Could the Key Bridge have been saved? Experts debate what’s needed to prevent tragedy

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When a 900-foot container ship struck the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 2007, the span stood agency and nobody died, both on the ship or the freeway above.

The bridge’s helps had been protected by a fendering system of concrete and different supplies that was put in to soak up such strikes. And it is now prompting the query: May such a system — or others prefer it — have saved Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge?

Some consultants are saying sure.

Sherif El-Tawil, a College of Michigan engineering professor, mentioned there are a number of security measures that “would have made an enormous distinction” had they been in place Tuesday morning when a cargo ship plowed into the bridge and precipitated its collapse.

El-Tawil mentioned a fendering system could have softened the 985-foot-long ship’s blow. Pilings anchored to the river backside, often known as dolphins, are one other measure that might have helped to deflect the container ship Dali. And yet one more potential safety would have been islands of rocks or concrete across the bridge’s helps.

“It might appear to be a really giant drive,” El-Tawil mentioned of the huge cargo ship. “However I feel you’ll be able to design round it, both via a protecting system or by designing the bridge itself to have huge towers.”

Such protections have turn into a focus within the wake of the tragedy, which claimed the lives of six development employees. Specialists say the 47-year-old Key Bridge didn’t seem to have the protections which can be frequent amongst newer spans.

The incident is elevating questions on how a lot cash American taxpayers are keen to spend to guard in opposition to these uncommon however lethal catastrophes. And never everybody agrees the Key Bridge might have been saved.

“There’s quite a lot of debate happening among the many engineering neighborhood about whether or not any of these options might have had any function in a scenario like this,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg mentioned Wednesday at a White Home briefing.

“It is troublesome to overstate the affect of this collision we’re speaking about,” Buttigieg mentioned. “It is not simply as huge as a constructing, it is actually as huge as a block —- 100,000 tons all going into this pier all of sudden.”

Buttigieg didn’t instantly reply a query about whether or not steps must be taken to guard the nation’s bridges. However the secretary famous that many bridges have been designed to raised shield in opposition to collisions since a freighter struck Florida’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge in 1980, killing 35 individuals.

Baltimore’s Key Bridge opened three years earlier than that catastrophe in 1977, a time when cargo ships had been a lot smaller in dimension. Lately, vessels have grown to hold extra containers to save lots of on transport prices. Ports in Georgia and South Carolina have dredged deeper channels to accommodate them, whereas a part of a bridge was elevated to permit larger ships to succeed in New York Metropolis-area ports.

The Skyway Bridge catastrophe in Tampa by which 35 individuals died prompted a paradigm shift in design within the early Eighties, mentioned Mark Luther, a College of South Florida oceanography professor and director of the USF Heart for Maritime and Port Research.

The brand new Skyway Bridge was constructed with rock islands round its fundamental helps and huge cylindrical piers on both aspect of these islands to make it “very troublesome for a vessel to strike any a part of the bridge and knock it down,” Luther mentioned.

“To return and retrofit a bridge just like the Key Bridge with these options could be extraordinarily costly,” Luther mentioned. “And to my data no one’s achieved it. (They’ve) simply needed to settle for what threat there may be with the development that was state-of-the artwork within the ’70s.”

Roberto Leon, a Virginia Tech engineering professor, mentioned the know-how exists to guard a bridge in opposition to a collision with a large cargo ship just like the Dali.

However he cautioned that governments will all the time be weighing the prices and the dangers. And the protections put in place do not all the time match as much as the dimensions of the catastrophe, even when the Key bridge was retrofitted with fashionable security measures.

“This was an unlimited load,” he mentioned of the ship that struck the Key Bridge. “If the safety system had been designed for that load. I feel it will have protected the bridge. However an enormous query is: Would you design it for such an unlimited load? As a result of because the load will increase, it turns into rather more costly.”