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Ricky Carioti

To bridge experts, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-maryland/" target=_blank>collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge</a> after being hit by a heavy cargo ship was as inevitable as it was devastating.

When a vessel as heavy as the Singapore-flagged Dali crashes with such force into one of the span’s supercolumns, or piers, the result is the type of catastrophic, and heartbreaking, chain reaction that took place early Tuesday.

“If the column is destroyed, basically the structure will fall down,” said Dan Frangopol, a bridge engineering and risk professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania who is president of the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety. “It’s not possible to redistribute the loads. It was not designed for these things.”

No bridge pier could withstand being hit by a ship the size of the Dali, said Benjamin W. Schafer, a professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

“These container ships are so huge,” Schafer said. “That main span has two supports. You can’t take one away.” He called the accident “a huge infrastructure failure,” but not because of the bridge collapse; he said the shipping industry needs systems to keep a ship on track when it loses power, as the Dali did before the collision.

The bridge itself, which carried more than 30,000 vehicles daily, appeared to be structurally sound. Its condition was rated fair, according to data in the 2023 National Bridge Inventory maintained by the Federal Highway Administration. Maryland state officials said they were focused on search-and-rescue operations and did not provide later inspection data. National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said excavating detailed inspection history information — and what was done in response to any earlier findings — will be a cumbersome and protracted part of the agency’s investigation.

But bridge safety and engineering experts are emphasizing a separate issue: protective barriers.

When the span opened to traffic in 1977, many ships were smaller and the standards for protecting bridges against them were lower, they said.

A few years later, a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/03/26/baltimore-stpete-sunshine-skyway-bridge/" target=_blank>Liberian cargo ship crashed into a bridge in Florida</a>, sending a Greyhound bus, a pickup truck and six cars into the Tampa Bay and killing 35 people, according to the NTSB. That deadly 1980 collision helped lead to the adoption of stronger national standards for bridges, including protection from errant ships, in the years that followed, safety experts said.

Sherif El-Tawil, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of Michigan with expertise in bridges, said if the Key Bridge had been built after those updated standards from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials were put in place, the span could still be standing.

“I believe it would have survived,” El-Tawil said.

Maryland officials did not answer questions Tuesday about what protective devices were in place near the bridge and whether they were sufficient to withstand this type of collision.

Two examples of protective measures that did not appear to have been in place, El-Tawil said, were large fenders designed to direct marine traffic away from the bridge supports and an island built around the pier.

Some states are building these kinds of protection systems around vital bridges. Last year, officials from a joint New Jersey and Delaware bridge authority announced work on eight 80-foot-wide, stone-filled cylinders designed to protect the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The existing protection for the bridge tower piers dates to 1951. “Today’s tankers and ships are bigger and faster than those of the 1950s and 1960s,” the officials said in announcing the nearly $93 million project.

State departments of transportation “are aware of the shortcomings of these bridges,” said Roberto T. Leon, a bridge and structural engineering professor at Virginia Tech. “It’s not that they don’t know. It’s a matter of prioritizing the repairs. It is a very expensive proposition to protect a bridge.”

Ian Firth, a British structural engineer and bridge designer, said he was “not surprised” at how quickly the bridge came down after it was hit. He noted that the support structure that was struck, which would have been made of reinforced concrete, was one of two main supports responsible for doing “all the work” to hold up the bridge.

He said the ship appeared to have strayed to one side before striking the bridge.

The bridge collapse, like other calamities, is probably the result of overlapping low-probability failures, said Edward Tenner, a historian and expert on disasters — akin to what happens when, by chance, the holes in a stack of Swiss cheese slices line up perfectly.

“This might have been a case where there were just an unlikely series of failures,” said Tenner, author of “Why Things Bite Back,” a book about technology and its unanticipated consequences. But he added, “I suspect there was something about the equipment of a huge ship like that, given the potential for damage like this, there should have been more redundancy. There shouldn’t have been one point of failure that could lead to a catastrophe.”

Speaking Tuesday afternoon in Baltimore, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called the accident “a unique circumstance,” adding, “I do not know of a bridge that has been constructed to withstand a direct impact from a vessel of this size.”

The ship was towed into the Patapsco River initially, but the tugboats did not accompany the ship all the way to the bridge, said John Konrad, a retired ship captain who runs the gCaptain maritime news website and co-authored a book on the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/02/12/toxic-reach-deepwater-horizons-oil-spill-was-much-larger-deadlier-than-previous-estimates-new-study-says/" target=_blank>Deepwater Horizon oil spill</a>.

“The safe thing to do is keep the tugs,” Konrad said. “Moving forward, I think that’s going to happen. The Coast Guard is going to say you’ve got to keep the tugs tied up until you pass the bridge.”

In video imagery, the ship can be seen losing electrical power, then briefly regaining it before going completely dark. The ship then veers to the right, directly toward the bridge’s structural support.

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.

“Obviously, they could not control the ship. They could not stop the ship,” he said.

A deficiency in the Dali’s systems was discovered when the ship was inspected in June, records show. Inspectors at the port of San Antonio, Chile, discovered a problem categorized as relating to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery,” according to the Tokyo MOU, an intergovernmental shipping regulator in the Asia-Pacific region. The issue was classified in the subcategory of “Gauges, thermometers, etc,” but no additional details of the deficiency were provided. The problem was not serious enough to warrant detaining the ship, according to the records.

After a follow-up inspection later the same day, the Dali was found to have no outstanding deficiencies, the records show, indicating that the problem was addressed.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) said at a news conference Tuesday that the Dali lost power and issued an emergency call for help shortly before the freighter crashed into the bridge. The “mayday” distress call allowed officials to halt vehicle traffic headed over the bridge and saved lives, Moore said.

<i>Erin Cox, Tom Jackman, Jon Swaine, Joyce Lee and Mark Johnson contributed to this report.</i>

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Edward Tenner's book. It is "Why Things Bite Back." This version has been corrected.

Stanford University, BA in political science

Michael Laris writes about the transformation of the U.S. transportation system. He has covered government accountability and was a reporter in Beijing.

Michael Laris

Germany’s Golden Blogger, foreign reporting (German election messaging app project)

Brunel University in England, BA in English and creative writing

Walthamstow School for Girls, England

Jennifer Hassan is a London-based breaking-news reporter for the Foreign desk at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post in 2016, Jennifer honed her breaking-news skills as the U.K. social media editor at MailOnline.

Jennifer Hassan

Princeton University, politics, 1982

Joel Achenbach covers science and politics for the National desk. He has been a staff writer for The Post since 1990. 

Joel Achenbach

washpost

How a cargo ship took down Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge

the-washington-post

The Washington Post

A photo of the steel beams of a bridge crumpled on top of a cargo ship with the headline: Experts say Key Bridge couldn't have withstood impact of cargo ship

Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post

Experts say Key Bridge couldn't have withstood impact of cargo ship

What we know

Video

Photos

Economic impacts

Baltimore Bridge Collapse

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