A continuous steel truss, three spans of it, carried four lanes of Interstate 695 across the mouth of the Patapsco River at a height that let anything afloat pass beneath it. It opened in 1977. It was one of the longest bridges of its type anywhere, and for forty seven years it was the thing you drove over to get around Baltimore without going through it.
At about half past one on Tuesday morning a container ship leaving the Port of Baltimore lost power and struck one of its supporting piers. The center spans went into the river within seconds.
What the minute before consisted of
The ship issued a mayday. That call is the reason this piece is about six people rather than about a number that does not bear thinking about.
The Maryland Transportation Authority received the warning and closed the bridge to traffic. On a road carrying what this one carried, at any hour, the difference between a closure and no closure is measured in vehicles, and at half past one on a Tuesday the road was as empty as it ever gets.
What the closure could not reach was the crew working on the deck. A contractor’s team was out there filling potholes, which is night work because it has to be, and they were not vehicles arriving at a ramp. They were already on the bridge. Six are missing and presumed dead. Two were pulled from the water.
So the warning worked exactly as designed and saved an unknown number of drivers, and the people it did not reach were the people whose job was to be there.
Widening out: what a port closure is
The wreckage is in the shipping channel, and the channel is the port.
Baltimore is not a port that happens to have a bridge over it. It is a deep water terminal a long way inland, reached through one dredged channel, and that channel now has several thousand tons of bridge lying in it. Until it is cleared, nothing goes in or out by sea.
What moves through there is specific rather than generic. Baltimore handled 847,158 cars and light trucks in 2023, the thirteenth consecutive year it led every other American port in that category, along with heavy agricultural and construction equipment. That is cargo which rolls on and rolls off rather than riding in boxes. That traffic does not simply divert. Other ports have their own berths, their own labor and their own schedules, and roll-on capacity is not interchangeable.
Vessels already inside the port are inside it until the channel opens.
Widening out further: the road
The bridge carried a route that exists partly because of what is not allowed in the tunnels.
The two tunnels under the harbor are the alternative crossings, and the authority’s own rules bar bulk gasoline, flammable liquids, explosives and other hazardous loads from both of them. Traffic carrying those things used the bridge. Its diversion is not to a tunnel at all; the designated route is the western side of the beltway, around the city.
That is a daily cost, paid in fuel and hours by carriers, and it will be paid every day for as long as it takes, which for a bridge of this size is measured in years rather than months.
What clearing it involves
The order of operations here is unforgiving and it is worth setting out, because public impatience with the timeline will begin well before the work does.
Nothing about reopening the channel can start until the recovery of the missing is complete, and that recovery is happening in cold water, in a current, among submerged structural steel, by divers who cannot see. It is among the most dangerous work in the salvage trade.
After that comes the wreckage itself. Several thousand tons of truss have to be cut apart underwater and lifted out, in pieces small enough for the cranes that exist, and a section of it is lying across the bow of a ship that is still there and still loaded. The vessel cannot move until the steel on it is removed, and the steel cannot be removed until the recovery is finished.
Only then does anybody survey the channel bottom to establish that what remains is safe to pass over. The bridge is a separate project from the channel and a far longer one.
What is known about why
The ship lost power. That is as far as the public record goes on Tuesday, and it is worth being disciplined about the gap between that sentence and an explanation.
Losing power on a vessel of this size means losing propulsion and losing the pumps that drive the steering, and losing both at a particular point in a turn leaves a hull of that mass continuing in the direction it was already going. The pilot had the rudder over. Whether anything else was available to him in the time he had is exactly the sort of question an investigation exists to answer.
The National Transportation Safety Board has the investigation. Its preliminary findings will take weeks and its final report will take considerably longer, and anybody offering a cause this week is offering a guess with a confident delivery.
One further thing is known and is worth holding separately from the cause, because it will bear on everything that follows. The vessel had a pilot aboard. Ships of this size do not leave this port under their own navigation; a local pilot boards and takes the conn precisely because the channel is narrow and the margins are small. Whatever happened, it happened with the person who knows that water best standing on the bridge.
The question underneath it
There is a design question that will outlast the investigation and it should be stated now rather than after somebody else raises it.
The bridge was designed in the early 1970s. The ships using this channel then were a fraction of the size of the one that hit it. Pier protection on bridges of that era was specified against the vessels of that era, and the vessels have grown by an order of magnitude while the piers have stood still.
That is not a Baltimore problem. It is a property of every major bridge over a working shipping channel in the country, all of which were designed against a fleet that no longer exists.
What is not resolved
Six families are waiting on a recovery operation in cold water, in a channel full of structural steel, which is dangerous work that cannot be rushed and cannot be indefinitely continued.
Beyond that, nothing about the sequence is established, nothing about the cost is known, and no timetable exists for either the channel or the crossing. A bridge stood for forty seven years. At half past one on a Tuesday morning it was carrying four lanes and a pothole crew, and the warning that emptied it of traffic reached everyone except the people who were working on it.
