The impact of the Baltimore bridge disaster
THE VIDEO footage of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was shocking. At around 1.30am on March 26th, when a container ship rammed into it, the central section of the 1.6-mile (2.6km) structure collapsed into the Patapsco river below, sending people and vehicles into the water. Workers repairing potholes were on the bridge at the time.
Underwater drones, sonar and infrared tools show several vehicles submerged in the river. “Never would you think that you would see…the Key Bridge tumble down like that," Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, told reporters. “It looked like something out of an action movie." Maryland’s governor declared a state of emergency.
As of Tuesday evening, divers were searching for six people. Beyond the human toll, the immediate questions concerned the causes and consequences of the disaster—one of the most significant in America for decades, according to Jerry Hajjar, president of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The FBI has said that terrorism was unlikely to have been behind it.
The 300-metre-long ship, the Dali, was heading from the Port of Baltimore to Colombo, in Sri Lanka, when it “lost propulsion", according to an unclassified Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report. The crew reportedly notified officials that a bridge collision was likely. Eyewitnesses say that the ship’s lights flickered just before impact.
Locals heard a loud thunder-like rumble in the middle of the night. “The house started shaking," says Cyrus Gilbert, a resident of Locust Point, Maryland, directly across the harbour. The bridge could have been structurally sound.
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