Well There‘s Your Problem - Newsbrief: The Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

usually we don't do current events but this hit close to home. let's hope we don't have to do too many more of these please stop calling it "The Baltimore Bridge" thanks WE HAVE A MERCH STORE NOW: https://www.bonfire.com/store/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ buy the shirt: https://www.grimgrimgrim.com/products/well-theres-your-problem-x-grimgrimgrim-diy-disastercore Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I see now the magic is ruined, because I saw the countdown out of the corner of my eye. And you don't get... Right, now I'm just... You got in your head, you got stage fright. I did, I did. For all years of doing this. Maybe I'll just go piss in the middle of a live show, who knows. I mean, like, Maimonides has this story of a lute player, right, who's brought to perform

before the king, perform a song he knows like a thousand thousand times, like the back of his hand, and he gets up there, and not only does he forget the song, he forgets how to play the lute, like everything about it, like how to even hold it, and yeah, that's what's happening to us right now. RILEY I did that in a Tim Hortons once. ALICE You did? Oh, so it was a Tim Hortons! So it was, I fucking told you!

It was a Tim Hortons! ALICE Why are we trying to play the lute in a Tim Hortons! So it was, I fucking told you! It was a Tim Hortons! JUSTIN Why are we trying to play the lute in a Tim Hortons? No, I... SEAN We thought we'd have to sing for our dinner. JUSTIN No, no, I went to Tim Hortons for the first time in Quebec. I tried to order a black coffee in French, and I messed that up, and then I also forgot how to speak English.

SEAN I tell people that story as, Ross tried to order a black coffee in two languages and then successfully spoke neither of those languages. Yeah, so. One of my great memories of you is just me and my dad being like, what the fuck is he talking about? You don't have to, you don't... Advice for first time visitors to Quebec, just don't bother with speaking French, just don't do it, they all speak English.

They get offended if you speak French. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. And because your French is better than theirs. JUSTIN That's for that, that's like, their thing. It's like, it's the equivalent of a white guy speaking African American vernacular English. Just don't do it. ALICE I don't know that it is. I don't really know that it is.

But I do love the idea of Roz going there and just being like, you know what I'm gonna do is speak exclusively African-American Vernacular English. JUSTIN I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do that. ALICE Yeah, I wonder what that might sound like. I guess we'll never know. JUSTIN No. ALICE Yeah, I hope we never learn that.

JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Oh, jeez. JUSTIN But, shizzle. ALICE Please. Oh, no. JUSTIN No. Alright. This is a bit of an unconventional episode, we're not gonna stick to the normal format,

we're doing what, I don't know, I'm just gonna call it, what layer's your problem, news brief? ALICE Yeah, we've done whoops all news before, but... LIAM Yeah, it's all news. In fact, let me hit you with the news. It's all news. JUSTIN Hello, welcome to It's All News. ALICE All the news that's been come- JUSTIN Podcast, which is about news.

ALICE I said odd. I hate myself. JUSTIN I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him, okay go. I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her, WTYP action news team, yay Liam. Yay Liam. Yeah, we're gonna... Oh, that was so loud, right in my fucking ears, dude.

Sorry. Are you taking allergy meds like I told you? LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS.

LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS.

LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. LOS. Why'd you do this? Well, no, it's what I didn't do, which is take allergy meds. You have allergy meds. I will take you to the store if I have to, and I will give them to you like a baby bird. Being friends with Liam is, you receive a large amount of allergy medication and hard

drives. Yes. Not that you know how to take it, that's fine. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. Liam McAnderson. I keep forgetting that I changed my name. My pronouns are he and him. ALICE Why did you change your name?

I guess Glass Houses, you know? LIAM It's not legal yet, but uh... ALICE Well, I mean, Glass Houses. JUSTIN Highly illegal name change. LIAM Oh, I'm gonna change my name to Liam Rosniak. And then it's gonna get real weird. JUSTIN Don't do that. LIAM Don't tell me what to do. JUSTIN It's my name, you can't have it.

ALICE. We just all increment by one, so we get like, Justin Kelly, Liam Rosniak, and November McCandison, I guess. ALICE. Yeah, we all have to share. JUSTIN. Wow, you get all the syllables. ALICE. In the future of communism, we all have to share one last name, which is Rosniak. LIAM And Comrade Rosniak, Comrade Rosniak, Comrade Rosniak. JUSTIN So, y'know, usually I like to back off from directly commenting on current events, because, y'know, you're gonna get stuff wrong. We'll probably get some stuff wrong in this one.

ALICE They're like, the blood's still wet. People aren't, like, receptive to you making jokes about it, like, y'know? SEAN We're gonna do the best we can as stuff comes out, reports may change, this is... we're gonna flash a big disclaimer here, this was recorded on April 3rd, 2024, don't get mad at us. Yeah, this is the baseless speculation hour. And so this is a disaster that, at least for Liam and myself, hit pretty close to home. Yeah, we've been on this bridge.

We took 695, I forget where we were going, we have definitely taken it. Why didn't we go through the tunnel? I don't know, Roz, we have taken so many trips together they all blend together, man. For all I know, we're still in Canada. This is where the Quebec riff comes back in, you know, you just hear in the background, like, Quebecois. JUSTIN This must be from when we got so drunk in Dundalk that we lost a week or something, I don't know. Anyway.

JUSTIN You were in Baltimore in a fugue state. ALICE Okay, I have been in Baltimore in a fugue state. Let me ask you this question, Roz, do you remember any of Spring of 2016? No you don't. No, not really. Yeah, I told you. Anyway, so, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which spans the entrance of the Baltimore harbor, got, uh, bonked.

Yeah, remind me what I just said about sensitivity. Boat 9-11 happened. JUSTIN It's not a good situation, the whole bridge went into water, most people were able to get off the bridge, but there was a construction crew on the bridge which was not in contact with the harbormaster, and they were not alerted to evacuate, so they all went in the water. Two of them were pulled out of the water alive, six are missing, presumed dead. Really fucking sad.

Yes, you found two of those bodies, and I've seen things online that are just like, well, they were like... they were definitely illegal immigrants, to which I say... no, I'm not gonna say blank yourself, because I don't wanna get this yet. But like, it's the dignity of human beings, you can do better than that, fuck that. ALICE Yeah, you understand how that's worse, right? That it's not like... There's a... everyone has a right to leave the job site safely and intact. And...

I'll put that on your shirt. ALICE Yeah, and the fact that these were people whose lives were already being devalued doesn't mean that their lives are worth less, kind of the opposite, right? It means that it's important to spend more time being like, it fucking sucks that these guys got boat murdered. Yeah. ALICE So it turns out all people are entitled to

dignity. ALICE I don't love that I said boat murdered. Dwarf Fortress Let's Plays colonizing my brain, allowing me to comment on a tragedy years later. SEAN You are fascinating. ALICE So, I'm neurodivergent, probably. SEAN Yeah, so are the rest of us. Remember that live show where they told us we all had autism?

I remember that. It counts as a diagnosis. We will get into the communication failures here in a bit, but, y'know, I always like to start with some history and some context. I thought this was gonna be like Drake's Well for a second. Yeah, no. Yeah. So, let's look at the Baltimore Harbor. I remember this from Season 2 of The Wyat. Oh yeah. So, it's the harbor the Baltimore Harbor. I remember this from Season 2 of The Wyat. Oh yeah, so, it's the harbor in Baltimore.

It's on the Patapsco River. Over here is the inner harbor, right? They used to have a lot of boats, it doesn't anymore, it's just like recreational boats. The rest of it... I said it was the outer harbor, it's not actually called that, it's just, y'know, the harbor, the port of Baltimore. ALICE Oh hey, but that's an actual, like, seaport, though. JUSTIN Oh yeah.

It's the fourth largest on the east coast, I believe. ALICE So that's where all the auto traffic comes through, right? JUSTIN They got a container terminal here, they got a terminal for auto imports here, there's a smaller one over here I believe. There's piers for exporting coal over here, and down here. Down here is a whole bunch of mostly bulk liquid exports, probably petroleum, petroleum products. ALICE So the stuff that's like killing the planet

goes out and then the Toyotas that are killing the planet come in? JUSTIN Yes. Well, they do export and import of vehicles here. They send out a lot of John Deere tractors. Over here, you got the Domino Sugar plant, they still get a lot of deliveries. I believe over here these piers are for gypsum, mostly. There's actually some old-fashioned break bulk up here, over here there's a couple navy vessels as well. What else do we have here? Over here we have the Middle Branch Community Rowing Club, where I did regattas in high

school occasionally. Middle Branch of the Capsco. ALICE Just wildly diverge into an unrelated news item, Justin. As a former rower, did you see that our Oxford-Cambridge boat race was derailed by massive amounts of human turds in the River Thames? JUSTIN I heard about the boat race being... I thought it was just they couldn't go in the river, it wasn't that it was cancelled. ALICE No, they did it, and then everybody got sick. A bunch of them got sick beforehand, and then afterwards they all got sick.

JUSTIN You know, I used to row on the Anacostia River, in Washington DC, and the boathouse was above a combined sewer outflow. It was literally like, at the dock, behind the dock was where the combined sewer overflowed. And I fell in that river when it was raining, directly into the poo, and I was fine. Nothing bad happened to me. ALICE You just built a different... Meanwhile, apparently. ALICE All of these posh kids get like one splash of

E. Coli. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Shitting their guts out for like a week. SEAN I just love the idea of Roz swimming through a river of turds and just gritting his teeth like some sort of army crawl. The Special Forces, but it's just Roz. JUSTIN Yeah, I believe it. JUSTIN This area, I remember rowing over here, it's

very briny. It's just unpleasant smells everywhere. What else is here? The NS Savannah is moored here permanently. Mmhm. It's a constellation. The nuclear merchant ship. Future episode, I guess.

We'll have to do a bonus episode on nuclear ships. SEAN People have been asking for it. JUSTIN Down here, Sparrow's Point, there used to be a big steel mill. Fort Carroll here. Robert E. Lee's other contribution to society. ALICE I like all this, this is like the kind of like, this isn't even Rust Belt, I was gonna say the Rust Belt playset, you know? It comes with a bunch of different activities.

You have, uh... You can go out in Federal Hill and see your future wife blackout, eat a bunch of pasta, wake up the next morning and ask why there's no more pasta. There's a Coast Guard station down here on Curtis Creek, some miscellaneous petroleum stuff over here, lots of barges. I'm not exactly certain what goes on down here. That's the extent of my knowledge of the port. Um.

