Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse

Several hospitals were quickly built in Wuhan and there was a 24 hr live TV feed from one construction site. I visited Wuhan last Autumn but had no time to go see one of them.

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My guess for reconstructing Baltimore Bridge is about 6 months, if original pilings are used.

 

Tunnels are a pain in the a** to construct if the goo under riverbed is very deep. Apparently much more trouble than through 'really good' rocks.

We do not often think about good consequences after glaciations, but this may be one.

 

We never use original anything in the US, because that would cut into the corporate builder's profits and the whole system is rigged to serve those needs at the expense of everyone/everything else.

 

It is the thing that still uses the twitter.com URL.

The same thing that x.com gets redirected to.

 

I'm informed that the skipper did get the emergency generator lighted off and got the port hook down - something I missed earlier - so they were trying to 'do the things.'

After they finish recovery efforts for the 6 victims the NTSB gets to take over and do the paper.
The Biden administration says that the feds will pick up the tab for fixing the bridge - not an unexpected thing since the port IS fairly important for getting stuff and things in and out of the right coast.
It also helps that the governor wears the right color tie and makes the right (in this case, NOT right) kind of speeches.
Thing number 'next' will be to pull out the cork and get port traffic moving again.

The boat in question is something like an Indian owned rent-a-hull with a Singaporese flag, working for Maersk?
Fun times in court trying to get insurance and lawyer bucks for this, eh?

I've been under Baltimore's usta-bridge twice on a grey hull but it was an MSC ship, and I was inside and under the water line so I do not recall if there were tugs in attendance.
I KNOW there would have been one for a black hulled USN boat!

 

Pretty sure the tunnels in that area used little to no drilling. They didn't tunnel under, but build sections of tunnel with sealed off ends. Those are floated out into the water way, submerged into place, connected to the other sections, and then the seals removed between them. They dig a trench in the goo for it, and then back fill it after.

Baltimore Harbor Tunnel - Bridges and Tunnels

 

A city as corrupt and impoverished as Baltimore is doomed when it comes to replacing this bridge, especially with a Tunnel when we're talking about a water crossing that only serves 30K per day....

But if you want to be amazed at large scale tunnel building underwater without much drilling, this project is astonishing:

 

In my career I did some bunker fuel R&D, not the most glamorous job in the Lab.
Fuel quality had to be excellent for ship sales, because power failure is totally unacceptable. Almost like jet fuel. Bunker fuel is complex chemistry though, can be tricky. I am guessing they do not fuel up in USA but not sure.

Of course, today we have strict new regulations requiring low sulfur fuel or scrubbers. I have not heard the fuel type, but I did hear they are checking fuel quality, which is always the first thing to check. It might not be surprising if the new sulfur regulations indirectly lead to more power failures due to more complexity.

There is also some thought that the recent years warmer global temps are due to removing ship SOx. It was really quite a lot of SOx going up those stacks in the ocean vessels. I think it was usually they switched to low sulfur diesel fuel near ports, so that should be clean fuel, I would assume.

Our daughter lives near there, but we rarely if ever needed to use that I695 bridge.

 

Biden says he took the rail over that bridge. Oh wait there is no rail. Kinda sad
.

 

^ There was a time when that would have been a meme instead of a recap of a daily presser......

The line forms on me for finding new and entertaining ways to bag on the Clipper City, but I will not elaborate as I am not forced to live there and I've only worked there very briefly once, more than 30 years ago when it only 'sucked' to be there.
Many of the 30k-per-day transits on that bridge were probably containerized cargo trucks, so the bridge WILL be replaced very quickly, probably with a federal 'no-bid' and lavishly expensive contract with steep 'on-time' bonuses. There will be enough money sloshing around in the bucket for all of the crooks to drink their fill while the kids in our media are dealing with chronic TDS.
As a bonus, some of the long term supply-chain issues and costs associated with the Red Sea shipping crisis will be explainable (and thus obfuscatable) by the reduced throughput capacity of our nation's 11th largest sea port.

The Dali is a diesel-electric hull and so I'm thinking that she absolutely DID load (bio?) fuel before singling up lines in the port of Baltimore.
Fuel is heavy stuff.
They don't haul it around on 10,000 mile sea voyages for ballasting.
OK...Well.....sometimes they do...but this time they were fairly well ballasted with Conex Boxes.
ALSO.....
She was bound for the Port of Colombo, according to our dazzlingly dull-witted media.
That's about a 27 day at-sea voyage with a 15kt speed of advance and this is if they split the ditch @ Suez.
Opinions vary wildly about that, but I'm thinking that they "might" have had different routing instructions from the home office.
There is a possibility that the NYT's estimate of 27 days used a higher SOA and that they got their estimate considering the longer route around Africa. I don't know MV Bali's most efficient sailing speed, but 20kts is not unreasonable, given her published top speed - so somebody at the NYT might have actually ASKED the right questions from the right people and simply not mentioned the expanded routing for obvious political reasons.
HOWEVER (comma!!!!!) I fully admit that I might be guessing wrong about using fuel as ballasting weight given how many boxes were stacked on her deck. That's a LOT of topside weight even if the boxes are empty - and they might not get paid to haul empty containers.

EITHER way they would have required more bunkerage than they had aboard when they tied up in Baltimore, so it is very likely that they had US fuel aboard when they lost propulsion.

