How Did A Ship Destroy Baltimore's Key Bridge?

At around 1:27 a.m. on March 26, 2024, the Singapore-flagged container

ship

Darley collided with the Key Bridge carrying Route 695 across 2 and 1/2 km of the Patapsco River. in Baltimore, Maryland, the impact caused a chain. reaction that led to the total collapse of the

bridge

in seconds, so what happened? How could a

ship

so easily collapse a

bridge

that had remained in place for almost 50 years during the afternoon of March 25, 2024? The container ship Dary was next to the source of her in the south. At the end of the September Marine Terminal, which is a huge facility in Baltimore capable of housing some of the largest ships in the world, the Darly, for example, is around 300M long and has a gross tonnage of just under 100,000 tons, by late afternoon she completed final departure checks and was ready to get underway for her next voyage to Columbo Sri Lanka.

It was a beautiful afternoon with light winds from east to north and minimal tide or flow as low tide approached shortly after midnight, now March 26th. She tied two tugboats, one forward and one behind her, and with their help physically reached Puerto from her birth. Once she was open about a ship's width from the key, she advanced her engines to get some water flowing over the rudder and prepare for the turn to port into the main channel as speed increased to three or four. knots or so, the two tugs stayed alongside her on the port side and simply ran with her as she completed her turn at 110, the turn was completed and she just entered the Main Channel, at which point the tugs stopped to let her could continue to gain speed.

When working with tugboats, you need to make sure you keep the speed low because tugboats are at great risk of capsizing if you go too fast. Check out my video on tugboats if you want to know a little more about that anyway, with the tugboat stopped, continue following the channel outwards lining up for the main span under the Key Bridge, which is the only place big enough for this type of massive tugboats. The boats to fit under continued to increase speed until reaching around 8.7 knots in one 26 just before the bridge, but then something went wrong and it began to turn to starboard just at the same point where the Curtis Bay Channel joins to the Main Channel, but why were there some interactive ones? effects perhaps, for example, if your starboard bow is no longer subject to the pressure of a bank, it could cause a turn to starboard if that happened, although the ship's bridge is full of professionals who are more than capable of correcting it with some engine and rudder movements.

So was there something else stopping them? If, for example, the ship suffered some kind of power outage at that point, it would be expected to deflect under the effects of the interaction exactly in the position where the channel's underwater profile changes, as in another channel. joins from the side in any direction regardless of the reason for abandoning the channel, at this time the crew knew that there was a serious problem, the tugboats that had been removed from the previous maneuver came to life and began to return towards the Dary at full speed. but unfortunately it was too late, now she was so close to the bridge and with so much momentum that there was nothing anyone could do.

At 129 local time, on March 26 she collided with the South Tower, which simply stood no chance against over 100,000 tons of ships and cargo traveling at 7 and a half knots. The collapse of the South Tower caused sections on both sides of the river to collapse, which in turn caused other sections to collapse as the Chain Reaction progressed. The bridge 15 minutes later, at 1:43, the first tug arrived on the scene, but by then the damage had been done. From that moment on, the priority was search and recovery. Now clearly, I'll post this video a few hours after the event so we don't.

We still don't know how the story will end, we also don't have all the facts yet, so everything I've gone through is just my interpretation of what I've seen based on the information that has been made public about the cause of the twist. to starboard is unknown, but interaction effects could be the reason behind this if there was no way for the crew to counteract them. A blackout could be a reason why the crew could not count down to the shift and would explain why the tugs responded before the ship hit the bridge, which could also explain the plume of black smoke that can be seen in the ship's reports. news and the lack of exhaust smoke coming from the ship at the time of impact, as I say, although at this point we simply don't know.

I encourage you all to keep an eye out for the official report when it arrives so that we can all learn from what happened and try to prevent the same thing from happening again in the future.