The Journal. - The Baltimore Bridge Catastrophe

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Early Tuesday morning, a 1,000-foot container ship lost power and plowed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge leaving six people still unaccounted for. The bridge collapsed, cutting off the port and a major traffic artery for Baltimore. WSJ’s Cameron McWhirter discusses the potential impact of the collapse on the local community and the wider region. Further Reading: -Baltimore Bridge Crash Investigators to Examine Whether Dirty Fuel Played Role in Accident  -Bridge Collapse Resets U.S. Supply Chains  -How a Night Shift on Baltimore Bridge Turned Deadly  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Tuesday morning, Americans woke up to some pretty shocking footage. It was of a bridge in Baltimore collapsing like a deck of cards after a giant cargo ship slammed into it. Here we go. You're not going to believe this. A massive emergency response is underway after this bridge in Baltimore collapsed earlier this morning. I wanted to know what the bang was. Ship hit the key bridge, sinking. The bridge is gone. Holy hell.

Rescue boats are now on the scene, and we are hearing from the Baltimore Fire Department that up to 20 people may be in the water. They're calling it a, quote, developing mass casualty event. The massive container ship, which is about as long as three football fields, lost power around 1.30 a.m., not long after departing the port of Baltimore. Unable to steer and in total darkness, the crew sent a distress signal.

Local authorities were able to stop traffic just in the nick of time. But the warning came too late for a group of construction workers on the bridge. Two were rescued, and six are now missing, presumed dead. Now, there are questions about

what happened, why, and what this will mean for a city that just watched a key piece of its infrastructure crash into the water. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, March 27th. Coming up on the show, the implications of Baltimore's bridge collapse. Attention all soccer fans.

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Get the ball rolling on your soccer getaway. Head to visittheusa.com. Our colleague Cameron McWhorter is in Baltimore today. I'm sitting in my car in a working class neighborhood of unincorporated Baltimore County, not far from where the bridge collapsed. I am based in Atlanta normally, but when I saw the video yesterday, I knew that it was all hands on deck and I was going to be coming up here. So I jumped on an airplane and here I am. The container ship that crashed into the bridge is named the Dolly. It was built in 2015 and is owned by a Singaporean company. It was chartered by the shipping giant Maersk to send goods from Baltimore to Sri Lanka.

What do we know about why this massive container ship lost power? We don't know really why it lost power yet. This is the great fear of these giant ships because when they're moving through these narrows, if power somehow cuts out, you can't really just slam on the brakes on something that enormous. And this was a nightmare scenario.

The ship had a crew of 24 people who were unharmed. In a statement, Maersk, the company that chartered the Dolly, said, The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating and says it will review the boat's safety record. The Dali has had at least one small accident in the past, but the Wall Street Journal didn't find any records showing it sustained damage that would keep it out of service. One area that investigators will focus on is the ship's fuel.

Blackouts at sea aren't common, but they can be caused by contaminated fuel. aren't common, but they can be caused by contaminated fuel. The Francis Scott Key Bridge is named after the man who wrote the lyrics of what later became the U.S. national anthem. It was built in 1977 and spans 1.6 miles. Is there also any understanding yet as to why the bridge collapsed so easily? I mean, watching this video, it just looks like a pile of toothpicks just falling into the water as soon as the ship makes contact. Some people have talked about the age of the bridge, but it really, compared to a lot of American bridges, it isn't that old. The issue really is our ships are getting larger. They're getting heavier.

larger. They're getting heavier. International global trade has boomed and we're moving lots of goods all across the planet all the time with bigger and bigger ships. I have no doubt that in the future, whatever replaces this bridge, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, will have lots of supports like that, protections like that. But this was not anticipated in the 1970s. And we have lots of bridges in this country up and down the East Coast, certainly, that don't have those kinds of protections because the builders didn't anticipate them. While there were no passenger cars on the bridge when it collapsed, there was a crew of eight men filling potholes, only two of whom survived. What do we know about the people who are still missing? So I spent time yesterday outside of a government building where families were brought in and

briefed on where things stood. And they came out crying. And, you know, they were told, which the public was then told, that the search after nightfall last night, Tuesday night, had become a, instead of a rescue effort, had become a recovery effort, which basically means that they don't expect to find anyone alive. They were all Hispanic men, and this is an area where a lot of immigrants are moving, a lot of Hispanic immigrants and others, but they come here to find work and they do day labor, construction, etc. Work in the warehouses

near here. If they went off to work the night shift at these jobs, you don't anticipate that this would happen and suddenly it happened. Our colleague did speak to a brother of one of the people who was killed in the accident, and he felt that the government wasn't doing enough to keep them informed. The man said his brother had family in Honduras, including a five-year-old daughter. At the time, he said they still hadn't told her of her dad's death. If there was this Mayday call that went out on the ship that allowed authorities to close the bridge to traffic

so that cars weren't driving on it, why was it that these construction workers were still on there? That's a fantastic question. And I assume the investigators right now are going to be focused on the exact time that the alert went out, that the officials received it, that the bridge was closed, so traffic could be stopped. It could be as simple as there wasn't enough time. It could be that they didn't notice the guys who were working on the bridge. It's unclear at this point. But that is exactly what investigators are going to be focused on.