So, a lot going on. Recreational vessels up there. Which is that, like, all of this stuff is behind, or almost all of this stuff is behind one bridge, and then some of it's behind three bridges. Which... No. There is one bridge, which is the Francis Scott Key Bridge down here.

Gotcha. This is the Baltimore Harbour Tunnel here. Oh, okay. This is the Fort Henry Tunnel here. Y'know, it's almost as if it makes more sense to do a tunnel under a harbour, rather than a bridge over it. LH- We'll get to that in a second, but yes. So this is a big port, or big exports are, y'know, right now it's cars, it's tractors,

it's y'know, stuff like that, it's sort of... ALICE- Is there an area in Baltimore called Pig Town? If you look above the M&T Bank Stadium, below and to the left of the, like, big Baltimore, there's Pig Town. JUSTIN Yeah, I've been there a lot, I didn't know it was called Pig Town. That's where the B&O Railroad Museum is there. B&, Railroad Museum, very, very good. Go there. But yeah, so, you know, this is a big port, it's the fourth largest on the East Coast, it's a relatively important one. It is, it gets some big container ships, but it also gets lots of other kinds of ships and always has. You know, the containers are not necessarily the main thing here, although they probably

have a bigger dollar value than everything else other than the cars. You know, the containers are, the big container port is still ported New York and New Jersey. So anyway, you know, one of the things maybe where I want to push back on some media narratives here, one of the some of the biggest vessels coming in here are the Bulkers for coal. Right. You know, there's been a lot of talk about how ships got a lot bigger very quickly over the recent few years. That's true of container ships for bulk ships. These got really big in the 1970s. So this ship here is called Cylinder II, registered in Malta, it's 95,000 gross tons,

it's 950 feet long-ish, 150 foot beam-ish. It's big, it's not notably bigger than a lot of the bulkers that were coming in in the 1970s. Y'know, the port of Baltimore has been seeing these really really big ships for a really really long time. One of the reasons why a lot of the early crossings were tunnels, as opposed to bridges. ALICE Hmm.

Cause all of these like Panama, like, Panamax era sort of bulk carriers. Oh, this is Suezmax. The bulkers got bigger than the Panamax standard really early on. Them and the oil tankers. I guess that's kind of implied by the word bulk. Yeah. Which, food, honestly, but... Same.

For the uninitiated, bulkers are designed to carry things like coal, or iron ore, or grain, or any kind of... Loose shit. Yeah, loose stuff that, y'know, you can just put in a big pile. Right? One might say, simply, a big container ship full of loose cigarettes. Yeah. But it's a container ship where the container is the ship, rather than a bunch of...

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Also, coal stored looks ugly as hell. JUSTIN Oh yeah. ALICE Like... Maybe we shouldn't be digging this stuff out of the ground. JUSTIN Well, you gotta make steel somehow. ALICE Yeah. Oh, we're well on our way to the...

ALICE We're well on our way to not doing that anymore, we don't do that in this country anymore, you know? JUSTIN Exactly. Alright, so, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, this is the product of induced demand, right? The Baltimore Harbour Tunnel opened in 1957, which is the tunnel that now carries Interstate 895 under the harbor from a neighborhood called Brooklyn... ALICE.

St. Gallup. What the fuck. JUSTIN. Yeah, yeah, this is Baltimore, Brooklyn. And it goes to a big industrial area, and then through... ALICE. Baltimore. JUSTIN.

...Greektown. ALICE. Just, just like, renaming everything in Baltimore so that it's the same as New York, but prefaced by Baltimore. I'd love to go Baltimore, Manhattan. JUSTIN Greektown brackets Baltimore. ALICE Stavros, what are you doing here? JUSTIN That's where he lives.

We're not doxing Stavros on here. Anyway. ALICE Listen, I only know two people who live in Baltimore, and I can't make jokes about one of them, so it's gonna have to be Stavros. JUSTIN LAUGHS. So, once all these cars started cramming themselves through the Baltimore Harbour Tunnel, there was, you know, clearly an imminent need for an outer harbour crossing, right? ALICE Sure. for an outer harbour crossing, right? So they put to tender this contract for the outer harbour tunnel in 1970, all the bids

came back too high. So it was gonna be a bridge. ALICE Is a bridge cheaper? JUSTIN Bridges generally are cheaper. You know, this is, uh, read the Power Broker for a lot of discussion on this. ALICE I don't have an intuitive sense of which is gonna be more expensive, you know? JUSTIN So, it depends a lot on the geography, it depends a lot on the geology, it depends

a lot on, frankly, who's building it and what era it was. Because there was a, you know, there were some, especially the further back in time you go, the stronger the case for the tunnel was. But yeah, this was going to be a big bridge. Funding was authorized in 1971. The Coast Guard sort of vacillated for a while on this idea, because they were like, well, maybe having a bridge that could potentially block the harbor, if it were destroyed, would be a bad idea. Eventually they acquiesced.

ALICE I remember reading that the Coast Guard station had a betting pool for a while after it was built, and when it was gonna collapse. Which, some like 1970s Coast Guard veteran has just won big. Y'know? Yeah, I was about to say. Congratulations on winning what I assume is like a tontine at this point as well. Yeah, it starts out like a swear jar, pretty soon it's the big transparent pig from Squid Game, and a guy has just like, won that.

Yeah. So, they eventually approved the bridge at the very last second, before the Bond authorization was going to expire in 1972, construction began. This was going to be the longest continuous truss span in the world, with a main span of 1200 feet. That's between the piers here, right? It opened for traffic. It's very impressive.

Oh, yeah. It was a very big bridge for its type. I believe if it were still standing now it'd be only the third longest in the world. So, you know, this is a four-lane bridge. It was built with two-lane approach roads cause they didn't have money to build the whole highway out. This is a bridge with no shoulder, no walkways, very much of a certain era where the focus is just, I'll get the lanes in. ALICE Yeah, the cars out of here again. JUSTIN Exactly. I have personally always thought this was a very handsome bridge, though.

It was definitely a familiar landmark, sort of as you're coming out of the harbor tunnel you can see it. ALICE It's striking, y'know? And it gives Baltimore a bit of skyline. I don't know Baltimore well, but y'know, I can understand people being, like, attached to it, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah. One thing I also want to note, because even mainstream big news outlets are doing this,

this is called the Francis Scott Key Bridge, it is not called the Baltimore Bridge. Right? There's many bridges in Baltimore. You know, they've got the Hanover Street Bridge, the Curtis Creek Bridge, the Carrollton Viaduct, the Howard Street Bridge, there's several bridges near Penn Station, there's a whole freeway interchange on a bridge on the middle branch of the Patapsco, you know, it's not the Baltimore Bridge, it is the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

ALICE It's named after the guy who wrote your National Anthem question? JUSTIN Correct. SEAN Correct. JUSTIN About seeing Fort McHenry being bombarded. SEAN It's still there, so. JUSTIN Yes. SEAN Congratulations on the tie. ALICE I do appreciate that you have the only National Anth anthem to mention a Congrave rocket.

That's pretty cool, you know. Other than that, no strong feelings. I think it's funny that they put the word free on too high a note for most people to reach. Right. It's impossible to sing, it's not a very good national anthem, we should replace it with America the Beautiful, which was written by a lesbian social school teacher. Hell yeah.

I mean, this is the thing that binds the US and the UK together, is that our national anthems suck. We have a much better one, ready to go at any time, and we choose not to use it. Out of inertia. Ours is like a dirge, you know? JUSTIN You watch, they'll eventually replace it with God Bless the USA. SEAN Welcome to State 51, sorry.

ALICE Replace it with Parsi in the USA. This can't be, save USA, Miley was partying again. Would they really still say Death to America if they had heard Parsi in the USA? Honestly, they'd probably say it more, I fucking hate that song. There's a good remix of party, I'm not done yet. There's a good remix of party in the USA combined with Biggie's Party in Bullshit, that's called Party in Bullshit in the USA, and it does kinda slap. Now I'm done.

ALICE I can fill up some time with some more bullshit, I can be like, I wanna hear a Boy Genius cover of Party in the USA. Thanks. So, a continuous truss bridge. Yes. Right? They look very similar to cantilever bridges, some of them even have like the pointy, almost suspension bridge outline. The idea of the continuous truss is exactly that, it's one truss section which is spread

out over four support piers here, the two in the middle are the major ones, all of this is one big structure, and it's all reliant on every other part. ALICE Yeah, as I saw one engineer put it on Twitter, the collapse of this bridge, sort of like if you and all your friends had to hold hands in a line, and then one of you gets hit by a truck going 60 miles an hour. You're probably gonna let go of each other. JUSTIN Yeah.

So anyway, it needs, especially the two in the middle support piers here, these are the most important. Maybe you would only have a partial collapse if one of these outer piers went down, but the whole thing is reliant on all of itself to stay up. ALICE It's got, like, two glowing wheat points. JUSTIN Yeah. As opposed to down here, this is the Commodore Barry bridge, this is a cantilever bridge, right, which is made out of three, two independent parts and one middle part that's dependent on both sides.

So you know, if there were a collapse where one of these piers were taken out, let's say this one here, this section from about here to probably there, that's reliant entirely on this pier, that goes down. Then there's a segment about here to there, which is suspended between the two cantilevers, that one goes down. But over here, that would be fine, it would just be balanced precariously on one spot. ALICE Sort of the designated survivor. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it's essentially the two long cantilever spans, they support this middle segment, which is supported just at the base here, somewhere up here there are some pretty hefty looking structural members which are actually entirely aesthetic at both ends. You know, that's always... Reassures people. Yeah, exactly. It's like, shouldn't there be a beam there? You don't need one.

But we put one anyway to reassure people. I like a bit of psychological engineering. I like the thing to be built with the appearance of solidness. It's like the Firth of Forth bridge, which is built specifically to look strong as well as be strong. ALICE Yeah. It's, y'know, projecting things. JUSTIN Yeah, but these cantilevers, they can be a bit longer than a continuous truss can,

just because, y'know, you're cheating a bit by having that middle span there. But those are, that's the basic differences there. This thing is entirely reliant on every part of it to stand, and this one, you can have a partial collapse, which will still be very bad. ALICE Yeah. But this one, the whole thing stands or falls. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Yeah. But this one, the whole thing, stands or falls. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Gotcha.

