The top US transportation safety agency said this week that the deadly Baltimore bridge collapse last March, after a cargo ship hit a support pillar, had been 30 times above the acceptable risk of breaking up if a vessel struck it and there was “no excuse” for a vital safety check having been missed years before.
In its investigation of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge across a vital shipping channel in Baltimore, which killed six construction workers, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that the Maryland transportation authority failed to complete a recommended structural vulnerability assessment that would have shown the bridge was extremely prone to a collapse.
In the midst of its investigation, the NTSB is now calling for the urgent assessment of risk related to 68 bridges across 19 states coast to coast, including national icons such as the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in California.
Such examinations are meant to determine how vulnerable the bridges are to collapse after a ship strike, especially given the vastness of some modern container ships.
The NTSB notes that while the list does not mean the bridges are certain to collapse in the event of a collision, it is recommending that state transportation agencies conduct an assessment and develop a risk reduction plan should a bridge be shown to be at higher riskof collapse.
The road bridges on the list include several major crossings that are above navigable waterways frequented by ships. In New York City it is not just the elegant 19th-century Brooklyn Bridge that is listed but also the George Washington Bridge, dating from the 1930s, which carries the Interstate 95 highway between uptown Manhattan and New Jersey and is the busiest bridge in the world with more than a quarter of a million vehicles using it daily.
The Brooklyn Bridge in New York last year.
In addition to the Golden Gate Bridge, the most famous of the Bay Area bridges in San Francisco, the NTSB also mentioned the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa, Florida. All the bridges on the list are owned by their states’ transportation authorities.
The list contains bridges built before 1994 as the Federal Highway Administration implemented a new law that year that required new bridges to be designed to minimize the risk of collapse after a vessel collision. In 2009, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation officials, which published risk guidance, reiterated recommendations to conduct assessment for older bridges.
Had Maryland’s transportation authority conducted such a risk assessment, they “would have been able to proactively identify strategies to reduce the risk of collapse and loss of lives associated with a vessel collision”, said Jennifer Homendy, NTSB chair, in a media briefing on Thursday. “There’s no excuse,” she added.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge snapped and collapsed in the early hours of 26 March 2024 after the Dali, a container ship from Singapore en route to Sri Lanka, lost power and collided with a bridge pillar. The bridge crumpled, with dramatic video showing infrastructure falling into the Patapsco River below.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Six construction workers who had been repairing a pothole on the bridge died in the collapse and the death toll would probably have been a lot higher had quick-acting police not stopped traffic about to reach the bridge. They did not have time to get the construction crew off the bridge.
The bridge opened to traffic in 1977, when ships visiting the Baltimore port were significantly smaller.
Amid the investigation into the Dali incident, Grace Ocean Private Ltd, the ship’s owner, and Synergy Marine Group, its manager, agreed to pay over $100m in cleanup costs.
Homendy said that she had been “sounding the alarm” on the need for collapse risk assessment since the Baltimore collapse.
“We need action,” she said. “Public safety depends on it.”
The NTSB said it planned to release more information on the bridge collapse in the coming weeks and months.
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