Debate emerges over whether modern protections could have saved Baltimore bridge

By BEN FINLEY (Related Press)

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 have been protected by a fendering system of concrete and different supplies that was put in to soak up such strikes. And it’s now prompting the query: Might 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, stated 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 triggered its collapse.

El-Tawil stated a fendering system might have softened the 985-foot-long ship’s blow. Pilings anchored to the river backside, referred to 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 could appear to be a really massive pressure,” El-Tawil stated of the huge cargo ship. “However I feel you may design round it, both by a protecting system or by designing the bridge itself to have huge towers.”

Such protections have grow to be a focus within the wake of the tragedy, which claimed the lives of six building staff. Specialists say the 47-year-old Key Bridge didn’t seem to have the protections which are widespread 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 may have been saved.

“There’s numerous debate going down among the many engineering group about whether or not any of these options may have had any function in a scenario like this,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated Wednesday at a White Home briefing.

“It’s tough to overstate the affect of this collision we’re speaking about,” Buttigieg stated. “It’s not simply as massive as a constructing, it’s actually as massive as a block — 100,000 tons all going into this pier all of sudden.”

Buttigieg didn’t straight 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 defend 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 have been a lot smaller in dimension. In recent times, vessels have grown to hold extra containers to avoid wasting on delivery 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 achieve New York Metropolis-area ports.

The Skyway Bridge catastrophe in Tampa prompted a paradigm shift in design within the early Nineteen Eighties, stated Mark Luther, a College of South Florida oceanography professor and director of the USF Middle for Maritime and Port Research.

The brand new Skyway Bridge was constructed with rock islands round its primary helps and enormous cylindrical piers on both facet of these islands to make it “very tough for a vessel to strike any a part of the bridge and knock it down,” Luther stated.

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

Roberto Leon, a Virginia Tech engineering professor, stated the expertise exists to guard a bridge in opposition to a collision with an enormous cargo ship just like the Dali.

However he cautioned that governments will at all times be weighing the prices and the dangers. And the protections put in place don’t at all times match as much as the scale of the catastrophe, even when the Key bridge was retrofitted with trendy security measures.

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

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