How long will it take to clear the collapsed bridge? Absolutely unclear. I've heard it ranged from a month to months to weeks. Everyone's sort of guessing, but no one's ever done anything like this. I mean, entire bridge, as we all saw in the video, collapsed into the water. And that's all got, all that has to be removed. The passageway has to be cleared and then shipments can start again amidst all this investigation. So it's utterly unclear, but every day the port is losing millions and millions of dollars. It's a giant logistical problem that is going to have to be worked out.

Meanwhile, Baltimore loses. What this means for Baltimore and its port is next. On August 9th, don't miss the Borderlands movie starring this summer's biggest cast. Everybody buckle up. With Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Ariana Greenblatt, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Wow, you never see that.

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Conditions apply. See in-store for details. The Port of Baltimore is critical for the city and the rest of the country. And now it's closed because there's a giant pile of rubble preventing any ships from going in and out. The bridge fell into the water and is a mangled pile of steel right now. And that all has to be removed. So it has basically blocked the port for safe transit. So once that is cleared, and no one really is sure how long that's going to be,

but it's going to be a complicated operation to remove all the wreckage from this bridge, then the passageway will be clear and ships can come in and out. Baltimore's port is a major piece of America's infrastructure, especially when it comes to shipping commodities like coal and cars. And companies like Domino Sugar, McCormick Spices, and Amazon all have operations nearby that rely on it. A bunch of other big companies have set up these giant warehouses to receive goods from China or from Europe or wherever. And now they can't. Now all that stuff has stopped. So the ripple effect is going to be massive. All these shippers are having to reconfigure where they're sending stuff, whether it's, you know, to another port,

to Norfolk or to Savannah or up to New Jersey. They're going to have to figure all this out. It's going to be added cost. You know, the trucks are all going to have to ship. So everything that normally goes in and out of this port is now going to have to go somewhere else along the East Coast. Exactly. Right. But, you know, as everyone has been talking about for years, the American logistical system is creaky at best. And absorbing capacity isn't going to be a problem. So if Baltimore is out of commission for however long, every port, suddenly their logistical plans, they have to be reworked.

For Baltimore, losing the port is bad enough. But residents there are also now losing a critical roadway. The bridge was part of a highway that circles the entire city. Here's the governor of Maryland, Wes Moore. We know the Key Bridge. I've ridden over

the Key Bridge countless times. So many of us know the Key Bridge because it is our normal commute. This is a place that is a normal commute route for over 30,000 Marylanders every single day. What is the impact going to be on Baltimore? Well, the city is a struggling working class city is the way I would characterize it. And it has had its knocks. There is a huge crime problem here. Those things are true. There are certainly beautiful parts of Baltimore too. But, you know, it has huge pockets of poverty here.

It also, now on top of it, its beltway is gone. It's the letter C instead of a circle. So that everyone is going to have to reconfigure how they get to work, how they get around the city. How long could it take for the bridge to be rebuilt? I mean, this is a enormous bridge. It's going to take years and years and years to repair it. And then it's going to have to meet much newer, stricter codes. It's going to have to be buffered so that if they ever face this problem again, that somehow they could avoid the bridge collapsing. This is going to be incredibly expensive and it's going to take years to do. President Biden said the federal government would pay for the full cost of the rebuild.

I've directed my team to move heaven and earth to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge as soon as humanly possible. And we're going to work hand in hand with the support of Maryland to support Maryland in whatever they ask for. The Biden administration quickly announced they're going to pay for the bridge to be repaired, no matter what it costs. But we're going to see a big number. This bridge, whenever it is completed, will be state of the art, and it's going to be at great expense. So whatever they built in the 70s, they certainly weren't anticipating a giant ship laden with goods slamming into it in the middle of the night. Who might be held responsible for this accident? We're going to have to see.

But I think what they're going to be focusing a lot of attention on is why the ship lost power and how did the crew react once it did lose power. Losing power on an enormous, heavy, laden ship as it approaches a bridge is a nightmare scenario that we saw take place yesterday. What if this had happened during the day when the traffic on the bridge was much, much higher? I mean, this could have been really, really horrific.

I mean, obviously, terrible loss of life already, but this could have been really, really horrific. I mean, obviously, terrible loss of life already, but this could have been so much worse. And it underscores that the infrastructure in this country, I mean, one big problem in one city will ripple out throughout the country. That's all for today. Wednesday, March 27th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Paul Kiernan and Costas Paris. Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.