JUSTIN So. Let's talk about the boats. ALICE I've heard of these. JUSTIN Yes. Sort of the concept of the Panama Canal, we all know it exists for a long time. ALICE At time of recording, there's some problems there. Turns out it needs water to operate the locks, and it turns out they're not getting enough

of it because of climate change, so, you know. Watch this space, I guess. Probably should've thrown some pipes in there so you can reuse the lock water for drinking water. Hindsight is 20-20. Tasty, tasty. You could really taste the bilge. It comes out of the lake anyway.

Love... Yeah, but I don't... Did you see the fake email we got from Ebbia? It goes through a water treatment plant! God damn it. Just let us have our bunker oil jokes and be done with it. I clearly wanted to say bunker oil. The fact that I restrained myself to get to bilge water is, you know, unproving. Bunker, the fact that I restrained myself to get to, like, bilge

water is, y'know. Well, girl! I'm improving. I'm so proud of you. Thank you. Okay, so we should at least talk briefly about container ships, how they got so big. They got so big because they expanded the Panama Canal in 2016. Suddenly all these old PanaMax container ships, which are the largest ships that could fit through the old locks, those are out of fashion.

The new Neo PanaMax ships are in because you can move more containers with the same crew. This higher value merchandise that's in containers, it prefers to travel on the most direct route. So suddenly if you're like, I can fit more containers through the Panama Canal on a bigger ship, I'm going to instantly move to bigger ships, the biggest ships possible. On the other hand, again, the port of Baltimore saw a lot of bulk ships, and since coal doesn't go bad, those got really big pretty early on. ALICE And stayed big. JUSTIN And stayed big, yes.

Same thing with oil tankers, in fact oil tankers have actually started getting smaller again. Hey, we finally hit peak oil tanker. Yeah. But one of these modern Neo-Panamax ships, Neo-Panamax being the standard for the new locks, as opposed to the old locks, was the MV Dali. ALICE When you say was, the ship's fine, right? JUSTIN Oh, the ship is mostly fine, yeah. ALICE You just, like, you know, drag it back out, paint it, maybe change the name.

JUSTIN You're probably going to have to do some pretty heavy repairs, actually, but yeah. ALICE Put a new bow on it, it's fine. JUSTIN So MV Dali is named for...? ALICE Put a new bow on it, it's fine. JUSTIN So, Mfidali is named for...? ALICE Salvador? JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Really? JUSTIN Seriously? JUSTIN Yeah, so it has a sister ship named the Cezanne.

ALICE I mean, I guess you gotta name him something. It's better than like, fucking Empire Loadmaster 27 or whatever. Like, exactly. LIAM Turbo, the SS Turbo Hitler, yeah. ALICE I think most ship names, exactly. The SS Turbo Hitler, yeah. I think most ship names are better than the SS Turbo Hitler, especially with the SS part. I don't ship with Hamburg lines for that reason. So anyway, this is the ship, 984 feet long, it has a 158 foot beam, 49 foot draft, 95,000 gross tons, can carry just under 10,000 20 foot equivalent units.

Oh, I can't do that. I can do that. It can carry like, probably like, one, I guess? This is... It can carry a shift container. Not quite the size of an aircraft carrier, but pretty close, right? And it's about just under half the size of the largest container ships afloat today. At least in terms of gross tonnage. International shipping is so cool.

And by cool I mean, like, strange. Oh, those boats got real big. Especially if you're doing the post-Panamax specific routes, those ships are just huge. Yeah, like, the largest thing that human endeavour has ever seen is there to bring you Toyotas. Exactly. Well, no, that's on a Roro ship. Not a container ship. No, we don't fuck with- To bring you fuckin', like, I don't know, Lego bricks. We don't fuck with Roroshifts on this show.

Semiconductors. What else goes in containers? Everything from- Fucking plane transport fever. No, no, it- everything in transport fever doesn't go in containers, it just happens to in the game. It's kinda fucked up that there's no, like, reason. Yeah, anyway.

JUSTIN No, no, no, no. What goes in containers, it's finished consumer goods. ALICE Okay. All of my trees, all of my crap. JUSTIN Among other things, yeah. Yeah, the tree, yeah, exactly. It's full of vacuum cleaners. ALICE Hmm.

vacuum cleaners, keyboards... JUSTIN All the shit you ordered on AliExpress is in there. ALICE Sex dildos... JUSTIN Oh, good! My John's Bow NAS case! Commemorative, like, model, CFL helmets, I don't know. Every time you see a full container ship you should realize that everything on there is gonna be thrown out in like two years. Not my John's Bow N1 Mini ITX NAS chassis chassis ITX computer case 5 plus one disk based NAS video looking up with steel plate case belts and 14 centimeter fan.

Only SFX power byte support H 70 millimeter CPU cooler. Okay, not everything on the container ship is finished consumer goods, but it's sort of a, it's sort of the stuff that you go, it goes in containers is stuff that, you know, is And, uh, it's sort of, the stuff that goes in containers is stuff that, y'know, is usually a little bit higher value merchandise. It's not like, y'know, bulk products or anything like that. Usually. It depends. Yeah, like, TVs, trafficked humans, uh...

There is, for instance, uh... Wayfair, what are you doing here? There's one container ship that goes between the Caribbean and Wilmington, Delaware, which carries exclusively bananas. And Roz, every time we see that ship, Roz has to sing the Yes We Have No Bananas today song. Yes, we have no- that's what they say when they finish unloading, they say, yes, we have no bananas.

We have no bananas today. Baltimore PD's Missing Surveillance Fan is on one of these. That's probably on there. Lots of stuff goes on these, but the things it sort of has in common is stuff that makes sense to transport in containers, which, y'know, is not like, I dunno, sand, for instance. ALICE Mmhm. Yeah. JUSTIN Yeah.

Sometimes you're just transporting the empty containers somewhere, cause a lot of times there's an imbalance between, like, Asia and the west coast. You have to... ALICE Oh yeah, they had the container shortage, didn't they? JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah, it's like, well, there's plenty of containers, they're just not where they're needed. No one wants to send a ship full of empty containers, but eventually you gotta do it.

ALICE Who owns the containers, by the way? Is the answer as simple as the, like, five shipping companies printed on the side? JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Okay. Cool. JUSTIN Sometimes there's like weird leasing arrangements, there's like all kinds of stuff that can happen. SEAN Yeah, it gets real weird with rail cars.

That's a weird one. ALICE So, like, Mezc or whatever owns like nine billion metal boxes? JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Cool. JUSTIN And so, you know, the ownership of the ship is a little more complicated. This ship was delivered in 2015, it was flagged in Singapore, it was owned by a company called Grace Ocean Private, but it was operated by Marine Synergy Group, and it was chartered by Miersk.

ALICE Gotcha. Least complicated sort of maritime arrangement. JUSTIN Yeah, that's actually relatively straightforward, yeah. Yeah, shit gets weird. I used to work with letters of credit in a previous life for this exact thing. And it got real fuckin' weird in a real fuckin' hurry. Mm, I bet. Yeah, and as for, like, okay, the crew was all Indian.

Still is all Indian, because they're still stuck on the ship, we'll get to that in a bit. ALICE That sucks! JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE I guess it's the reverse of the Beirut port explosion, where you're like, trapped on your own ship after the disaster, rather than before. JUSTIN Yes. And Singapore?

Not exactly a flag of convenience, those guys are a little strict about this stuff. This is not like a super fly-by-night operation, even though it is a complex ownership structure. This is not like, you know, Bob's shipping company that exists to own one ship. ALICE Yeah, it's commercial so they're gonna try and get the edges and cut the corners where they can, but like, it's not Cowboys. JUSTIN Yeah, at some point, you own something this big you have to be at least a little above board. ALICE Well, literally.

So to speak, right. JUSTIN So, make a long story short, because there's a lot of people who've covered the exact trajectory of the ship, and everything down to the minute. She's underway to leave the port of Baltimore early in the morning, March 26th, 2024, bound for Colombo in Sri Lanka. Bunch of Sri Lankan guys waiting on their John Deere tractors, TVs, and sex asses. JUSTIN Yeah, there's one guy there in a dirty Mac, and he's like, just one more thing. So, around 1.30 in the morning, things went wrong.

ALICE Yeah. Yeah, that this point. Obviously this is all secondhand from the... I'm just not like I'm down on the ground reporting. ALICE Yeah, you're like bothering the NTSB guys, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. LIAM Hey, I got a pod to put out!

ALICE I'm pretty sure some of them listen. Like they must do. LIAM Yeah. We have, we have listened. Like they must do. Yeah. There's gotta be, yeah. We have, we have listened. The Empire is everywhere. Yeah, the one thing you should know about us, we have people everywhere. So the ship left the port, she was assisted by tugs into the main channel, once they get

her into the main channel, the tugs leave, she accelerates up to a whopping 8 knots. ALICE What's that normal person? JUSTIN Like, 9 miles an hour? Maybe 10? I don't know what that is in kilometers. ALICE Usain Bolt could outrun this ship, but I couldn't. JUSTIN You could outwalk this ship, probably. ALICE 9.20624 miles per hour.

LIAM I don't think I walk at ten miles an hour. Oh, well I guess, yeah, this is gonna be like a... It's like a six minute mile, man. Is that a... I guess... okay. I could outrun it briefly. I'm short-lived, so I'm not gonna... Yeah.

Okay, yeah. Alright, well if we stacked all three of us on top of each other we might have been with the chef. All three of us stacked on top of each other on a Segway could outrun this boat. SEAN Yeah. I just did a fun run last weekend, I was forced to do it, and my pace was not exceptional. ALICE Doesn't sound like a fun run if you're forced to do it, that feels like a mandatory run. SEAN Yeah, it was more of a death march. ALICE You could out-bicycle this ship easily. SEAN Okay, well, I... yeah.

ALICE Well listen, that's not hard, because the bicycle is, as you keep telling me, the most efficient, like, means of transportation ever invented. JUSTIN Yes. SEAN You use it with your legs! ALICE It's out there with, like, fuckin' some of the, like, nuclear bypass rockets or whatever. SEAN Ross, we should get you a recumbent bike. A bicycle is as energy efficient, almost as energy efficient, as a small bird.

