Sadly, this is for real. It’s not made up with AI or anything. It’s just as bad as it looks.
At 1:28 AM Eastern Daylight Time, a 1000-foot container freighter ran into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing a huge section of I-695 to collapse into the river.
I’m guessing deaths are most likely in the two digits. At rush hour, however, the toll might have been in the four digits.
— Kyle Daly (@kyledalyfagan) March 26, 2024
Baltimore is about the 8th biggest port in the U.S. I’d imagine the port is now blocked off, but the Key Bridge is so long (8000′) there might be a way around. The Port of Baltimore specialties include importing cars and exporting coal.
There was a similar disaster in St. Petersburg, FL in 1980 when a freighter hit the Sunshine truss bridge during a sudden intense squall that made the ship’s radar useless. 35 motorists were killed when 1200 feet of roadway fell into the water.
In the live cam footage, a couple of minutes or so before the ship hit the pillar, all its lights went off. After about a minute some emergency lights came back on, suggesting some sort of malfunction that perhaps disabled steering. A huge puff of black smoke can be seen, perhaps due to the pilot trying to reverse power. Or maybe an explosion.
Personally, I would at this point avoid jumping to conclusions about how this must be an example of whatever is your favorite complaint, such as the Crisis of Competence or DEI or Crumbling Infrastructure or whatever you learned about the Port of Baltimore from watching the second season of The Wire.
I also wouldn’t immediately rule out a 9-11–style hijacked kamikaze mission. If the harbor pilot were on the radio to the harbor master, we could know quickly whether that happened or not.
A remote control bomb might conceivably be timed so perfectly that it leads to the ship hitting the bridge’s tower squarely two or three minutes later, but that sounds implausible to me that it could be calculated so precisely. Bu, what do I know? If it was terrorism, I’d expect a Mohammed Atta–type at the wheel guiding the Dali all the way home. (It’s by no means impossible that hijackers could survive the impact, just as the crew on the freighter in Florida in 1980 survived.)
Or it could be pilot suicide, like in a few airline crashes in this century.
So, I’d imagine the most likely cause is some catastrophic accidental failure on the ship leading it to drift into the tower.
Yep... set & drift analysis suggests loss of main steerage and power while making 13 knots in a crosswind.
— Ethical Skeptic ☀ (@EthicalSkeptic) March 26, 2024
Not an act of terror or drunk helmsman.
Back to bed... everyone stand down. pic.twitter.com/MBY5Hl5a5h
But I would check for terrorism too.
