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Dive brief:
- Baltimore’s key bridge had protections in place, but not enough to stop one frontal collision of a cargo ship like the one that occurred on Tuesday, according to civil engineering experts.
- The bridge, that collapsed in the Patapsco River on Tuesday after one of its loading docks was hit by the container ship Dali, concrete dolphins, also known as pilings or bollards, appeared to be in place to protect it, according to experts who examined photos of the site.
- “So the protections are that you have these bollards strategically placed around the pier so you don’t have a direct impact,” KN Gunalan, senior vice president at AECOM and past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, told Construction Dive . “[The Key Bridge] it had some protections but not to withstand an impact of this size.”
Diving knowledge:
Protecting a bridge against a major collision with a container ship is not “economically feasible,” Ben Schafer, a professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said on a call Wednesday with reporters. Schafer called the key bridge protections “modest,” saying that “something like a small fishing boat or a pleasure cruiser wouldn’t be able to hit the docks directly.” The Dalí is 984 feet long.
When the Key Bridge was built in 1977, the bridge’s designers would not have anticipated an attack from a ship the size of the Dali, Gunalan said, because they would not have expected a collision of this magnitude.
Rachel Sangree, an associate professor in Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins’ department of civil and systems engineering, agreed with Schafer about the feasibility of safeguards against a ship like the Dali.
“I’m not sure anything could have been practically built to withstand this direct hit,” Sangree said on Wednesday’s press call.
Action Plan
wednesday morning divers recovered two bodies of a red pickup truck in less than 25 feet of water, the Washington Post reported.
Efforts by first responders to find four remaining construction workers missing since the collapse have been ongoing a rescue to a recovery mission. U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said “we don’t think we’re going to find any of these individuals still alive,” because of the water temperature and the amount of time that has passed, Axios reported.
On Tuesday, the ASCE announced that it is developing a action plan to better protect people in the event of a similar collision, although he did not release any details of the plan.
Gunalan said the collision will change the way U.S. bridges are designed, built and protected, as standards are regularly reviewed and receive updates.
“It will definitely be a lesson learned,” Gunalan said, saying the designs will “definitely be more robust.”
