The Highwire with Del Bigtree - DELVING INTO THE BALTIMORE BRIDGE COLLAPSE

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

An update to the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse sees new information come to light as we search for clearer answers to some of the most pressing questions surrounding this major event.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I want to talk about something that happened last week. It's really, from what I've seen, one of the biggest events on American soil in several years, the single event. This was the tragedy of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, was hit by a container ship. And, you know, if you haven't seen it by this point, well, here's some news to check it out. All right. This morning, a stunning bridge collapse at the Port of Baltimore. This nearly 1,000-foot-long cargo ship called the Dolly hit a main structure of the, Francis Guy, Key Bridge.

The bridge collapsing right into the harbor waters. The governor of Maryland has declared a state of emergency. In the moments before it hits this structure, the ship looks dark. It looks like it's lost power. The ship had alerted harbor authorities to an emergency. They had lost power, police quickly blocking traffic at both ends. Shortly thereafter, we saw that massive shock from that explosion.

Concrete coming off of the pylon, water splashing off of the ship, And then now we know that the Francis Scott Key Bridge no longer exists. Authorities are trying to rescue at least seven people who were doing overnight work on the bridge. They're believed have been tossed into the waves. We're talking about one of the biggest ports in the country has been effectively crippled. There's a major employer, more than 15,000 direct jobs, 139,000 jobs rely on this port here. And again, it's been effectively shut down. The economic impact of the port of Baltimore does not just impact the state of Maryland.

It's over 51 million tons of foreign cargo. It's the largest in the country. I have to say I'm really psyched you're going to that you've looked into this, Jeffrey, because I was really busy while all this was happening. I just kept, you know, it's like one of those ways you see walking by TVs and you see a discussion about something that doesn't make a lot of sense. And it seems like almost immediately you had one story, which is this is an accident. Then you had conspiracy theories, as they call them, right, saying, wait a minute,

there's something else going on here. So I'm curious, you know, what is fact? What is fiction? Where are we at right now on this story? Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts of this story. It's been fascinating researching this at this point over a week later. But we'll start out with some of the knowns. So this was this was owned by a Singapore-based firm. It was on charter to Marisks. This is the shipping giant. And immediately, I mean, these are just the recent headlines immediately that Singapore-based company is looking to seek to limit. their legal liability. This is the headline here. Cargo ships owner and manager seeks to limit legal liability for deadly bridge disaster in Baltimore. Why are they doing that? Well, this is Morning Star. Baltimore Bridge collapse, likely to be largest marine insurance claim in

history. I mean, we're talking billions and billions in disruption just in the container ships alone. I mean, not to talk. It's damage of the bridge and the ship. So let's go to some latest news here. This is the Army Corps of Engineers. And they took to their Facebook, to release some sonar images of the underwater bridge collapse. And they said this, just to give people an idea of how hard this is going to be this salvage, divers are forced to work in virtual darkness because when lit, their view is similar to driving through a heavy snowfall at night with high beam headlights on. So murky is the water. Divers must be guided via detailed verbal directions from operators and vessels topside

who are viewing real-time coda imagery. No usable underwater video exists of the wreckage because, as one Navy diver stated, there's no need to take video of something that you can't even see. So we can look here, I mean, imagine that. You can look at some of these sonar images here that were released by the Army Corps of Engineers. And you can see this bridge is, I mean, all the concrete, mangled concrete and steel there, but it's also embedded into the mud. There's several feet of mud at the bottom of the river there. So it's embedded into the mud, which is going to make the salvage and trying to find out where to cut and remove this much, difficult, especially with almost zero visibility at that point.