Which is a highly energy efficient form of transportation. Yeah, but how do you get on top of it though? Right, exactly. Well, outside of nature's laws, man. They're about 90... You just hit me on a skateboard with a flock of starlings all on leashes. JUSTIN Yeah. So they're about 90 seconds out from the bridge, when the ship loses power, for reasons which

have yet to be determined. The ship is under control of a pilot, right? And the pilot is... ALICE Well, lucky mistake, that's the go-fly as a plane. JUSTIN Alright, yeah, yeah, fine, fine. ALICE Oh, salty snail! JUSTIN I really felt like I was about to get fired in that moment. SEAN Yeah, so here's the thing, we can't fire you. Yeah. Alright. So, the pilot is employed by the port as someone who's an expert in navigating vessels through

the various narrow channels that come in and out of the port, in this case, out of the- down the Patapsco and into the Chesapeake Bay. And the pilot, you know, okay, we lose power, the radio's dead, everything's dead, he's no control of the ship, we don't know everything about what exactly was, he was in control of him, what he was, but we do know he immediately whips out his cellphone and calls the port and says shut down the bridge. ALICE The correct decision taken instantly. JUSTIN Instantly, yes.

SEAN Unfortunately, I hate doing this, I'm mad at myself for even saying it, but the cops whose job it was to get people to not go on the bridge did a tremendous job. ALICE If you ever need a cop for anything it is to close a road. Right? It's the same thing. They love doing it.

Some of the places, I think, like, the Northeast, they end up having to deputize some of their firefighters as cops, because New York state law doesn't let a firefighter have the power to close a road, only a cop, so some of the firefighters are like, theoretical, legal cops for that purpose only. That's what we have, fire police, basically. Fire police, yeah. We have fire only. That's what I'm saying, fire police basically. We have fire police. America's so cool. We're dumbass country, bud.

Thin blue and red line at the same time. Thin purple line. No, I like purple, it's my favorite color, pick another one. Harbormaster calls the police, the Maryland State Troopers, block both ends of the bridge. If you go on Twitter you can see some pictures of people trying to drive around the blockade, cause they're insane. ALICE No, no, I gotta get home. I gotta get home. JUSTIN Yeah, I gotta get home, yeah.

I can't... ALICE And what in the morning, where are you going? Like, where else are you going at 1am? You're going to the bar? JUSTIN There was a eight-man construction crew working on the bridge, who were not in contact with the harbormaster in any way. ALICE Do we know why that? ALICE It's... they really should have been.

Also, it's so long that you can't see them, like, blocking it at the end. But you're on the top in the middle, so it's like a downslope. JUSTIN There was not a lot of time to react here. One of the officers actually called for backup so he could drive onto the bridge and tell the guys to get off. ALICE Probably give that guy some kind of a medal, or something. JUSTIN But he was still blocking the bridge, so, if he moved, people would drive onto the bridge and...

ALICE So, surface choice, yeah. ALICE Well, quite literally, the trolley problem, right? Like, a bunch of people who are trying to drive past you to their deaths, or eight people. JUSTIN It's also far from obvious how imminent this disaster is at this point. ALICE Because no one can see shit, right? SEAN Yeah, no one can see anything. ALICE The lights on the ship are out. Like, it doesn't have any...

SEAN It's also far from obvious that the ship is going to immediately turn and hit the bridge. ALICE I've seen video of this, and when the lights cut it is crazy how invisible it is. Even against, like, it's backlit against a city, it's like the ideal situation for it being visible, and it still just disappears. LIAM Right. JUSTIN I believe they do, before they hit the bridge

they dropped the, I wanna say this is the port anchor here, which, I don't know if that affected the trajectory of the vessel at all, or, y'know. ALICE Yeah, I think what happened was they lost power one time, they tried to do, they got it back, tried to turn, and then lost power again with the rudder over, which turns, like, they can't get it back, so the small turn turns into a very big turn, and just like, diverts it off course anyway. So even if it hadn't been drifting, it just turns into it. Exactly. So, the dolly bonks into the south pier, and there's just no contest here, the bridge immediately... like, the pier goes, the bridge itself rips itself apart, collapses

in multiple ways from multiple locations, just instantly. I heard, right, that this happened because of woke, and because of DEI. Oh, I have that later in the presentation, don't worry. Okay, sure. Good. Good. So, now, owing to the quick thinking of the pilot, the tugs that were previously assisting the ship were alerted immediately, they came to the scene, they managed to pull two of

the construction workers out of the water alive, but the rest, again, they went in the drink and didn't come back up. It's really cold water. Yeah, 47 degrees, I think I read, I couldn't remember. Don't know if that is a normal person, but yeah. Plus also, you know, the impact. Yeah, SS Estonia, cold. Yeah. But yeah, so...

That's what I was trying to explain to someone at work, I was like, you have ten minutes when you hit the water, if that, and that assumes a best case scenario. ALICE Yeah, that assumes that you go in, and are injured in a survivable way, and you don't... SEAN Right, can swim, basically, yeah. ALICE And you dodge the bridge landing on top of you. SEAN Yeah. JUSTIN Bridge landing on top of you is a big factor here. You also might have been sitting in your car.

A lot of stuff can go wrong here. SEAN Jesus fucking christ, man. This shit sucks. ALICE I mean, drowning in your car is like, that's one of the fucking nightmares. SEAN Nope. Nope. Nope.

ALICE I think we talked about this with the Tesla billionaire lady. SEAN, thanks. Not a pleasant way to go. So anyway, this ship, it also came in at an exceptionally bad angle, right? There were a few systems in place here that may have stopped this ship, but to some extent, this was very, very unlucky. Yeah.

And I'll go through some of those. Here's some navigational charts. Well, one navigational chart. How does this happen? Is this an unavoidable freak accident or are there some lessons to be learned here, right? So we have to talk about the Baltimore Harbor Channel. This is about 60 feet deep, fills the whole width of the main span of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is about 1200 feet.

The bridge itself was built on a budget, still nevertheless testing the limits of continuous truss bridge technology, so any inch they could take, they used for the navigational channel, right? ALICE But you wanna give yourself, like, as much space as you can, because it's a busy port, right? JUSTIN Yes. You know, it was supposed to be designed that two ships could pass each other going under the bridge, I believe, but that very rarely happens.

Especially since the container ships got bigger, rather than seeing, you know, multiple container ships a day. Now it's like the container ship comes four times a week or something. Now, even then, only the channel itself is deep, 60 feet deep, everything around it. You can see these numbers are soundings, you know, 42, 22 feet deep, 19 feet deep, so on and so forth. Ideally, you know, a ship which is bound for one of the piers is going to run aground well before it reaches the pier. ALICE It just bonks into, like, I guess, the electricity wires up here, north of the bridge, which...

Oh, you're gonna run aground well before you get up to here. Ah. You just bonk off to the side. You're perfectly, like, ever given Baltimore Harbor. Yes. Yeah. Running aground is a great way to stop a big ship, but we can see that MV Dali just managed to thread the needle in such a way, so as it hit the pier before it ran aground.

Yeah. ALICE I do like, of the ways to stop a huge ship running aground is one of the premier ways of doing it. JUSTIN Yes. There are other defense measures possible, namely dolphins. Oh yeah, we're talking about the dolphins. The Sunshine Skyway, yeah. The thing that we all said initially in the first moments of baseless speculation is,

why did it not have more of these things, how did they fuck this up this badly? ACKERMANN And I do think actually more substantial dolphins probably would have helped here. I've gone back and forth on this, because some people say, well, there was nothing you could do to stop the ship. And other people said, well, the dolphin system should have been more substantial. Some interesting stuff here though. So the Francis Scott Key Bridge was actually one of the first bridges to be put up with big concrete dolphins. Right?

ALICE It's a ship bollard. JUSTIN Yes, exactly. ALICE The ship goes off course, it whacks into the big concrete pier instead of something that's holding up something. JUSTIN Exactly. So, you know, these sorts of things sort of entered the public consciousness after the Sunshine Skyway Bridge was knocked down by a much smaller ship than this. We have an episode on that.

Go watch that one. A colleague dug up this article from the St. Petersburg Times on May 4th, 1978, which favorably compared the Francis Scott Key Bridge fender system to the Sunshine Skyway. This is actually from before the Sunshine Skyway came down. Designer said his sells his Dolphins, which cost $250,000 each, would stop a 200,000 ton ship doing six knots. Yeah, it just bulks into it.

JUSTIN Well, it either slices into the ship and lock it there, or it will divert it. Right? It's unclear here whether he's talking about 200,000 gross tons, or 200,000 deadweight tons, 200,000 tons weight... I don't know what he's talking about when he says 200,000 tons. Ships aren't measured that way. But... ALICE Probably not an encouraging sign.

Although I do like the quote at the beginning, where he says, well, should we put armor plating over houses to protect them from airplanes? Which we kinda sorta, like, after plane 911, classic, like, they did build a lot of buildings to try and be more, like, 9-11 resistant, so... Yeah. Well, the World Trade Center towers did have some engineering decisions which made them a little less plane-resistant than other buildings. That's a different episode.

Yeah, the 9-11 episode. Yeah. Where you found out that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Which we've done three episodes on. ALICE We should really do another one. JUSTIN So anyway, this is why, generally speaking, when you talk about these systems, you don't talk about individually dolphins, or individually anything, there's the whole thing. What you

have is a bridge fender system, right, which is designed to stop ships from hitting the piers. No one technique is going to stop a huge ship dead in its tracks. Combination of works will bleed off momentum, redirect the ship, otherwise disable it, prevent it from reaching the bridge piers. The specific purpose of the dolphin is it takes a hard hit, right, and it starts to tear into the hull of the vessel, which in turn bleeds off the momentum, causes the ship to slow down quickly, right? You combine that with, while it's hitting the dolphin, it's also running ag ground generally.

And in the case of the Sunshine Skyway, the new bridge, they actually built an artificial island around both the main bridge piers here. So that is also absorbing the impact before the ship reaches the actual main structure, right? Then at this point, through a combination of these techniques, also the fact that the captain is trying to stop the ship as well, everyone involved here works together to stop

catastrophe from happening. Instead, you just have a very expensive accident. ALICE Yeah. That maybe, like, blocks the channel until you move the ship. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. And it causes a lot of damage to the ship, too. Ideally, this doesn't happen at all and the ship just goes through. Right?

