PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Most likely culprit is poor maintenance and lack of training for the crew, which is very much a common thing these days.
It won't be that long.
The port of Baltimore is way too important to both the state of Maryland and the US as a whole. Basically the instant that the S&R operation is over the investigators will pull the VDR log and start clearing.
The shipping channels will be cleared on what is essentially a crash priority basis with crews working 24/7 and zero fucks given about permits, environmental studies, etc. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see the military get involved in a fairly big way.
Anyways the one channel I watch on rare occassion for commercial shipping news in the YouTube channel 'Whats Going On With Shipping' by Sal Mercogliano.
He did a time lapse of the collision and offered his commentary on it.
Recently he did a livestream with another Commercial Ship Captain and Maritime Journalist named John Konrad.
There they discuss things and answer questions like why weren't tugboats there, how come the ship didn't sound its horn, and discussed things like the potential of cyberwarfare being involved etc as well as how vulnerable bridges actually are to ship impacts and the lack of capability of domestic naval salvage.
There they discuss things and answer questions like why weren't tugboats there, how come the ship didn't sound its horn, and discussed things like the potential of cyberwarfare being involved etc as well as how vulnerable bridges actually are to ship impacts and the lack of capability of domestic naval salvage.
That's a lot of reasons for why the scorpion shouldn't kill the frog as they are both crossing the river. But that's how the story goes.The issue with that Q&A is that the people talking are industry experts who have internalized the standard/normal processes for doing things.
Business as usual? You are looking at months to years to get things back up and running.
But then you have the actual realities. This is a Presidential election year, Maryland is a Democrat heavy state whose residents make up a lot of the rank and file of the upper-middle level of the federal government and is where a lot of relatively quiet and unofficial influence lives.
This incident is also cutting off US Navy facilities which is all the justification that the DoD needs to intervene and Biden already has the statutory authority to waive essentially every bit of red tape on national security grounds.
Those factors mean that the budget to get the problem resolved is basically unlimited. Bluntly, it doesn't matter what the normal scheduling issues are for any given resource or salvage operation. The US government will just throw money and influence at whomever they have to to get jumped to the very front of the line.
This is an incident that will have a noticeable impact on headline US GDP in an election year. It is an incident that is going to threaten the livelihoods of a hundred thousand plus blue collar workers less than an hour from the White House.
Biden and the Democrats are desperate for a win, to be seen to do something effective and news worthy and that distracts the populace from their myriad failures. Butt Boy also has hopes for a long term political career and this is his opportunity to get national prominence and position himself with success - or to crash and burn hard. The Republicans also aren't going to oppose funding for this or waiving all the normal processes because doing so is political suicide in an election year if nothing else.
Seems that there's a deluge of copy-paste and AI generated tweets pushing the conspiracy theory that the ship took an intentional turn toward the bridge. Which is obviously BS to anyone that knows anything about ships: if a ship doesn't have power for their lights, they definitely don't have any for propulsion and deliberate maneuvering, and the ship lost power well before the supposed "turn" happened.
Good catch.Lights aren't power.
So I've seen some break down of this; the nearly the entire port of Baltimore is now out of commission, including Naval Station Savannah, for weeks at least.
New bridge is like 10 years out, at best.
Whomever was responsible for the ship and it's condition just fucked that area for decades, and is going to cost billions, maybe trillions, of dollars in damage.
So what I'm picking up here is that the cargo ship that rammed itself into a bridge was malfunctioning? Not just an "idiot at the wheel who wasn't paying attention" scenario?
Yup. It lost power at exactly the wrong time and in exactly the wrong place. It theoretically could have been deliberate but almost certainly wasn't.
The most likely explanation is that the fuel was bad as that has been a known problem in shipping for a while as the switch to low sulfur fuels prevented the chemical breakdowns of the waste plastics that (relatively) often end up tossed into the bunker fuel for disposal by the refiners.
Other likely causes are a lack of maintenance causing the conditions of a failure and it eventually occurring. Or what is essentially a freak mechanical failure that was basically unforeseeable and not reasonably preventable.
If this had happened ten minutes sooner the tugs would have gotten to the vessel in time (they responded immediately after the mayday) and been able to prevent the accident. If it had happened ten minutes later then the ship would have been passed the bridge and the worst case would be the ship grounded when it drifted out of the shipping channel.
The issue with that Q&A is that the people talking are industry experts who have internalized the standard/normal processes for doing things.
Business as usual? You are looking at months to years to get things back up and running.
But then you have the actual realities.
You're underestimating the importance of that bridge. It wasn't just a commuter bridge, but rather it was on of the main bridges for heavy road freight along the I95 corridor*. For those unaware of the US Highway system, I95 is the primary interstate highway that runs north-south along the East Coast and connects most of the major cities from Maine to Florida. Further, it can be considered one of the main arteries for what's called the "Northeast Megalopolis" that is the region of fairly ubiquitous urban and suburban development that stretches from Richmond Virginia up to Boston MA.I expect every effort will be made to quickly clear the passage and reopen the port/naval base. After that will be when the whole thing slows down and the pure graft starts setting in as the MD Dems start filling pockets, boots, hats and anything else they can from the state and federal coffers. A couple years before there is a new bridge minimum, likely longer, but I don't think that there will not be a new bridge. They also will not name it after Francis Scott Key but instead you can expect a minority that is not the likes of Dr. King. Sucks for people who lived/worked on opposite sides of that bridge.