Impressive

 

A day and a half after the Baltimore bridge disaster, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (pictured) gave a press conference at the White House describing the accident in detail, the immediate and long-term effects on Baltimore’s busy port and its employees and area residents, on America’s imports and exports, and on plans for reopening the shipping channel and rebuilding the Interstate bridge. It was an impressive display of how much Buttigieg had learned in a day and a half.

He described the 990-foot-long container ship, the Dali, and noted that it was fully loaded with nearly 4,700 containers giving the ship a weight of more than 100,000 tons—a floating mass heavier than the largest aircraft carriers. With the aid of a video that showed the ship approaching the bridge at night, Buttigieg pointed out that the ship’s lights had gone out, briefly came back on, then gone out again, indicating a main power failure followed by the emergency generator kicking in than another failure. Without power, the ship couldn’t be steered and crashed into a critical support pier at about 9 mph causing the steel structure to collapse. 

The wreckage blocked the port’s navigable channel, and Buttigieg explained that 8,000+ jobs will be affected directly and thousands more indirectly until the port is reopened. He said that $100 million of cargo goes through Baltimore’s port every day. Unless other East Coast ports can handle some of the trade, the supply chains of bulk cargo, cars and farm machinery, and other manufactured and agricultural goods will be disrupted nationwide. Congestion on area roads will increase because of the loss of a major commuter route.

After serious supply disruptions during the pandemic, the recent Jobs and Infrastructure Act created a new freight office in the Transportation Department to coordinate the movement of goods. Buttigieg explained that ocean shipping isn’t centrally controlled like air traffic, so “having these tools allows us to create coordination that just didn’t exist before.”

Buttigieg said that the bridge was built in the 1970s and the Dali is “orders of magnitude bigger than cargo ships in service at the time [typically four times heavier].” He confirmed that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will conduct an independent investigation, and if they “determine anything that should be considered in the regulation, inspection, design, or funding of bridges in the future, we will be ready to apply those findings.”

Meanwhile, Buttigieg said, the federal government was already working with city, county, and state officials, Maryland congresspersons, and the Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers to quickly open the port, remove bridge wreckage, and remove the ship whose bow was pinned to the shallow riverbed by the weight of a bridge section that fell on it. 

Buttigieg confirmed that to expedite recovery, President Biden said that the federal government will pay for the project, including the cost of replacing the bridge. Buttigieg also said “rebuilding will not be quick or easy or cheap, but we will get it done.” Asked by a reporter if he would “go after the shipping company,” the Secretary said, “Any private party that is found responsible and liable will be held accountable.”

Meanwhile, government agencies were wasting no time. The day after the press conference, the largest floating crane on the East Coast arrived from New York soon followed by others. The next day, ironworkers began cutting the bridge wreckage into manageable pieces while divers took sonar scans of the underwater debris in the channel. 

Secretary Buttigieg glanced at his notes once or twice, but mostly spoke eloquently while looking at his audience. His was an impressive example of how to inform the public during an emergency. Good job.