April 4-10, 2024

It’s hard to turn away from the astonishing video of the mega-cargo ship “Dali” hitting a support pier of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore Harbor last week. The resulting destruction of the bridge is almost graceful as the span leaps up and then, in mere seconds, settles into the waters of the Patapsco River below, taking with it a crew of men repairing potholes in the middle of the night. The nighttime video is silent, making the scene even more surreal. A video game could not have designed a more fascinating image, especially without something blowing up!

The shock of the accident will reverberate for some time, but the “what ifs” started immediately. What if the support piers were armored? What if more tugboats were utilized in the harbor? What if more vehicles had been on the bridge? What if the bridge had been designed and built differently? What if this was a terrorist attack? That last one, sadly, speaks to what has become normalized in our society. Any kind of incident immediately conjures conspiracy theories. Let it go! Accidents happen, preventable perhaps, but the blame game almost becomes sport.

The loss of life is tragic. When you leave for work, you expect to come home safely, even in dangerous jobs. The video shows the repair crew vehicles on the span with their hazard lights on. They were following the normal road safety rules for their tasks, but never expected the bridge deck to disappear underneath them. As the search and recovery operation continues, safety must be paramount. There is an enormously dangerous task ahead to remove the ship and the bridge structure from the river, and those crews’ safety must be front and center. No more lives lost.

The Key Bridge accident recalled another, much smaller accident, but with many of the same attributes. In October of 1990, a dredge broke from its moorings in the middle of the night and hit a pier supporting the Oregon Inlet bridge on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound come together at the inlet, and dredges are used to keep the channel open for fishing and recreational boating. The accident destroyed a 370-foot long portion of Highway 12, effectively marooning all of Hatteras Island and its many small villages. When the high bridge deck dropped into the water, it also took out all the electrical and telephone lines sustaining the island. There is no video of the accident, but a popular souvenir T-shirt asked “Where were you when the ship hit the span?” No lives were lost, and North Carolina revved up its ferry system to get folks on and off the island, albeit in limited fashion. Hatteras Island took a huge economic hit when access to the island was lost, but the bridge was repaired in about six months, and the next summer beach season was not affected.

That’s not the case, of course, for Baltimore and the entire Eastern Seaboard that depends on the port and the interstate highway system. The loss of the bridge will be felt by residents and businesses for years but, in what I hope is true American fashion, people will come together, find workarounds to reestablish their daily commerce, and support both the clean-up and the rebuilding of the bridge, without rancor or polarization. Crisis can bring out the best, or the worst, in us. So far, it sounds like the former. Let’s keep it that way!