Consider This from NPR - Investigators Search For Answers in Baltimore Bridge Collapse

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed early Tuesday morning after a cargo ship rammed into it. As search and rescue efforts continue, federal investigators are trying to understand what led to the collapse.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

One of you guys on the south side, one of you guys on the north side, hold all traffic on the Key Bridge. There's a ship approaching. It just lost their steering. Early Tuesday morning, a Mayday signal was sent from a cargo ship heading towards the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The ship's crew said it had lost power and propulsion. Yeah, if we can stop traffic, just make sure no one's on the bridge right now. I'm not sure where there's a crew up there. You might want to notify whoever the foreman is, see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily. Authorities were able to stop more cars from driving onto the bridge,

as you hear in this recording from the Maryland Transportation Authority police dispatch and response. But there was a construction crew working on road repairs on the bridge at this time. C-13 dispatch, the whole bridge just fell down. Start, start, whoever, everybody. The whole bridge just collapsed. It is not clear how many people may have fallen into the water. Two survivors did make it out, but first responders continue to search for construction workers who are missing. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott spoke to NPR this morning. We're hurting. Right now, our focus is on search and rescue to try to save lives. And that's where our focus will remain until there's no longer a search and rescue mission. We have fire department units, diver units from Baltimore City, Baltimore County. We have state assets here. The Coast Guard

is here. Our police assets are here. We're going to continue to do the work. Meanwhile, as Baltimore residents and the country hope for the safe return of more survivors, the city must now also face the loss of a major thruway. It was just crazy. And it just gave us an eye-opener to appreciate life because we were on that bridge yesterday. That is Mia Monique Brooks of Baltimore looking at the craggy remains of the collapsed bridge this morning. That bridge is literally like the only way in and the only way out if you have to come over to this area. Consider this.

The investigation into the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge is now underway. Already, there are questions about engineering, safety, and construction. Experts are trying to understand what happened and why, and what can be done to protect other bridges. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Consider This from NPR. A federal investigation has begun in Baltimore to understand what led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Video footage of the crash shows the bridge collapsing into the Patapsco River in a matter of seconds. Joining us now to talk about all of this are NPR's Nell Greenfield-Boyce and Joel Rose. Hey to both

of you. Hey, Alison. Hey there. So, Joel, I want to start with you. What are investigators saying at this point about what exactly happened? Not a lot, and that is typical at this point. The National Transportation Safety Board wants to gather information. They will look at a lot of things, the ship's records, safety inspections. They will try to recover the voyage data recorder from the ship, which is like the black box on an airplane. And investigators will also look at the bridge itself. Here's NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy this afternoon. Part of our investigation will be how was this bridge constructed?

It will look at the structure itself. Should there be any sort of safety improvements? Homendy says much of this, though, will have to wait until the search and rescue phase of this is over. Well, about the structure, I mean, Nell, watching the video of the accident, I mean, the bridge seemed to have collapsed so quickly once the ship hit it. Can you tell us more about, like, what kind of bridge this is, why the collapse was so immediate? Right. So I talked to Rachel Sangree. She's a bridge engineering expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And she told me she woke up today and saw the video.

And here's how she reacted. I wasn't shocked to see the whole bridge collapse as a result of that impact. That's because this is a continuous truss bridge, which basically means that each section is connected together. And she told me that's why damage to a primary support can just take down the whole thing. Wow. Was the bridge just too old or out of Dayton anyway? Well, it was built back in the 1970s, and it was built before the terrible Sunshine Skyway accident in Florida. That was in 1980, and that disaster brought a lot of attention to the need to protect bridges from ship strikes. Interestingly, though, a few months after that Florida accident, a cargo ship actually ran into the Key Bridge in Baltimore. And back then, its protective measures worked. There was this concrete structure around the bridge support that was destroyed, but the

bridge itself was unharmed. And that was seen as a success story. But that was a long time ago, decades ago. And in general, cargo ships weren't nearly as big as they are today. And it seems that in this case, this huge cargo ship overwhelmed whatever protection system the Key Bridge had around its supports. Well, Joel, the ship, it was clearly off course. What do we know so far about how that happened? Yeah, this ship is called the Dali. It's a big ship, nearly 1,000 feet long, can carry nearly 100,000 tons, and it appeared to suffer an electrical failure.