I have a futuristic solution to this, I'm willing to sell to any port in the world for huge amounts of money. You just have a very high powered laser, either side of the navigation channel just slices the ship apart the second it goes over it. Easy. JUSTIN That's gonna kill some people, I don't like that. ALICE Yeah, well, I mean, so is this maybe. Let me have my bridge lightsaber.

JUSTIN So, this is, again, Francis Scott Key Bridge had one of the earlier Fender systems installed, it's relatively small, you can see it in the next image, there is a dolphin here, there's one over here, there's one over here... ALICE Hey, sorry, I'll be right back. Just keep going. Okay. ALICE Yeah, they're like, really widely spaced, and it came in at a really unfortunate angle. JUSTIN Yes.

Yes. So it completely missed the dolphin. ALICE It seems weird to just have four of them, is the other thing. Especially given the sunshine, Skyway had, I dunno, a half dozen for each pier, it seemed like. JUSTIN This is after we learned a lot. ALICE Yeah.

JUSTIN You know, this is just a different situation entirely, because, y'know, they're much larger, but they were also built in reaction to, oh crap, this bridge collapsed. ALICE The thing is, if I... Maybe I'm assuming too much budget for public works here, but if I had a bridge, and I was in charge of that bridge, I would want to keep up with bridge news. And I feel like bridge fall down because boat hit it is kind of, for me as, like, operator of a bridge over a harbour, that's something I would want to be, like, up to date on. JUSTIN Well, ideally, the fender system on the Francis Scott Key Bridge would have been

improved after the Sunshine Skyway went down. But that did not happen. It was sort of like, well, we have a fender system, it's not very good, but it exists, that's way better than most other bridges at that time period. You know, so it's kind of like, it was, I guess, not at the time considered urgent to upgrade the fender system, because they had one and most bridges didn't. ALICE Sure. It's like, I have an airbag.

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE It's in like, the rear passenger offside door, but like, I have one. JUSTIN Yeah, so these very small, very old fashioned fenders, the Dolphins, they're not enough to stop it, the shipping channel goes right up to the pier, so there's not enough ground to stop it, and the angle of attack here is very unfortunate, so it was able to just whack into the pier, the bridge came down. ALICE I think it gave people a lot of misconceptions

the way it looks visually as well, because, like, if you compare it to the power lines, the fenders around that look, to the, like, I guess untrained observer, kind of substantial, and you're like, wait a second... LESTER It looks substantial, nah, that thing is gonna... If the ship hit this, well, number one it would've run aground first, if the ship hit this it would go through it like it wasn't even there. ALICE People look at that and they go, well, like, okay, well clearly the reason why this didn't have those is because of woke, or something. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, nah, it's just an old bridge. I mean, that was never upgraded. ALICE I did have the thought, right. You remember a couple of weeks ago, Biden was in, I wanna say Michigan, where he was doing the like, ooh, Earth Rider Rider thanks for the Great Lakes thing. But the other thing he was doing was being photographed, being like, we're gonna invest in your shitty bridges, Michigan. Maybe, maybe, I mean, stranger things have happened, maybe this wins him the election.

Like, given that he's infrastructure guy, or trying to make himself be seen as such. That's an entire deal, yeah. He's had a great track record on infrastructure so far. I don't think any of the Build Back Better funds have even been awarded yet. Yeah, but he's putting up the IRA stuff with the signs, y'know. That's a good point, yeah. But, so anyway, yeah, unfortunate angle, we have no idea how well these dolphins would have performed because the ship didn't hit them.

Even though they're pretty small, I still think you would have probably had a situation where you were able to bleed off a lot of momentum combined with the ship running aground. You know, it might have stopped a lot more quickly. But yeah, and we don't know. combined with the ship running aground, you know, it might have stopped a lot more quickly. Yeah, and we don't know. And there's a lot of people who are still at this point debating in like, both on Twitter but also in like the news, like, would a dolphin have stopped this? The answer is just sort of, there was not the combination of defenses here to stop the ship. And that was just sort of due to the age of it.

And also, I think the real thing here is, alright, how do you engineer to avoid the scenario happening in the first place? If you look at other bridges and tunnels which go over major shipping lanes. So, for instance, here is the Bayonne Bridge in New Jersey. I've been miserable on this bridge. Yeah. The main shipping lane to the port of New York and New Jersey goes right underneath it, right? There's a very easy way that they are able to avoid having a situation where a ship whacks into one of the piers, which is the piers are on land, which ships cannot operate very well on. Yeah, one of the most effective ways of stopping

a ship. Land. Yes, is land, yes. I don't like it. Yeah, so it's, that's one of the ways is you just span the full width of the channel, and that you're never gonna have to worry about a ship, y'know, bonking into your bridge. Another option we can see here, the Commodore Berry Bridge over the Delaware River, which ships for the Port of Philadelphia go in there. Number one, it's a wider span or a longer span. This is 1500 feet. Number two, the ships that go through here are smaller. I don't think we can take the huge post Panama or Neo Panama ships in Philly.

We got a smaller container terminal. So, you know, but it's a wider shipping lane, it's a wider channel, it's a longer bridge, there's more room for error, and also they've built up these gravel islands around the piers. I want to say these were put in in 2008 or so. ALICE I like the way they look. This is the level of analysis I bring to this podcast. I really... I look cool. But with a larger margin of error, the risk of collision is much lower. Another option,

of course, very popular one, is to build a tunnel. This is the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. It's an immersed tube tunnel, it's one of those ones where they dug a trench on the bottom of the harbor, and then they lowered big steel tubes in there, and then they covered it up, and then they built a road through it. Theoretically a ship could hit this, but it's very unlikely. ALICE Yeah. Could get hit by a submarine, I guess. You would be embarrassed as a submarine commander, I feel. Yeah. This is true, yeah. I mean, you'd be...

Oh my god, I wrecked my submarine on the seabed, 50 feet under the port of Baltimore. The, uh, the fuckin', what's it called, the conning tower, or whatever, on the submarine? Yeah, a sail. Yeah, it would still be fuckin' above the water. Just embarrassing at that point. Yeah, so one great way to prevent ship collisions is to not build a bridge at all, is the main thing. ALICE Just go around, just go around.

JUSTIN Lots of our major heavy duty ports, like Rotterdam, or Shanghai, or Port of Long Beach, they just don't have crossings, or those crossings are all in tunnels. ALICE Wait, doesn't Long Beach have a massive bridge, though? I remember from GCA 5... JUSTIN No, Los Angeles. Los Angeles has the big bridge, and the two ports are adjacent to each other. Long Beach does not.

ALICE Okay. JUSTIN Yeah. But you always gotta consider the option of removing the safety hazard entirely before spending a lot of money mitigating it. I also believe the Port of Los Angeles, that bridge also has the two piers on land. Ah, smart. Yeah. That's thinking with the brain head.

So I think there were some design deficiencies here which contributed to the accident here. You know, especially since they were originally considering building a tunnel here, as opposed to building a bridge, I mean, they sort of, you know, they were asking for it, and it took 52 years, but they got it. ALICE I mean, in some ways it's a testament that it took that long, right? That the fucking Coast Guard, like, bat betting pool on it has probably aged out. Yeah, that guy's probably 92 years old now.

One very happy 92 year old Coast Guard guy. Yeah. So, y'know, we've gone through, we did the search and rescue phase already. Again, the two guys they pulled out of the water, the two guys who lived, I believe they pulled out, what, yeah, two more bodies, right? I think so, yeah. There's still four people under the water. We are sort of in the clean up and salvage stage right now. There is one fortunate thing here, which is, there's a lot of marine salvage industry based

on the- in the Chesapeake Bay. This crane is called Chesapeake 1000. It's on the scene right now. When I took- oh yeah, it's real big. I took the train through Baltimore on Friday, and you could see this thing just looming on the horizon. Um. Real big.

Um. So. ALICE We've deployed the sort of like, uh, like riverine equivalent of the Bagger 288. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's some stuff. There's some of these big marine cranes, you know, they make the Bagger 288 look like, uh, you know, a Tonka truck. ALICE Well, those giant caterpillar dump trucks.

I love those. JUSTIN Yeah. So, uh, you know, the, um... You know, Chesapeake 1000 is on the site right now, they're trying to move the wreckage out of the way, this is probably gonna take a month or two to clean up, to get the port moving again. At the time of recording, there's a few small channels that have been opened up to give access for smaller vessels, but the main channel is still blocked.

You know, you can't- More psiosus. Yeah, exactly. All the big ships are still stuck in there for a long time. A lot of this work is very nasty. It's very difficult because, you know, you have divers in there doing underwater welding or underwater cutting, I guess. The visibility is low, you know, because the harbor

is full of silt and nast and dill. Right? Yeah. And there's uh, when you're cutting metal like this, which has been subject to, you know, these weird conditions like the bridge ripping itself apart, there's still internal stresses in the metal, which may be released by cutting it. Yeah, you just get perfectly flicked by a giant, like, eye beam or whatever. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

So it's one of these, you have to be very careful, you have to know exactly what is going to happen before... you can't just go in and cut the beams willy nilly. You know, cause you don't know exactly what the reaction is going to be, unless you have people heavily studying this thing, who can say, okay, it's fine if you cut that bit, or whatever. ALICE Yeah. Otherwise you'd like find yourself airborne, having previously been scuba diving. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly.

You've been sort of, uh... You have a Looney Tunes situation. ALICE Yeah. I would hate to have a Looney Tunes situation. JUSTIN Yes, yes. That's, um... It's not as funny in real life. SEAN I hate to be strapped to a rocket that just says

ACME on it. And I also paid too much for groceries! JUSTIN Now, one of the things whenever one of these major disasters happens, especially if it's in the United States, or if it's in, y'know, Western Europe, if it's somewhere that a certain type of person considers to be the normal part of the world, you get conspiracies. ALICE I love these. JUSTIN Yeah. I just wanna say, this bridge behaved exactly as you would expect almost any long-span bridge to behave when you remove a bridge pier.

You're not going to just remove a bridge pier and still have that half of the bridge hang in the air. It's going to fall down. ALICE Yeah, it's held up by itself. We go back to the, like, fourth suspension bridge, kind of like, guys holding up other guys on planks of wood with ropes or whatever. JUSTIN Exactly. So one of the conspiracies is that this is because of diversity, equity, and inclusion,

or whatever it is, DEI. LIAM Shut up. JUSTIN Right? ALICE Yeah, they changed from woke to DEI. JUSTIN To DEI. And this was instigated by the DEI mayor of Baltimore. ALICE I don't... Sure.

