A bridge collapses, and a vital port expires

Aport has been defined as a place where shippers are separated from their money. Now the Port of Baltimore has been separated from all the world’s ships.

The destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge cuts off a significant but not vital highway corridor. It severs a significant and totally vital maritime passage. Until the wreckage can be cleared – and it will be, of course – the port is stymied, shut tight, under blockade.

All it took was one ship – a gargantuan one, to be sure – to knock the bridge down. The Dali container ship, stacked sky-high with coloured steel boxes, looking like some fiendishly complicated Rubik’s cube, lost power and, as mayday calls sounded, crunched into the bridge’s south tower.

The great big sprawling port, until this

Five-minute quiz

1. Which fictional vampire was first portrayed by New Zealand actor Russell Smith in the late 1970s?

2. What is the lowest rank of British nobility?

3. Which part of the body is used to refer to the seed-bearing head of a cereal plant such as maize?

4. Haitian Creole is based on which European language? week one of the nation’s busiest, is way down where the Patapsco River empties into Chesapeake Bay. It is effectively out of sight to most who live in the city.

Yet what an enterprise – sugar in and coal out, “forest products” in and scrap metal out, cars and light trucks in (more than 800,000 last year) and other cars and light trucks out. All goods with histories riven with pain and exploitation. Legacies of slavery, black-lung disease, air pollution, forest annihilation – but this is the world as we have built it. Surely it’s not so dark as it once was. Why shouldn’t Baltimore get a piece of that action?

Today’s deep-draft vessels need plenty of room, around them and beneath them. They need sprawling terminals, fitted out for this century of automation. That’s why the port left the heart of Baltimore and now plays such a small role in the civic imagination. We forget that ships call daily, 5. Someone who is hubristic could be described as excessively what? a. Proud, b. irritable, c. insightful

6. Which stringed instrument, like a harp but smaller, was used by several ancient cultures around the Mediterranean Sea?

7. Bicycle motocross is best known by which abbreviation?

8. Craig Potton is known for his work in from China and Brazil and Singapore. Their poorly paid crews – “sailors” doesn’t seem like the right word to describe them – know Baltimore as a vast expanse of asphalt called the Dundalk Marine Terminal, whereas seamen of ages past once roamed the rough and ready bars of now-quaint Fells Point.

The Dali is registered in Singapore, which means it’s held to a higher standard than those sad ships that fly so-called flags of convenience. But that didn’t keep the ship’s power from cutting out in the first minutes following its departure.

When the Key Bridge opened in 1977, mastodons of the seas such as the Dali didn’t exist. Now they do, and now it appears that six road workers who were on the bridge have lost their lives.

They are casualties of a business that has grown gigantic in every way, from its vessels to its terminals to its worldwide many fields, most notably what? a. Architecture, b. sculpture, c. landscape photography.

9.Which word is a transliteration of an Ancient Greek word for “I have found it”?

10. Leo Varadkar announced his intention to step down from his role as Taoiseach and as the leader of Fine Gael last week. He is the first openly gay head of government for which country? economic reach.

As for the bridge itself: We are told, plausibly, that it was structurally sound. Yet its disintegration speaks to a deeply held, very common fear. It’s about technology that doesn’t make sense. How can this plane be flying high above the Earth? What keeps this train on those narrow tracks? If I’m driving across a high bridge over deep water, what keeps this bridge up?

Failure is that unspoken thing in the back of your mind, until it happens – surprisingly, horribly.

Now the whole port is dead, or at least comatose. The biggest part of Baltimore, the biggest generator of who knows how many millions of sticky dollars over the centuries, dollars that stuck right here, is at a standstill.

Will Englund is a former reporter and editor for The Post and the Baltimore Sun.