Just the ones which lose power when they are two minutes upstream from the bridge.
I think it was the Tampa Skyway bridge that got hit by a ship in bad weather - pier on one of the lower spans, not the raised ship span. That ship was way off course and would have been fine if it had kept to the ship channel and gone under the higher part of the bridge.
When they rebuilt that bridge, they added large concrete "ship stoppers" on BOTH sides (incoming & outgoing) of ALL the piers under that bridge. Country boy would say that's "Locking the door after the horse was stolen" but other bridges subject to traffic that includes large ocean-going vessels would have benefitted from Tampa's example and they could have added those large round blocking devices on the "in" and "out" sides of the piers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge to prevent this type damage for a lot fewer $$$$$$ than building a new bridge from scratch. I've not yet heard any estimates of the cost of replacing that bridge but the current dollar cost of building the Key bridge is about $735 million. If they ut in a new bridge, you know they'll want some upgrades. If it was 4 lanes, make it 6 (maybe 8?) and upgrade all the roads to and from the bridge to also handle that much traffic. Maybe start with $2 billion as the low end?
Details about the size and weight of the ship are here:
www.barrons.com/news/dali-the-ship-that-brought-down-baltimore-bridge-c0d45092Short version:
985 feet long, 158 feet wide, 81 feet high
gross tonnage is 95,000 tonnes (metric tons at 2200lb each or 209,000,000 lbs)
it can hold 2.2 million gallons of fuel (heavy oil - as in thicker than diesel)
There are reports that a security camera recorded the ship going totally dark about two minutes before it hit the bridge. A ship that size without engine power for forward/reverse or without generator power to operate the controls is just so much debris floating at the mercy of the river's current.
In one of the videos that was shown on Fox News, the ship was NOT lit as they normally are so I'd say it was a generator failure and they could not steer. They did have radio/phone/whatever communications capability as they notified the Maryland DOT that they were without power and drifting toward the bridge as soon as the power failure happened. Possibly the harbor pilots on board the ship had cell phones or radios to contact the harbormaster?
That bridge was built to handle the load when the Harbor Tunnel reached its traffic capacity, It's the only short path from downtown Baltimore to east Baltimore. Before the Key bridge was built, that trip required a L-O-N-G road trip with 51 traffic lights along the way (that's all in the history of the Key bridge if you're curious).
90%+ of the docks there are inaccessible because the bridge in the water blocks the channel that leads to the Baltimore docks. They're about #20 in in cargo handling of all US posts but are #2 in the northeast US for amount of cargo and possibly #1 in cars and light trucks.
I'd expect a week or more before they start moving the remains of the bridge because they will have to have divers check every vehicle that went into the water (not an exact count of vehicles and "maybe 7 people" the last I heard) and they may also be looking for the bodies of the DOT crew that was working on the bridge when it was hit. I'd expect that to take a while because they may have to figure out where there's space to place that much scrap metal - and where there get the crew with the barges/ships with heavy lifting gear which can lift that structure out of the water.
Hope any ships trapped inside - or outside - the new "submarine fence" has supplies to last them until the port is open again.
The CS Dali crew is OK - they started a 30 day voyage when they left the dock in Baltimore's inner harbor - where the container handling equipment is - on their way to Sri Lanka. Will the ship's owners decide the ship should sit out in the ship channel and run its generator(s) or dock and pay for dock space and shore power until enough of the bridge is removed to clear the ship channel?