I DID read where Dali has only ONE screw.
This is not uncommon for container ships, but this DOES somewhat limit their maneuvering ability - and IMHO this should have necessitated the mandated use of tugs in constrained waters with substandard bridges 1970's era bridges.
THAT is on the Port Authority.

YMMV

 

Probably would have been a good reason not to do it on a ship until you get into open water.

This is going to be a 10-billion+ USD event.
If I'm the current administration the very FIRST thing I would do is force all bridges susceptible to ship collisions be brought up to the new standards following the Sunshine Skyway incident and examine their tug requirements for large vessels.
They will be able to put the Pachyderms in a tough spot and probably get a grunch of unrelated spending attached to some 20,000 page bill that would take as long to read and understand as it will to rebuild the Key bridge!!
Nothing gets Donkeys more excited than making more federal rules and more promises to spend other people's money on shovel-ready infrastructure (except actually taking the money to do it!!) and the Pubs are going to be hard pressed defending the fact that horribly run port authorities have not brought their facilities up to code in over 40 years.

Dali is a neo-Panamax ship rated for roughly 10,000 TEU - or Twenty-foot (container) Equivalent Units.
This puts her somewhere between the Post Panamax and the VLCS flavors.
That means that they make ships in sizes BIGGER than that!

 

Baltimore has an honored spot at the Federal Feeding Trough

"Last week, Congress voted on a $1.2 trillion spending bill that was more than 1,000 pages long, filled with over 1,400 earmarks, was released at 2:32am on Thursday, and passed by Friday night.

Some of the most egregious earmarks – which your tax dollars are being recklessly spent towards – included were:

• $1M granted to SAGE, an elderly LGBTQ+ advocacy group in New York for "cultural competency" training for medical staff
• $2M to the University of Maine for the construction of a kelp and shellfish nursery
• $388K to Columbia University in New York, a private university with a $13.6 billion endowment
• $1.5M to Game On New York to expand the gaming industry
• $1.7M for wind energy workforce education and training in New York
• $250K for the Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education Archives in West Virginia
• $1.5M for economic and business development training for lobstering in Maine
• $249K for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
• $85K to a public school district in Connecticut to increase school attendance
• $1.1M for a food incubator project in Delaware
• $1M to Martha’s Vineyard Hospital
• $500K to the San Diego Zoo for a student biodiversity corps program
• These are only 12 of the over 1,400 wasteful earmarks included in this week’s spending bill."

U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time (usdebtclock.org)

 

^^^not to mention Maryland stole the new FBI HQ from Virginia. All the studies and FBI wanted to go to my town basically, Somehow Maryland inserted a political operative in the GAO who had sole decision authority. Workers got screwed either way moving from DC, either Virginia residents were screwed or Marylanders. Take your pick.


"Diesel" for the Dali does not tell me much. Another name for Bunker Fuel (heavy residua) is Marine Diesel, sounds better right? But I would expect light (regular) diesel burned in port, but no clue actually. To my knowledge we do not make much marine diesel in USA, but I guess shipping ports must sell some amount made somewhere.

 

Feeding at a trough, good topic. I know he picked on Baltimore to pick on someone. Surprised at the legs it has.
One bullet point, college research and other depts get all kinds of grants and also can have billions in endowments.

 

Mental aerobics I gotta do.

 

I give even the current administration credit for being smart enough NOT to do that, at least not without modifying them with 'dolphins' to prevent another ship-on-bridge incident.
No.
Not the marine mammals...

BTW....
Some of the crazier people in our media slagged the fact that we ruled out a terror attack while the waves were still rippling around the harbour.
Long before 9/11 happened there have been - um - measures put in place to PREVENT such things because if this can happen accidently......a bunch of times......just think about what you can do with something that weighs 2000-4000 times as much as a 757 with a full bag of gas!
Or an Ultra Large Crude Carrier....
AFTER ALL......howareya gonna stop it? (**)
So....yes.
They 'ticked that box' and part of the investigation will entail verifying that this was just incompetence instead of malice.
We had 'measures' in place to prevent 9/11 too.....before 9/11.
(**) That's been addressed too....maybe even sufficiently.

Me neither.
She has a diesel-electric plant but that's the plant and not the fuel.
I've always thought that diesels can burn almost anything you can fit through the injectors.
When I left the sneaker Navy and started wearing combat boots I learned that our green and tan trucks could burn many flavors of diesel fuel, petrol, or avgas, or any combination thereof.
I do not pretend to know that Dali's crew puts in her fuel bunkers - but I WOULD BET that we will be finding out!!!!
It is possible that Dali's bunkerage allows for a round trip, but those ships burn 50,000 gallons ++ per day, and math is still math and so my finely honed Spidey senses are tingling at me that they probably topped off before singling up the lines and taking off the brow.
EVEN in Baltimore, and YES....if I represented Dali's owner/operators I would immediately start looking at bad fuel as the problem and pointing out the Port of Baltimore and their ignoble reputation as a root cause.
I would also fully expect that lawyers that represent the victims will point out the fact that the Dali already had one bridge silhouette painted on their superstructure and they ran with an insufficiently trained, paid, and motivated crew who were probably cited by the USCG in their inglorious past for multiple violations.

It's going to be a nasty fight, with billions at stake!

Aerobics are good for ya!

No state is without sin here but it surely does not hurt to have a governor with outsized political ambitions and 'just happens' to be in the right (in this case, NOT right) political party.