Wow. So some of the positive notes that came out of this was they are, they have opened a new channel, two new channels actually, and here's some video of the first barge going through this channel, and it's an alternative channel. It goes obviously around the wreckage. This is an 11 foot depth channel. The second channel they opened was 14 feet depth. Why is that important? Well, to get the large container ships out and in like the Dolly, this port is really designed for. You need about 35 to over 50 foot depth. So this is a temporary fix, nowhere near what's needed to really get this stuff going. But there is a little bit of movement now, which is which is a positive. Another positive really looking back across the whole thing is the

police response to get people off that bridge. And now we know from the black box, here's the headline here. NTSB, that's one of the organization investigating, says police had 90 seconds to stop traffic and get people off key bridge before it collapsed. So they did an incredible job at that point to really save a lot of lives. And we have the black box, the ship's black box. And although the audio has not been released to the public at the time of that incident, there has been the conversation about what was on that black box. And I'll read some of that at this point because this really starts to piece together some things that you don't get from the video. So it says here, Muse, that's the person that was relating this information in the article, said several alarms were heard on the recording

just before 1.25 a.m. followed about a minute later by steering commands and rudder orders. So on the ship, they knew there was an issue. They sounded the alarms. The captain was shouting steering commands and rudder orders at that point. At 126 and 39 seconds a.m., the pilot on duty made a radio call for assistance to tugboats in the area. Sometimes they can call these tugboats out and they can direct the ship who's lost power. Obviously, this didn't happen. And said, and 45 seconds later ordered the port anchor dropped, giving additional steering commands at that point.

But that's another thing that with the ship going that fast, the port anchor that was just kind of a last ditch effort, it wouldn't stop that size of a ship, but they obviously were trying to just do anything at that point. It says at 127 and 25 seconds a.m., the pilot said on a radio call that Dolly had lost power and was nearing the bridge. around that same time, the officer on duty for the Maryland Transportation Authority told officers

who are at both ends of the bridge for the road repairs to close traffic, which likely save lives. So that is just an incredible feet there, and thank God. Yeah, I mean, just I'm just thinking about those police offices and there, I mean, you know, we've all run businesses and companies and sometimes you give an order, it can really be like, well, can I ask some questions about it, you know? What do you say? I mean, clearly these were people that took it very seriously, acted very quickly. So really hats off to everybody involved in, you know, clearing that bridge.

I mean, look at those cars going there right there just before impact. So that's always impressive. And it's great to celebrate the human spirit and teamwork when it really does work. Exactly. And so there's two big questions still floating around here. What caused the power outage? and we may not really know that for a while now as this investigation is going on by several agencies. And then also, did the ship have steering command? Obviously, the power went out. Did they have rudder

control? And why did it turn? And so there's, you know, there's a lot of people have explanations. One of them is a YouTube channel that deals with all things shipping, a very popular YouTube channel when it comes to this topic way before this event ever happened. And this was his explanation of possibly why the ship turned at the time we saw it. Take a listen. Okay. You'll see the main channel, this big huge white channel right here, and you can see the red obstructions right here. Notice how close the bridge is to the main channel. There's not a lot of room there between it. But the key thing is this white channel going off here to the left. This is the channel to Curtis Bay. If you have water coming out at this time, if the tide is going

down, remember it was a full moon. If tides going out and you're having a tide movement here, and this is really close to when you're coming to a slack tide, but even if not, when you hit an area where water is coming in off your starboard side, it may push the dolly just enough to nudge her. And then you have effects called a bank suction where you may see the ship start pulling and the bow will kind of nudge to the right and the stern will want to suck in toward the bank. And if you give it just enough a nudge, and this ship was just hugging, by the way, the left side of the bank there just a bit, that may be enough to cause the Dolly if they don't have rudder control to kind of go off skew. And I think that's one of the issues that's leading

Dolly now to do this. If you had rudder control, again, a little bit of left rudder and you coast under the bridge at this speed, you still have enough way on for the rudder to have control. But if power is not going to the rudder and the rudder is locked in place, then this could be the main problem. Very interesting. So, yeah, it's just one explanation of several out there that are floating around, but I thought that was interesting because the video, there's a different perspective. On the video, it looks like the ship takes a really hard turn to go out of its way. When you actually look at that from a topography overhead view like that on the map,