Why the hell not, man? Let's all just live in pretend land with a bunch of poor people. I just, I wanna point out, they said he was DEI presumably because he's a black guy, right? But the city is 62% black. So I figured if they had a DEI mayor, he would be a white guy, right? That's the point! The token white guy mayor, yeah. ALICE That's sound logic!

JUSTIN Exactly. Okay, so I... I don't know, I mean, this is just sort of, I mean, people just label anything bad that goes wrong as DEI now, which is like, okay, a plane fell out of the sky, well that's because of DEI, or like, what else has happened recently. ALICE Yeah, it's very weird to be doing an engineering disasters podcast at a time when the most cynical fascists in the world are trying to weaponize engineering disasters as a thing to make you racist against black people.

JUSTIN There's an earthquake in Taiwan, that's DEI. You know, there was... ALICE And that's woke, because, oh, we can't say woke anymore, because... JUSTIN There was an eclipse, that's DEI. I stubbed my toe. ALICE People actually believe that. JUSTIN I There was an eclipse. That's DEI. I stubbed my toe. I stubbed my toe. That's DEI.

ALICE Yeah. SEAN It's just a bunch of fascist whining. ALICE Yeah, and it's like, it's a pretty obvious, like, intentional campaign here, and it started with the fucking airlines, and now it's this, and it's gonna keep going until they find that new thing, y'know? JUSTIN Someone's gonna say, well, y'know, the whole crew of the ship was Indian. Number one, ships doing international trade are crewed by people from other countries. Yeah, crazy, right? This is not some, like, sudden change in the demographics of the merchant shipping industry.

Believe me. The merchant shipping industry, which is like, 70% Filipino, 20% Indian, and then 10% all others. JUSTIN Yeah. So, these are all competent, y'know, crew. ALICE Yeah. Most of them. They've been doing it all the time, for like, decades.

JUSTIN Yeah. I mean, the question of why did the ship lose power is still an open one, but it does not seem to have been anything particularly related to the fact that certain people had a certain skin color. ALICE No, what it was, clearly, there was a Russian guy with the Havana Syndrome gun, aimed at the ship's engine. RILEY Yeah, this is the other idea, is that, what's his face, Andrew Tate promoted this, it was a cyber attack, right?

I was joking. No, it wasn't. Shut up. Nah, he's very dumb. Yeah. The idea is, okay, this was a sort of cyber attack, right? No it wasn't. This is a wildly optimistic idea of how networked all of these systems are.

It's a hamster running on a wheel! I was gonna say, at some point that has to go to like a marine diesel engine. JUSTIN The marine diesel, I mean, whatever computer it's connected up to is know that you could do a cyberattack that causes a very precise series of events where the ship loses power, and then while it's lost power, precisely navigates between the dolphin, directly into the bridge pier. ALICE Yeah, that's like a kind of pool trick shot with your cyberattack.

JUSTIN Especially considering, one of the things that lost power, as far as we can tell, is the rudder, which steers the ship. ALICE Yeah, that's the thing, right. JUSTIN Another conspiracy is that Obama predicted it in a Netflix film. ALICE This is by far the craziest, so I'm willing to hear it out. Yeah, this has something to do with the cyber attack, I didn't write many notes here, just cause it's ridiculous, I guess there was some kind of Netflix film that Obama was the producer

of about cyber attacks. Obama coming out on your Netflix for you being like, let me be clear, I'm gonna collapse the Francis Scott E Bridge. I did it. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's, um, so, it's, uh, I don't know, maybe Obama did it, maybe he didn't, I don't know, I'm not gonna pass judgement. I think it's cool how, like, a lot of people like, pathologically paranoid about everything.

You know? Yeah. Another conspiracy theory is, as always, it was a controlled demolition. Because I think there's some people who don't believe any structure has fallen down accidentally ever. Yeah, it's all part of the controlled demolition racket, going back to Krasis. Yeah, doing like an Illuminati wanted shit except it's like some secret brotherhood of like controlled demolition operators.

I think the thing is, if the previous one overestimated how networked a marine diesel engine was, this one overestimates how well every Baltimore area demolition guy can keep a secret. ALICE Yeah, I mean... LIAM It's not so good, they'd be drunk at a bar in Dundalk the next day. You'd be talking about it in the parking lot of Cranbrook Liquors. I know about fucking Baltimore, leave me alone. ALICE Most controlled demolition guys are pretty excited to tell you about their job.

LIAM Just a guy in a fucking Ravens Jersey drinking a Natty Boat talking to you about how he demoed the bridge. So I was like, you know, keeping a secret is very difficult when you're doing really cool stuff. Like clandestinely blowing up a bridge, or doing 9-11 or whatever. ALICE Whenever the CIA does anything cool, they can barely keep it secret. They managed to get like a couple of decades out of it, and then all of a sudden you know

about Project Azorian, because it's on their webpage. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. SEAN This is just a webpage. JUSTIN You believe that shit we did? SEAN A printout that just says we did it and we're not sorry. Here's a photo of Alan Douglas for you to masturbate to. ALICE Yeah, I log onto like ca.gov and my print

are just uncommanded prints of like, full color Alan Dallas. JUSTIN So it does not- SEAN It's pretty funny for April 1st, honestly. ALICE It does not seem as though this was any kind of conspiracy or intentional thing as of yet. No, rigs fall down, shit happens. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, to some extent this is shit happens.

I mean, there are some people saying, well, you know, we shouldn't say that, you know, this is attributable to any one kind of political ideology or this is attributable to a certain, you know, conspiracy or whatever. I do think this was an avertable accident. I do think that there are reasons why this happened, and lessons to be learned. I don't like the idea of just saying this was just a freak accident and there's nothing we can do. But it's also, it was not like, uh, I don't know if this would have been fixed by having

communism. ALICE It's one of those things where you can be like, it's not enough to be like, this is a freak accident, because that lets people off the hook for bad decisions and bad systems, but you can still say this was bad luck, even by the standards of like... JUSTIN Yes. Extremely bad luck. ALICE Yeah. Mmhm.

ALICE I mean, obviously the real truth is that, as they were operating the marine diesel engine, a single Hamas fighter popped the hatch from a tunnel leading into the engine room, and like, sabotaged things down there. JUSTIN By God, is that Hamas's red triangle? ALICE Oh, you never want to see a red triangle over the bridge, Pia. Yeah, that's not good, that's not good. You wanna get outta there. Yeah, the boat didn't even hit it, it was one guy in a ski mask and a green headband,

just putting an RPG warhead on there and running away. Aha! You'll never catch me! You can catch me at the bar in Fethill. I'll be at others. ALICE Do you think the Hamas guys go to bars in Fethill that often? ALICE Fethill?

Yeah. I mean, I would. I like Fethill. LIAM Got a Hamas Overseas Operations. Hamas International. JUSTIN It's like when Archer had to change the name of the agency from ISIS. My favorite bit of Archer, what they had to do, that was rolling out the old ISIS logo.

ALICE Before ISIS brackets real was a thing, I very nearly had an ISIS t-shirt from Archer, and that would've been an awkward moment, y'know? SEAN It's like the laundry in, uh, somewhere in England that was just called Swastika Laundry, and then they had explained underneath it was ours first, Hitler be damned. Shoulda kept it. Shoulda did the big dick move. ALICE Yeah, why should I change? He's the one that sucks.

JUSTIN Yeah, he's the one that sucks. So anyway. Let's talk about putting the damn thing back up. ALICE Oh, they're gonna build some fuckin' bullshit, aren't they. JUSTIN It's probably gonna be a cable-stayed bridge, it's gonna be kinda boring, I'm not a huge fan of how these things look, I know a lot of people are, but I'm kinda like, eh, I like a big truss, you know? ALICE So does Lamar Jackson. Connecting us once again to Baltimore.

LIAM I thought I did, but after 49 days of her as prime minister, I'm not so sure. ALICE Aww, she deserves to suffer. LIAM I just pictured this, right. At the end of his second term, a 9000 year old Biden inaugurating the like, American Renaissance freedom prosperity bridge, or whatever. LIAM Can you step away from the lathe for me please? ALICE And then immediately dropping dead, and like, crumbling into dust.

LIAM Uh, fingers crossed, baby. Um. JUSTIN Yeah. So, the thing is, however you slice it, this is a long-span bridge, those things take a long time to engineer and a long time to build, there's gonna be a lot of debate as to exactly how to do this, y'know, the old bridge was functionally obsolete, right, it was not built to interstate standards, certainly not modern ones, you need new approaches, you need new... You need to like, Santiago Calatrava this shit.

No you don't! Old, old Biden opens the bridge, trips and falls off the span. JUSTIN It slides down because it's made of glass for some reason. ALICE Wheeee! Donked to the outer harbor, instantly dies of being in that harbor water. ALICE What if it revives him? JUSTIN There's gonna be environmental questions, there's gonna be historic- ALICE Like a Lazarus bath from Batman? Yeah.

There's gonna be historic preservation questions, because you got the two forts right there, there's existing infrastructure nearby, you know, the high tension power lines, you're gonna have the question of should you build a bridge or should you build a tunnel, there's gonna be annoying people like me who are going to ask for public transit lanes on there, you know, so on and so forth, right? Mm, sure. And it's not gonna be a quick job, it's gonna be measured in years, not months, right? Biden announced the federal government would pay for it, which I think is jumping the gun,

they should maybe try and get some of that insurance money first. Right? DADDYGOOVERMENT'S just gonna, like, take over. It's critical, like, national infrastructure, what do you want? Uh, we'll get to that. So, but luckily, the world's smartest and richest man has chimed in. So, if you reuse the trust steel that fell, says Elon Musk, it could be functioning in three to six months.

The repair should be put to commercial bid bid with a massive incentive for early and safe completion. Hey, whoever edits this episode, can you put in that gif of the Roxannex shut up bitch? I like the massive incentive for early and safe completion. To famously, like, congruent design philosophy. Yeah, have you tried to build anything in this country? Good fuckin' luck, asshole. Okay, you can do things early and safe, it's just that...

Nobody. ...in this case, might not be worth it. Anyway, so, sent 9.31pm on March 29th, 2024 from Earth. Ah, interesting. I thought Elon was going to Mars. They all do that now. Any day now. Yeah.

