A bridge collapses, and a vital port expires
A port 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 – there are other ways to drive from here to there, however slower or longer. But it severs a significant and totally vital maritime passage. Until the wreckage can be cleared – and it will be, of course, but until then – 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, a 984-foot container ship, stacked sky-high with brightly colored steel boxes, looking like some fiendishly complicated Rubik’s cube, lost power and, as mayday calls sounded, crunched into the bridge’s south tower.
Mention Baltimore and it brings to mind Freddie Gray, “The Wire,” the suddenly resurgent Orioles, felonious mayors, corrupt cops, all those Matisse paintings at the Baltimore Museum of Art, maybe Billie Holiday, maybe John Waters.
The great big sprawling port, until Tuesday one of the nation’s busiest, is way down where the Patapsco River empties into the Chesapeake Bay. It is effectively out of sight to most of us 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?
Years ago, my wife and I lived in an 1847 brick row house on East Hamburg Street, in a neighborhood built for shipyard workers, the street’s very name a nod to the ocean trade that built the city. Back then – this was the 1980s – there was a Bethlehem Steel ship-repair yard down the hill at the foot of our street. You’d walk out in the morning and there would be a big freighter pointing at you, its deck roughly at street level. Horns would blow as shifts changed. Cranes labored, steel plates clanked. Then, one morning, you’d come out and the ship that had been there for weeks was gone, having slipped away to some far corner of the world. The air was clear – you could see straight through to the Domino Sugars refinery down toward Locust Point.
Where the shipyard riggers and welders worked their prosaic magic, a big luxury high-rise now stands. Pleasure boats prowl beyond. It’s the way of things.
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, 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 socalled 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 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.