It's actually just about 10 degrees off, maybe 15 degrees off, it looks like. So there's still a lot of open questions. One of the things that's a concern is the military response, because there's a lot of ships, there's a naval base, there's a lot of ships that are sitting idle. This was one of the articles by Breitbart. Transportation Department will not say how many national defense ships stuck in harbor. So according to another inventory list maintained by the Department of Transportation as of January 31st, 2024, there are 90 ships that are part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, with 53 of those

part of the Ready Reserve Force. RRF ships are maritime administration vessels assigned to support U.S. military surge sea lift requirements. So basically six of those RRF ships, they're called all roll-on, roll-off cargo ships are assigned to Baltimore, according to the list. So in that article, it says they quoted people from the military saying, look, if we don't have any military issues or conflicts, not a big problem, but if we do, a gigantic problem. So that's just a side note to this as also talking about the container ships, not being able to go through. But really, there's a whole conversation about cybersecurity, hacking of the ships, electrical systems, and, you know, the vulnerability of American infrastructure here, because this was a significant hit on American

infrastructure. So we're going down that direction as well because we still don't have all the answers. So this has to be on the table. And in 2017, remember this ship, the Dolly was chartered by Marisk. In 2017, Maris did have a cyber attack that affected their company for two weeks. And this was the headline here. It cost the cyber attack cost Maris as much as 300 million and disrupted operations for two weeks. So what happened was 17 of Maris 76 terminals across the world were infected by this virus, this computer virus. The computers on Maris ships were not infected. So that's a delineation we have to make.

But the terminal software was. So they didn't have any records of the cargo ships, containers, what was going on, what was going off. So it just paralyzed them at that point. But we go even further back. This is an article from almost 10 years ago. I mean, talking about the capability they had back then, hacking ships, maritime shipping industry at risk.

This was a warning sign almost 10 years ago. It says information technology has been playing a very important role in the the maritime shipping industry. Today, our modern ships are completely computerized. Everything is connected to networks. Today's modern ships have complex cargo operations that are entirely connected through cyberspace. Then it goes on to say this, it gets even more to the point. Cyber security is a safety issue. Every ship built has software that manages its engines, and that software is updated while the vessel is underway from the beach. And Master doesn't even know that the software is being updated, said Rear Admiral Paul Thomas, US Coast Guard. Hackers could interfere with

With the control of a ship, disabled navigation systems, cut off communications or steal confidential data according to Alliance Global Corporate and Specialty SEs 2015 Safety and Shipping Review. Crews become smaller, ships become larger, and a growing resilience on automation all significantly exacerbate the risk from hackers disrupting key systems the report stated. But then it goes on to say this. Security vulnerabilities and software used by the maritime industry could be exploited to cause ships to malfunction or run aground, according to research from global information assurance firm NCC group. They have revealed security vulnerabilities in ECDIS, that's electronic chart display and information

systems and information technology product used by the shipping industry. These systems are usually installed on ships and used by navigation officers. So clearly there's an open-ended question there. There's a flap for this conversation. to get into and a vulnerability there that people are several organizations including the coast card are saying look this is a problem nine years ago yeah and it's one of those things i've seen several reporters saying you know it's been proven there's no way this is a cyber attack or you know there's some of that going on and i just i'm always shocked how quickly people start making definitive statements i mean this just happened sort of like the the wuhan lab when they started saying this is absolutely natural

no way it's the Wuhan lab, that's where my spidey sense goes off and says, how would you know that? Like, you wouldn't know that by now. You haven't, you don't know barely anything about this. And I would prefer the reporters at the moment. And I want to make it clear what we're doing is just stating what is known, the facts, the history, where we're at. This is a story we should all be concerned about. Clearly, it's a, you know, if it's an attack, it's an attack on infrastructure. If it's an accident, it's one, you know, one of a kind that we haven't seen before. But, you know, I think we should all be careful as reporters to say, look, there's a lot of theories. There's a lot going on here. There's a lot that's suspect.

And we're going to continue to follow the different elements of this investigation as we get more information. All right. Absolutely. And this is, I think, one of the things we can do best here is we can really just take that center space and really take all of the information into account and look what's going on.