So I was really bored this weekend and found out that people actually believe that reusing the steel to build a new structure quickly is possible because because Elon typed it out on Twitter, so... Let's humor them. What if we reuse the steel? ALICE. Why are we doing this? Ooh, material science hour. JUSTIN.

Alright. We've had this diagram up before, but... ALICE. I remember this. JUSTIN. I dunno, maybe we get some new viewers. ALICE. You taught me what Young's Modulus does, and I will never forgive you for it.

SEAN Yeah, I'm actually pretty bad whenever I have to host this thing. ALICE This is a stress strain curve. This is representative, we don't have the units marked or anything, because it's... SEAN Yeah, shut up. ALICE When you have the units it makes it more irritating, because it's harder to point out the different parts that are going on, because then everything gets crammed over on one side.

LIAM Yeah, exactly. Go learn this from a nerd. Yeah, well I guess we're... Yeah, exactly. Look, I rode in high school. I was... I'm jock-coated. ALICE A row is jocks?

I don't know. JUSTIN Rowers are definitely jocks. LIAM They're nerdy jocks, though. ALICE Okay, yeah. Firmly on the jock side of the spectrum. Jock-coded. Dweeb exists perpendicularly to nerd and jock. I'm gonna come over there, beat it up with your shoes. So yeah, it doesn't have units, this chart, we don't need them at the moment. Stress is measured in pressure, it's like psi or pascals or whatever the hell people want to use.

Strain is unitless down here. Strain is the ratio of the length of a piece of material at rest to its length when stressed, right? So, if I have a beam that's a meter long, with a strain of 1.01, that beam under that amount of strain is one meter and one centimeter long, right? Gotcha. Yeah. The way that this is tested, the way these charts are made, essentially we have what's

called a coupon, right, which is a piece of metal that looks like this, just a flat piece of metal. And then you have some things that grip on one side, some things that grip on the other side, and this big ugly machine... ALICE should grip on my metal. ...this big ugly machine... ...totally fractured. ...holds one side down at a constant rate...

...it feels good as hell. ...uh, no, it doesn't, we'll get to that. I guess it does, child. And that's how we increase the strain, and measure the stress, and not the other way around. So, anyway, as we increase the strain, we go through a period called elastic deformation, right? That's this part here, it goes, the strain increases linearly as the stress increases,

or rather, vice versa, the stress increases as the strain increases, there's a linear relationship, and the slope of this line is the Young's modulus, right, which is a nice, useful data point that could tell us a whole lot about how and where to use materials. But at some point, we hit the yield strength, right? And the yield strength is where stuff starts to break down. All of a sudden, where the amount of stress in the material reduces, even though strain is increasing, and this is because we've gone from elastic deformation where when the stress is relieved it goes back down to the original size. Now as we increase the strain, if you release the stress it goes back in the same line but to a point where

it is bigger than before. That is plastic deformation, right? And this is something that's bad. That means you've overstressed the material, generally speaking. There's some times when it's desirable, we'll get to that in a second. Now we increase the strain from there, we start messing with the crystalline structure of the material, right? The actual, like, how the metal is arranged in a molecular sense. This causes something called strain hardening, which is essentially, we're making it more rigid, right? Yes!

Yeah. This is the shit we like. And it peaks at ultimate strength. Ultimate strength, yes. Ultimate strength, yes. Now sometimes this is desirable, you want to do this at the factory or something, when you're making the iron members. Yeah, the iron foundry stretching things until they reach ultimate strength.

Yeah, that's called cold forming or cold working, in that case you would ship the thing out after it has been you know, de-stressed, and the piece would have sort of a... it would return to a different size than when it started out with, but you would know that and you could use the material appropriately. If it happens after you install it, this is very bad. You don't want things to be cold-formed when you don't want them to be. SEAN I hate when... yeah. You already know the joke, don't worry about it.

ALICE Yeah, on the 26th of March at 9.31pm, a large amount of structural steel was strain-hard hardened in, like, a second, kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So then we get, from strain hardening, we reach the ultimate strength, we go to necking. Right? And necking is when this thing has been pulled apart so far, that the cross section at the middle starts to get smaller and smaller and smaller and

eventually we get to the point it just breaks in half. As you know. Yes. Fracture. Yeah, that's definitely the point where you don't want to be is where it fractures. So this is how, and this is simplified compared to the real world where we do this with a machine on something which is effectively, the strain is one dimensional, right? When you're in a situation where the bridge has collapsed, all this stuff is happening

in three dimensions and that becomes a lot more complicated. It requires ugly and annoying math like tensors and differential equations, multivariate calculus, finite element analysis, all this crap, and so... it's much much more complicated, this is just, y'know, this is the simplified version. ALICE Thank God. We never have to learn the compli-complified version. Complexified. complicated.

We're doing so good. ALICE The complexified way, yes. ALICE The It's hard. Complicated. JUSTIN. The complexified way, yes. ALICE. We're doing so good. ALICE. Complexificated version.

JUSTIN. Con-flexificated, yes, it makes the brain hurt. ALICE. I'm gonna beat you to death with your own shoes. JUSTIN. The important thing here is that the steel has gone past the yield point here, the yield strength, and if it's for reasons other than intentional cold forming, for the sake of structural purposes this steel is now trash.

You should not and cannot reuse that. ALICE It's unsafe now. Because you don't know where on this, even on the simplified version, where it is on this. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Other than it is beyond the boundaries of where you wanted it to be. And you can sort of see here, there's a lot of members which have clearly gone through plastic deformation.

All this stuff is bent, and busted, and, y'know, it's twisted, all this stuff has happened, some stuff is clearly fractured. Right? Mmhm. Some of it's just been dumped in the harbor, which is probably not good for it. JUSTIN That's also not good for it. But some of it, okay, you can see this wide flange section here, eh, that one looks maybe okay, maybe we can reuse it, right?

Now when you think about that you also have to consider the Key Bridge stood for 52 years, and thus had 52 years of load cycling on it. ALICE, RETT, and LIAM Trucks, cars, extremely fat men on grotesquely heavy bicycles. JUSTIN No, there was no walkway. ALICE Shut up. LIAM Yeah. Um, these members may have also lost some cross-sectional area due to rust, because it was being sprayed with brine constantly.

The steel in general is just old. It's just old and busted, right? You can sort of correct this by way of annealing the members, right? So okay, hypothetically, we remove all the steel that's okay, and then we bring it to an enormous oven, and we heat treat it, we anneal it, and it restores the original crystalline structure. Right?

Then you graph some plates on there where there was rust, and boom. You got a brand new bridge from the old bridge. Right? This is what Elon stands actually believe. ALICE You have one proportion of a new bridge from the old bridge. Maybe. JUSTIN Yeah, and, I mean, this is the thing, is... if we go and salvage all the steel which is okay to be reused, you're not gonna wind up with a lot of material.

I would venture to say that in your insane quest to reuse the steel, after you spent twenty months extensively testing all the salvage materials to ensure they're usable, and then annealing them for reuse, you're gonna have thrown out about 99% of them. ALICE Hey, you can have like, one beam. JUSTIN Yeah, you have one beam. Then you have the problem that this was a functionally obsolete continuous truss bridge. It does not meet any modern standards. We don't build continuous trusses really anymore.

The new span is probably gonna be cable-stayed, it's probably gonna be made of reinforced concrete piers and concrete box skirters, right? So if you got all these members annealed, and you had them, you'd have just a big pile of wide flange beams and hollow structural sections, when what you need is rebar and post-tensioning rods. Right? The material's gonna be useless. ALICE Just put, like, one beam that you've saved at huge cost, just leave it sticking up, you know?

JUSTIN Yeah, and then you can say, look, we reused the bridge. ALICE We reused it, we reused it, shut up now! JUSTIN It's the bridge of Theseus. That's funny. JUSTIN Yeah. And I guess the other thing is, okay, well, why not recycle it more conventionally, which is what they're gonna do.

All this stuff is gonna get recycled. You melt it down into new material, but it's not like they're not going to reuse the same steel, right? Because mild steel is fungible. You know, you just, you melt down the old steel and you get the new steel from a new location. You don't, you know, it's like, it's like if,

I don't know, I went to the bank and I deposited the twenty dollar bill, if I want to get that twenty dollar bill out, I don't get the same twenty dollar bill, and I can't ask for the same twenty dollar bill. ALICE Yeah, and it's stupid to expect them to, because steel doesn't have feelings. JUSTIN Exactly. So, y'know, if you were like, really serious and gung-ho about getting a bridge built really

quickly, I mean, you could probably get the new material delivered before the old steel even hit the scrapyard. So it's kind of like, reusing the steel. The steel will be reused for something, it just won't be the same bridge. Yeah, it's going to, I dunno, shipping containers, or something. JUSTIN Shipping containers, uh... ALICE MERSK, you bastards! JUSTIN Razor blades.

ALICE We're all, y'know, pawns under the thumb of Big Mersk, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, and then, Elon's other big brilliant idea was offering incentives for rapid completion. Which is gonna be standard in any government contract of this nature. LIAM Right. Cool. Thanks, man.

JUSTIN Thanks for your two cents, Elon. We've taken it into consideration. That's how we've built the new bridge. ALICE We've built a rejection letter that just says go fuck yourself. JUSTIN We've built the new bridge out of Cybertruck skin. JUSTIN Don't do that. ALICE No, don't do that. ALICE No, no.

JUSTIN One thing I will say is, okay, if. If. This is a big if. You really wanted to get a crossing functioning here really quickly, and you really needed to. ALICE On to the bridge! JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Fuck yes.

