going to be ~$1 billion. Five years later, it was more like $3 billion, and by 2010, it was more like $7 billion, and now - "Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. Georgia Power now estimates the total cost of the project to be more than $30 billion". Had the project started in 2010 and been completed on the original schedule (~2015/2016, based on 60 month schedule), they might have done it for ~$15 billion.
Ref: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61963
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-...-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64

Back in the mid-2000s, I did a review of the cost of stainless steel, structural iron and concrete by sampling various government transportation reports. It was clear that 2000 estimates were under-predicting the likely cost of infrastructure.
I suspect that $2 billion is a low figure. It looks like the stakeholders are starting from scratch.
https://www.keybridgerebuild.com/.
"MDTA representatives discussed the anticipated Progressive Design-Build (PDB) Process"

 

[Vanadium 50]

Steel is a very politicized issue, especially the use of foreign steel. Regions of the country that produce steel have different interests and opinions than regions that consume it, and these regions vote differently.

Some of this escallation is real. Some is caused increased effort demanded by various stakeholeders, such as the federal government and compliance officers. Some is caused by deliberate low-balling of initial costs. (The federal government encourages this, although they say they don't). Some of this is due to projects being dragged out, and some for using unrealistic inflation figures until they fail the laugh test. (We were once told that 3% was too high, but the actual number was 9%)

 

[Nik_2213]

IIRC, a well-known Italian consortium has offered an 'Off the Shelf' design for a very nice cable-stayed suspension bridge. This would use the same approach roads etc, but safely span a lot more than the main channel. Nearest pier would be in shallow water, easy to protect beyond even unreasonable collision...

 

[Astronuc]

BALTIMORE (AP) — Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are assessing the country’s bridges to determine the likelihood of another disaster like the one that collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

The team includes students and faculty members and will focus on large bridges near major ports of entry, officials said in a news release Wednesday.

https://apnews.com/article/baltimore-bridge-collapse-johns-hopkins-4007c3b404f4b515cf4b4f9e2ba49da3

I would think it prudent to have essentially every civil/structural engineering university program in the country to be involved somehow, so that there is a population of students (future structural engineers), who will know be aware of bridge design and vulnerabilities. This somewhat akin to engineering students studying the accident at Three Mile Island, so that they would be aware of what can go wrong, and hopefully prevent future events.

 

[Rive]

hopefully prevent future events.

Honestly, I think most bridges are just not affected. As far as I'm aware river boats did not bloat up the same manner as seafaring ones. It's more of an adjustment/update of statistics than a really new situation.

 

[Nik_2213]

"What can go wrong..."

I still regret the demise of 'Engineering Failures' web-site, with those nape-prickling examples, very carefully documented and explained, of sundry infamous disasters.

IIRC...
Three Mile Island', beset by poor training and too many clamorous alarms to quickly identify the true problem.
An Asian shopping complex which had additional floors and heavy roof HVAC added above floors weakened by pillar-removal to create 'airy' retail environment.
The US hotel walk-way, its suspension system lethally compromised by unauthorised changes from plan.
Ronan Point modular apartment block, where a 'minor' gas explosion 'un-zipped' many panels' interlocks...
The 'DC 10' lesson, whose cargo hatch could show latched when it wasn't, and its loss' violent decompression warped aircraft floor, deranging congested control runs...

 

[Flyboy]

I would feel confident in stating that the majority of the most important safety lessons from engineering are written in blood. The above list has a notable exception in Three Mile Island, but the rest are painful reminders and lessons.