The bodies of two people, who have been identified as 35-year-old Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and 26-year-old Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, were recovered in a red pickup truck Wednesday morning from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse site. https://t.co/nNH4BbizIg pic.twitter.com/nUJFZqt0Mr
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) March 27, 2024
I gritted my teeth and bought a Bulwark subscription. Andrew Eggers, “What Went Wrong on Dali?”:
What do you do if a man-made disaster turns out to be nobody’s fault?…
Eight workmen were on the bridge at the time; two were rescued, and six are now presumed dead. That the attempts to recover their bodies have so far been fruitless is a grim illustration of just how nasty a logistical problem the collapsed bridge presents—a tangle of twisted metal and concrete rubble submerged in murky water 50 feet deep. They don’t even have the Dali out yet. Pinned under huge trusses from the bridge, with crew unsure whether the ship is safe to navigate even if it were free, the massive vessel could take weeks to move.
Until the channel is cleared—to say nothing of the bridge being reconstructed—the economic damage will be significant. The vast majority of the Port of Baltimore’s shipping facilities are now cut off behind the wreckage of the bridge. Much Baltimore-bound commerce can be routed through other east-coast ports, but that means extra load on already stressed supply chains; meanwhile, according to White House estimates, 8,000 Baltimore longshoremen will be sitting on their hands…
Should the ship’s mechanical failure have been foreseeable? It’s too early to say, although you can bet investigators will find out. “It’s likely that virtually every pilot in the country has experienced a power loss of some kind [but] it generally is momentary,” Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots’ Association, told USA Today this week. “This was a complete blackout of all the power on the ship, so that’s unusual. Of course this happened at the worst possible location.”
That’s the bottom line here: How flatly unlucky the Dali was at every turn. The worst possible location to lose power—after the tugs that turned it out to sea had detached, but before it was safely out of the harbor. The worst possible drift once it lost power—whether due to the position of the rudder, or wind, or current—apparently compounded by the ship’s response to the crew throwing it hard astern in a desperate attempt to slow it right before the crash.
Maybe they’ll find a culprit—some human error to pinpoint, some regulatory deficiency to address. But maybe the collapse of the Key Bridge will just prove one tragic and hugely costly demonstration that shipping has risks, and keeping those risks at acceptable levels isn’t the same as getting them to zero.
The pilot of the cargo ship Dali called for help minutes before it hit a bridge in Baltimore, according to audio from the vessel’s ‘black box’ https://t.co/XNmvqqQNf2 pic.twitter.com/Kl0VJsUhia
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 28, 2024
Baltimore bridge disaster: immigrants died doing job 'others do not want to do' https://t.co/kwKik54gSb pic.twitter.com/WhUB9DboUy
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 28, 2024
The Many Tragedies of the Baltimore Bridge CollapsePost + Comments (6)