JUSTIN This is how you would do it. ALICE YEEAAAHHH! JUSTIN Yeah. Yes. Yes! JUSTIN You could do this, but you would do it. ALICE Yeah! JUSTIN Yeah. Yes. Yes! You could do this, but it would be stupid. ALICE I do not care, bokeh. ALICE No more harbour traffic, give it to the Army

Corps of Engineers, be like, just do this. ALICE It just slides back and forth like a curacao, hell yeah! JUSTIN So, this is a Bailey Bridge, or a series of Bailey Bridges, which are on pontoons. Bailey bridges were developed in World War II as this very simple steel bridge. It could be assembled entirely with hand tools and without the aid of a crane. The one we're looking at here is on pontoons obviously. Bailey bridges are used for temporary structures pretty much everywhere. Really cheap, they go together really quick. some of them are even in use as basically

permanent spans. They can be long, they can be short, they can be tall, they can be wide or narrow, they work really good for a lot of applications, right? ALICE So one of those things that you invented in World War Two that just turned out to be like, we have solved this problem. Like, as good as it needs to be on Earth. Like, it's done. Yeah, there's like, I was researching this, just, apparently there's a lot of companies that have tried to come up with something better than a Bailey Bridge, and they all

like require cranes or some bullshit, and they're like, eh, just don't bother. We solved the problem. This is the thing, like, one guy in an office just solved a problem, for good. Just to be like, thing is, like, this can be assembled by like, 20 guys, they don't need to be able to read, you know? Like... Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. You can ship it in flat pack. It's such an American moment. I think about this, I think about the USS we built this yesterday, I think about, like, bulldozing old planes with minor faults off the runways into the jungle because a new one was coming in quicker than you could fix it. Like, 1940s American logistics genuinely still astounds me. So yeah, we should do this.

ALICE Bailey Bridge is British. ALICE Oh, fuck, even better! Okay, so this was invented by a dude in a shed in 1942. He was just like, hey, I'm just gonna tick this one, tick this box, and be like, it's done. Bridge complete. So... JUSTIN Yeah, so, if you're like, we really really need this bridge completed real quick... ALICE HMS, we built this yesterday.

JUSTIN It's like, I think plausible, you could build a Bailey pontoon bridge across the harbour. And you could just say, okay, this metal section we can float out to let ships go through, and then float it back in. That would be possible? The real question, though, is, uh, why. It'd be too cool. Cool things aren't allowed to happen anymore, you know?

Now, here's Baltimore. Here's the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Francis Scott Key Bridge is on the Baltimore Beltway. The Baltimore Beltway of course goes all the way around Baltimore. So that's an alternate route. There's a harbor tunnel. There's a Ford McHenry tunnel. The main purpose from sort of a national context for the Francis Sky Key Bridge was to allow hazardous materials trucks to bypass

the harbour tunnels. Which they can still do by going through the Baltimore northern suburbs. It just takes a little longer. ALICE The tunnels? JUSTIN What? ALICE Are they not allowed through the tunnels? JUSTIN Nah, you can't put hazmat through the tunnels. ALICE Because again, it would be too cool.

It would be like that one Sylvester Stallone movie. JUSTIN Baltimore has had some bad experiences with hazmat in tunnels. We'll do that episode at some point. So that's pretty much standard on interstate highways though. No hazmat in the tunnels. You know, in Pennsylvania on the turnpike, they actually make the hazmat trucks exit, and then you go up a long winding road up and down the mountain, and then they rejoin. Nice.

Pennsylvania's so fucking cool. But the thing is, other than the hazmats being essential, sort of this is more important in a local or regional context than a national one. It was not a super heavily used crossing. If you live here in Dundalk and you work in Brooklyn, it's going to be annoying for a long time, but there's a lot of alternative routes. I don't think we're about to have like mid-Atlantic traffic chaos because of this. I think they can afford to spend some time and rebuild this bridge right.

ALICE You are more likely to see a hazmat truck, but that's about it. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Well, the people in the northern suburbs are all assholes anyway, so I hope they get blown up. Yeah, it's uh, I fucking love Baltimore City, hate Baltimore County. Yep. Take a strong position here on this one. He's right, he's right to say it.

Oh, I believe it. The other thing is, alright, the port is still shut down, it probably will be for two months. What happens now, um, y'know, the statistic is something like fifteen million dollars of lost economic activity a day. Governor Wes Moore called it a quote, global crisis, unquote. There's lots of hemming and hawing. For most of us, all we might notice is that the car dealership inventory is gonna be a little thin for a few months.

No Toyotas? Yeah. Fuck. Um, some people are gonna have delays on their tractor deliveries overseas. Um, y'know, but this is not a situation like the railroad strike, where the grocery stores would have been empty in two weeks, this is kinda... eh. We can compensate for this, right? It's a global crisis, but in a kind of, like, manageable way.

JUSTIN Global annoyance. ALICE I guess you can't get up there after the fucking big landmark fell down and killed, like, six people and be like, this is annoying. JUSTIN This is actually, like, yeah, this is annoying. ALICE We can tank this one, Governor says. You know? Yeah. We can tank this one, Governor says. Yeah, we can probably afford to take a little bit of time to do this right. You know, our other East Coast ports are able to take up the slack, there's like, lots of generally excess capacity, at least to absorb what needs to be absorbed at this point.

You know, the railroads have started running extra trains. A lot of these... I guess maybe one facility that's getting slammed right now, this is in Norfolk, there's Lambert's Point, which is, I guess, the only East Coast coal terminal right now. But again, there's enough capacity to absorb a lot of these shipments without, like, really really serious delay. ALICE American moment. JUSTIN Yeah, and if you're hoping for, like, chaos and pandemonium that upends the global order, you're gonna be disappointed.

ALICE I mean, listen, that's kind of already just happened in slow motion anyway, so, like, fucking, wait. You chill. SEAN Can you just be normal? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. I think there's another interesting question. Are there any other bridges that have similar vulnerabilities? SEAN Well, I bet.

JUSTIN I can think of two. One of which is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, notably different from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. This is downstream from the Francis Scott Key Bridge. This has about a 1600 foot main span. ALICE If it's downstream of it, like, one pilot has the opportunity to do the funniest possible thing. JUSTIN Oh yeah, exactly.

You could cause a very severe blockage there. All those ships that go under Francis Scott Keybridge also go under the main span of this guy. There's a little more wiggle room here, again, it's 400 feet longer. I'm not sure of the depth of the channel here, whether ships can make it to either of the piers. You might be able to bonk this, I am not sure. ALICE Do not try.

Don't try. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. I mean, this thing is already terrifying to drive over, don't make it more terrifying. ALICE Yes, it's not fun. JUSTIN It's about 180 feet, and the road deck is three lanes. ALICE It's real weird. It's not fun. JUSTIN No shoulder.

ALICE Nope. JUSTIN And, one of those lanes is reversible. Yep. What? Yeah. Do you guys not have that? Uh, no. I thought it was bad when we introduced, like, smart motorways which don't have a shoulder.

No, no, it's, uh, okay, imagine you're on a three lane bridge, speed limit's 60mph, there's a Jersey barrier and then just the air, and the other two lanes of traffic are coming the other way at 60mph, and there's no separator between them. That's just Big Bay Bridge. ALICE I... I would worry a lot about that. LIAM It's not fun. ALICE The more I learn to drive, the more scared I get, rather, the less.

Which I think is probably the responsible way of doing it. JUSTIN Yeah, so this is, I don't know, this is a candidate for replacement soon. I don't think they're gonna replace it, I believe they're just gonna build an additional span. You know, this is another one of those functionally obsolete bridge, which I think could wind up sustaining a bonk in the future. And then the other one, which I think is a little bit worrying, the Walt Whitman. Which, uh...

SEAN They had to close it last week to get the USS New Jersey under that bitch. JUSTIN This is true, yes. ALICE You could bonk one pair of it, or I guess the middle. JUSTIN Well, here's the thing about the one pier over here. The other pier's on land. But this pier is right at the end of the container dock. ALICE If you fuck up your parallel park a bit, then...

JUSTIN Yeah, that could be an issue. You may want to put some armoring around this, y'know? Other than that, I don't know of any other bridges offhand that might be vulnerable to those same problems, but I'm not being paid a million dollars to do a study on that. So... Probably a lot internationally. I doubt this is only an American problem, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah, well, especially like the newer container harbors, they just do not have spans

over them. At all. It's all tunneled. I mean, even like, even like Hamburg, which is way inland, there's no bridges over that channel. So, y'know, this is by and large a solved problem, except for certain ports, which seem to all be in America. ALICE Yeah. Classic ports.

JUSTIN Yeah, port classic, yeah. ALICE I don't know, I assume Britain is also lagging behind and is probably vulnerable to something like this, just because, generally assume that we are. No, no, there's nothing between the ocean and what's it, Felix Town? Whatever it is? Uh, Felix Town. Felix Town, yeah. There's, there's, you leave the container port and you're out in the ocean instantly.

There's no bridge, no tunnel, no nothing. And benefits of being an island, I guess. Exactly. HmmICE Hmm. Well. What have we learned? JUSTIN Uhh... if you're building a bridge over a major shipping channel, make it pretty big. Because, you know, you don't want tight clearances in there, you want a lot of room for error

so you don't get bonked. ALICE If the Coast Guard guys start keeping a betting pool, rethink your course of action. It might take them fifty years, but they will be proven right. JUSTIN And construction crews working on bridges should be in contact with the harbormaster. ALICE Yes. JUSTIN Yes.

ALICE Just give them an extra walkie talkie, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. Give them a walkie talkie, give him a telephone, give him something. I do wonder how, in this case, just, again, with the bad luck, whether there would have been time, you know? I wouldn't want to be in the middle of a bridge span and be told, like, okay, start sprinting. Doesn't matter which direction. Everyone would have piled onto a pickup truck and drove off.

I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Everyone would've piled onto a pickup truck and drove off. ALICE I guess that makes sense. Well, I forgot the existence of pickup trucks, so I think it's probably a good indication that I'm getting kind of tired. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah. So, that was, well, there's your problem news brief, which was not that brief. SEAN No.

Extra said that's an hour and forty-five, baby. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Consider yourself informed. Yeah. Okay, let's get on to the regular... Nah, okay, we're done. Yeah, I do have a plug before we finish, if you've listened this far you probably already know, we'll put a link in the description as well.

We have a merch store, you can buy shirts from us, all the stuff that we said about fashion, about fast fashion, about Rana Plaza, we are also mercy to these, like, currents of international commerce. And so now you can buy shirts from us, we try and make them as ethically as we could. You can buy em, they're fun. I will continue to update the t-shirt store when we have a joke that is funny enough to put onto a t-shirt, and then you can buy it and you can wear it on your body. JUSTIN. Guaranteed to be as ethical as reasonably possible. ALICE.

Yeah. It's as ethical as we take a look at it. JUSTIN. Yeah. ALICE. Is that it? JUSTIN. I think that's it, yeah.

ALICE. Bye everybody. JUSTIN. Bye. JUSTIN. Bye everyone.