In the video footage from the moments before the accident, you can see the lights on the ship going on and off. The Port of Singapore says the ship's management company reported that it suffered a momentary loss of propulsion. And I talked to David McFarlane. He is a maritime safety expert in the UK. McFarlane says there would be backup power systems on a ship like this,

but they do not kick in instantly. Losing propulsion can mean you lose steerage as well. And it doesn't take long to veer off course, which seems to be the case here. The ship's crew were in a dreadful predicament. I should caution though, it is still very early. We're going to learn a lot more about what happened, but initially that is where a lot of attention is focused. Well, Nell,

what can we do to avoid catastrophic accidents at bridges like this in the future? Well, you know, the experts I spoke to pointed to a lot of different things, more substantial protection around the bridge supports. Of course, there's other bridge designs that are not so continuous. And, you know, it's fair to say that most likely whatever is rebuilt there is going to look very different from the bridge that was constructed nearly 50 years ago. Yeah. That is Ampere's Nell Greenfield Boyce and Joel Rose. Thank you so much to both of you. You're welcome. Thank you. Now, according to Maryland's governor, the Key Bridge was up to code, and the FBI says there is no evidence that this was a terrorist attack.

So, how did a bridge this massive go down so quickly? My colleague Mary Louise Kelly spoke with Stephen Flynn. He's an expert in critical infrastructure and a former officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. She asked Flynn what he thought when he saw the news. Well, it was really, first, concern for anybody who'd been on the bridge, and then second, oh my goodness, this is going to be a real mess. This is going to be a real disruption, a real consequential loss here by losing this important piece of infrastructure that essentially has closed off the Port of Baltimore from the rest

of the world. Yeah, it's hard to wrap my head around just what the challenge of clearing debris from the harbor will be once they wrap up the search and rescue mission. It's going to be a huge undertaking. I mean, you know, the basic challenge here was a vessel of this size hitting one of the two support columns for the span was going to bring that bridge down. And the way in which that's prevented, and the best way you do that, is to create essentially a fender around that structure. In the maritime world, we call it a dolphin. But what's happened is that we have bigger and bigger ships coming into old ports, and we didn't necessarily keep the infrastructure up to pace with some of the challenges that having much larger vessels like the one that collided with the ship today. Okay, so you're starting to get to the central question, how a bridge this massive that, as we said, was up to code how it would go down so fast. You've mentioned a couple things. One is cargo ships have gotten way bigger, which I suppose prompts

the question, could any bridge, no matter how you build it, withstand getting hit by a ship that big? If the ship collides directly with the support pylon, basically that structure that's holding up the span, almost certainly the bridge will come down. That's almost the single point of failure on the bridge. The only way to prevent that is to create essentially an outer wall away from that structure. And that way, if the ship hit that, it would not impact on the structural

integrity of the bridge. So for existing bridges, what safety measures should we be thinking about? Well, you really have one or two courses for suspension bridges that essentially rely on these pylons to hold up the towers that hold up the deck of the bridge. And that is to create a safety zone essentially around it. Or you have more care with the vessels. And this could include tugs that actually escort the vessels through the bridge opening in order to make sure we don't have these kinds of collisions. The better approach is the first one, is to basically create that kind of mini island around the actual pylon and then that reduces any possibility of the ship actually hitting the key structural member.

I mean, is there any conversation at all about restricting the size of these mega cargo ships when they're going through densely populated areas with big bridges? There hasn't been, really. The whole movement in the industry is going, basically assuming bigger is better. There's better economies of scale. We get essentially lower cost goods in a very efficient way. But what has led to is a much more concentrated infrastructure that we rely on. It's not just the stuff on the water, because Baltimore is one of our most important ports on the East Coast. There's a lot of shoreside infrastructure, big distribution centers that

Amazon and FedEx have, because they want to be nearby where those boxes are coming off the ship or loading stuff onto them. And so when this particular bridge, though, is closing out the entire harbor, everything inside the harbor now is trapped inside. Anybody who's on the other side trying to get in, that's not going to happen. And what you now have is a massive challenge of how to clear out the debris from the shipping channel so you can get that harbor back up and running. And it's not going to be easy to do. This is the number one port in the country, for instance, for automobiles.

The automobile industry is just getting back up on its feet coming off of COVID. Last year, about three quarter million cars and light trucks came out of the port of Baltimore. And you can't just say, well, let's just take them up to New York or down to Charleston, some of our other big ports on the coast, because there isn't the infrastructure there that's the same way for that particular niche in the maritime sector. The disruptions that are going to flow from this are going to be quite consequential for quite some time. The National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB, is investigating. What is the biggest question they should prioritize in your view? Well, I think the biggest issue here is the bridge failure itself and the lack of safeguard that we had in place to protect that pylon. That's the focus. Obviously,

very important questions about the ship itself, how it was handled, what the source of it losing its way and causing the collision that took place. But the other real big issue we have to focus on is what does a recovery look like? How do we rebuild and hopefully build back better? A big focus of resilience is actually not just bouncing back, but bouncing forward. We have to adapt to the risk as they're evolving. That is infrastructure expert Stephen Flynn. He is founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. Stephen Flynn, thanks for your time. Thanks for having me. This episode was produced by Megan Lim, Michael Levitt, and Mia Venkat, with audio engineering by Maggie Luthar. It was edited by Amina Khan, Russell Lewis, Justine Kennan, and Bridget Kelly.

Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.