Francis Scott Key Bridge update

 

You should recall this case – in March 2024 a cargo ship lost power, drifted into the Francis Scott Key Bridge near Baltimore, totalling the bridge and killing six workers on the bridge. We’ve had bad luck with mid-Atlantic coast bridges – this May the tall ship Cuauhtémoc  drifted into the Brooklyn Bridge, fortunately with more damage to the ship than the bridge (a pity, she’s one of the prettiest afloat.)

The Key bridge ship isn’t as pretty – the Dali is a container ship and isn’t long on sex appeal. But there are a few updates on the crash:

The expected price tag to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge – which collapsed in March 2024, leaving six people dead – has more than doubled and is expected to be completed later than what authorities previously said, according to a release on Monday.

The updated cost estimate is now projected to be $4.3 billion to $5.2 billion, with an expected opening in late 2030 – a two-year delay from the earlier estimate, the Maryland Transportation Authority said.

“Preliminary cost and project time estimates were made less than two weeks after the initial crash and before any engineering or design studies were conducted,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement Monday.

“Since then, national economic conditions have deteriorated and material costs have increased. At the same time, elevated costs have resulted from federal design and resilience standards — not discretionary state choices,” he said. CNN

Anyone happen to remember who is paying for this? Yep, President Biden said we will. I can see why – suing the ship owners in India will take years, if not decades. But two years later and more than doubling in price…and you thought your grocery prices were going up.

In related news, the NTSB has completed their analysis of the accident. You are gonna love this…

The NTSB said Tuesday that a single loose wire on the 984-foot-long containership Dali caused an electrical blackout that led to the giant vessel veering and contacting the nearby Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which then collapsed, killing six highway workers.

One wire. Read on.

At Tuesday’s public meeting at NTSB headquarters, investigators said the loose wire in the ship’s electrical system caused a breaker to unexpectedly open — beginning a sequence of events that led to two vessel blackouts and a loss of both propulsion and steering near the 2.37-mile-long Key Bridge on March 26, 2024. Investigators found that wire-label banding prevented the wire from being fully inserted into a terminal block spring-clamp gate, causing an inadequate connection.  NTSB

Those wrapped wire labels are commonly called Brady labels, I believe – and just one of them applied too close to the end of the wire is gonna cost us over $5,000,000,000. Kudos to NTSB for tracking that one stinkin’ bad connection down at all out of the literally miles of wiring on the ship.

In the early morning of March 26, 2024, two power outages occurred three ships’ lengths from the bridge and were triggered by the tripping of two critical circuit breakers, which caused several pumps required for the ship’s single propeller and its single rudder to stop working, a preliminary report from the NTSB said.

The emergency generator was not configured to power the ship, the agency added.

The ship at the time of the failure was under the control of an apprentice pilot, who was accompanied by a senior pilot. When the pilots boarded, the captain reported the ship was in good working order, according to the report. NTSB investigators said the crewmembers tested negative for drugs and alcohol, and the fuel tested negative for contaminants three times.CNN

Kind of a perfect storm of failures. Well worth reading the NTSB report.

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work"