A warning from Baltimore on disaster planning
Would Canada have responded so efficiently?
To the inexpert eye — mine, anyway — the most astonishing immediate thing about footage of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsing was that a single container ship could take out such a massive piece of infrastructure. It was natural that much early inexpert conversation concerned the parlous state of America’s infrastructure.
Add a little context, though, and it wasn’t so surprising at all. The ship, the Dali, is as long as the Eiffel Tower is high, weighs 95,000 tons empty, and was carrying nearly 5,000 shipping containers.
“When you look at the failure in the video, the container ship is as wide as the bridge is tall,” Johns Hopkins University engineering professor Benjamin Schafer told Scientific American. “It’s hard to get your mind around how big it really is.” When you zoom in, Schafer notes, you can see the Dali essentially “obliterated” the support column it impacted. The bridge never had a chance.
Knowing that, the most remarkable thing might be that the bridge’s continued existence rested on none of the thousands of ships per year entering and exiting Baltimore Harbour ever running into it. Surely, at some point, that luck would run out. The Dali is not the largest ship to use the port, either: As of last year that honour went to the Ever Max, which is 20 per cent longer than the Dali and carries twice as many shipping containers.
“It’s no secret why these massive container ships want to call on the Port of Baltimore,” Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld enthused upon the Ever Max’s inaugural visit. “They know Maryland’s port is a valuable resource and a terrific partner in moving goods efficiently across the state and throughout the region.”
Various news outlets have detailed the safety features that could have been in place for the FSK Bridge but apparently were not: fenders meant to deflect impacts, or shoals or other barriers designed to ground ships before they make impact. It’s not clear whether those would have prevented the collapse, but such simple protections aren’t billion-dollar projects.
Especially since the FSK was a “fracture critical” design, meaning significant damage to any one steel component was likely to bring down the whole structure, it’s maddening such protections weren’t given a chance to save the day.
It’s not as if there hasn’t been recent precedent.
Eight people plunged to their deaths from a Texas causeway in 2001 after wayward barges impacted its supports. Fourteen died in Oklahoma the next year after a barge struck a bridge over the Arkansas River. One of the worst passenger-rail disasters in American history occurred in 1993 in Alabama, when yet another loose barge damaged a railway trestle, derailed a train and sent it into the Mobile River, at a cost of 47 lives.
For the outlay of a few million dollars for protective barriers, six Baltimore road workers might still be alive, the FSK could still be carrying passenger and freight traffic at a clip of 11 million vehicles a year, and the Port of Baltimore could still be flinging goods efficiently across the state and throughout the region, instead of being blocked off entirely for an estimated six weeks at minimum. Clearly there are practical lessons to be learned here.
On Tuesday, Canadian officials declared our bridges safe from such potential disasters. The piers of the two bridges in Halifax are guarded by “rock islands,” Halifax Harbour Bridges explained, and every ship’s crossing beneath them is closely monitored. The Laviolette Bridge crosses the St. Lawrence River at Trois-rivières, and is of similar design to the FSK. Its piers are similarly guarded by “granular material,” a spokesperson told The Canadian Press, which has stopped at least one boat from impacting the piers in the past.
That’s good to know. Still, it’s probably a good opportunity to rerun the calculations in question against modern shipping realities.
But the single most impressive thing about the Baltimore disaster is how efficiently everyone involved seems to have worked to make it the least bad disaster it could be. When the ship’s pilot realized the Dali was in trouble, having lost power and drifting toward the bridge pier, he immediately called mayday, and within moments — with no 9/11-style “are you sure?” or “is this a drill?” nonsense — police were scrambling to close the bridge, and largely succeeded. (Evidently those in charge of the port’s day-to-day operations knew instinctively what might happen if a gigantic container ship hit the FSK.) Reports indicate an officer was about to head out and fetch the road workers when the bridge collapsed. Six people are presumed dead. As tragic as that is, it’s not hard to imagine dozens could have been killed, or more — especially had this ship lost its way during the daytime. It’s a feat of first-rate management and preparedness that the death toll is as small as it is.
Would the same happen in Canada, in the middle of the night, if a heavily loaded ship were drifting toward a bridge pier that would hopefully but not definitely survive the impact? I’d like to think so. But now is not a time of massive trust in Canadian institutions.
We seem to do pretty well handling wildfires, floods and other natural disasters. But then there’s the RCMP’S wretched failure to protect the people of Nova Scotia from a roving madman — or even to inform them. There’s the Ottawa Police’s wretched failure to anticipate what was coming down the highway in that trucker convoy, and to restore order in the nation’s capital when it needed restoring. There was the absolutely shambolic whole-of-government response to COVID-19.
It’s great if Canada’s bridges are safe. But this seems like an excellent opportunity to test our disaster preparedness and aversion skills.