Officials studied bridge risks, didn’t prepare for ship strike

Terrorist strike was inspectors’ primary concern.

They worked for decades to keep the Francis Scott Key Bridge from falling into the water.

After the World Trade Center’s twin towers were destroyed by hijacked airplanes, Maryland transportation officials worried that the Baltimore span could be taken down by terrorists. Transportation police bought boats to patrol around bridge piers in the state.

After a bridge carrying Interstate 35 motorists over the Mississippi River collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007, Maryland inspectors rushed to examine the Key Bridge, hunting for similar design errors and other weaknesses that could lead to catastrophe.

Then, this week, a ship hit it.

For 47 years, Maryland inspectors and safety officials had spent many thousands of hours and millions of dollars inspecting, prodding and protecting the 9,090-footlong bridge, trying to keep it strong amid the onslaught of time, weather and vehicles. But state officials worried about terrorism had focused on bombs and bad guys in small boats, not an errant 95,000-gross-ton container ship, according to a former official with the Maryland Transportation Authority, the independent agency that runs the Key Bridge and the state’s other tolled bridges, highways and tunnels, and a former senior state transportation official.

And after Minneapolis, the focus wasn’t on building the kind of massive and costly barriers that might have had even a chance of stopping a ship like the Singapore-flagged Dali from sending the Key Bridge crumpling into the Patapsco River, said the former senior transportation official.

“It never occurred to anybody,” the former senior transportation official said.

Both former officials requested anonymity to speak candidly about the bridge, which is now part of a federal safety investigation.