Repeating History
Baltimore's Key Bridge Catastrophe is eerily similar to one in Tampa Bay 44 years ago. Someone in Maryland should have paid attention to the NTSB report from that event. Porkfest coming?
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
That timeless quote is attributed to George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, in 1905.
For those not unfamiliar with bridge collapses caused by errant cargo ships and tankers in recent years, the Sunshine Parkway Bridge disaster on May 9, 1980, is worth revisiting. It seems states such as Maryland didn’t learn from that disaster nearly 44 years ago.
Unlike last week's Baltimore tragedy, it occurred at 7:30 a.m. during rush hour. Thirty-five people died. Six are believed to have died from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. Two deaths are confirmed, and four are missing. The Key Bridge collapse occurred at 1:30 a.m.
Tampa’s crash involved a mostly empty tanker: the Summit Venture, a Liberian-registered phosphate carrier speeding towards Tampa Bay. The highly experienced captain did his due diligence, including checking for other traffic and weather conditions. According to all reports, so did the captain of the Dali, the much larger, fully loaded cargo ship weighing 248 million pounds (9,500 metric tons), that was leaving Baltimore’s busy port and harbor.
A sudden, unpredictable storm emerged during the morning hours of May 9, 1980. The ship’s captain simultaneously lost radar, and the tanker slammed into a bridge pier. The rest is history. A state inquiry absolved him of responsibility, but not the National Transportation Safety Board. “The (NTSB) voted 3 to 2 that (Captain John) Lerro had been partly responsible but said that other factors, including the severe storm, had contributed to the accident,” reported Structure Magazine.
The 4.4-mile-long bridge opened in 1954, 26 years before the accident, and the 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge opened about three years before the Florida tragedy. Both bridges had a similar design: “Steel truss cantilever arch main spans, plate girder approach spans.” Whatever that means, I may be a former US Department of Transportation official, but I’m no engineer. However, the bridge piers appear especially important under this design.
The Sunshine Skyway Bridge now includes the name of 87-year-old Bob Graham, a former three-term US Senator (D-FL), Governor, and briefly presidential candidate before retiring from elective politics in early 2005. The new bridge was rebuilt in seven years and reopened in 1987 at a total cost of $277 million. The newly-designed bridge featured a new cable-stayed design that has won 18 awards.
Current estimates are that it will cost between $400-800 million to repair/replace the Francis Scott Key Bridge, depending on the design. And there is no shortage of federal laws, not to mention the people in charge of enforcing and interpreting them, that will determine how long this takes, including such dandies as the Foreign Dredge Act that prohibits any foreign-made dredges from operating in the US. Not even from Canada. Other laws involve procurement (“Buy American”) and environmental (National Environmental Policy Act) provisions.
Don’t forget Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s agenda to remove “racist” highways and implement all sorts of diversity and inclusion policies. After all, Maryland native Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics of our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, reportedly owned slaves. At least his Maryland plantation-owning family did.
Hopefully, the Administration, eager to help Maryland’s Democratic governor and legislature and their constituents, will be willing to waive many, if not most, requirements to get Baltimore's highly unionized 15,000-worker port, the nation’s 17th busiest and first for auto imports, back up and running sooner than later.
It will be a while. While logistics exporters scramble to find new homes for vessels and trucks to ship goods, the good news is that there are plenty of terrific ports along America’s east coast, from Georgia and North Carolina to New York. Meanwhile, the investigation into what went wrong - why did the ship’s engines fail, why didn’t backup generators work, and why weren’t the piers better sheltered from a collision - will tell us much.
However, as City Journal’s Sean Kennedy chronicled, Florida's bridge rebuild probably did not need to take seven years. Maryland officials could follow Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s (R-MN) example and the 2007 I-35W highway collapse.
In the middle of evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, the I-35W bridge collapsed over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thirteen people died, and 145 were injured. The city felt like it was cut in half. Faulty design and poor safety inspections were blamed for the tragedy.
Republican governor Tim Pawlenty and the state’s Democratic-led U.S. congressional delegation immediately got to work to restore the span. Within hours, the federal government pledged millions to clean up the bridge’s debris. The chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Minnesota Democrat Jim Oberstar, earmarked $250 million for a new bridge. Within days, Congress passed the bill unanimously. President George W. Bush signed it into law five days after the tragedy. The new bridge reopened for traffic in an astounding 14 months—three months early.
How did it accomplish this so quickly? Federal and state officials “fast-tracked” the bridge’s reconstruction by reducing the regulatory burdens that hamper new construction projects—environmental, safety, labor, and contracting reviews. Then they supercharged the process with a carrot-and-stick approach to construction: if the contractors met the timetable, they would get a generous bonus; if they missed it, they would get hit with penalties. Crews worked around the clock every day, right through the state’s notorious winter weather.
Besides how quickly the Patapsco River channel can be reopened while bridge design and construction commence, the big questions are: How much will it cost, and who will pay? Also, what else are we going to be asked to pay for?
This is where things get interesting. Lawyers and insurance companies are no doubt involved and scrambling. Fortune Magazine:
The owner and manager of a cargo ship that rammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge before the span collapsed last week filed a court petition Monday seeking to limit their legal liability for the deadly disaster.
The companies’ “limitation of liability” petition is a routine but important procedure for cases litigated under U.S. maritime law. A federal court in Maryland ultimately decides who is responsible—and how much they owe—for what could become one of the costliest catastrophes of its kind.
An 1851 maritime law caps the ship owner’s liability at $44 million. While the matter will be litigated for years, it is simply a reality that federal tax dollars will cover most of the cost.
Meanwhile, as Minnesota’s Democratic delegation did in 2007, Maryland’s congressional delegation, working with the US DOT, will introduce legislation to pay for bridge design and construction and mitigate the economic impacts of the bridge disaster and port closure. The legislation will no doubt provide emergency waiver authority but look for surprises, including possibly renaming the bridge. Also, look for lots of “add-ons.” After all, “don’t let a good crisis go to waste,” as Barack Obama's former White House chief of staff, ex-Chicago mayor, and ex-Democratic US Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) infamously said.
Will Republicans demand “offsets” for the spending? That’s where it gets tricky. Disaster politics in Congress, whether hurricanes, tornadoes, or “man-caused,” usually involve an unwritten rule of helping colleagues so they’ll be there to support you when your disaster strikes. Following Hurricane Sandy, which devastated much of the East Coast, especially New Jersey, a newly-reelected President Barack Obama sent to Congress a $60 billion relief and reconstruction bill that some considered a “porkfest of epic proportions.”
Given that it’s an election year and the Biden Administration’s well-established propensity to print and spend tax money, the bill could be another pork-fest of epic proportions.
There’s one very easy offset (not politically) that could more than pay to replace the Baltimore bridge—the high-speed “train to nowhere” in California. Clawback about $929 million in funds the Biden Administration released to California in 2021 for its poorly conceived and largely unconstructed “bullet train” project. The project was supposed to make train travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco possible in three hours, with extensions into the Central Valley.
Since Californians are never likely to see it completed, they have nothing to miss besides a few monuments to incompetence left behind as reminders of the money wasted thus far (see below).
Approved by voters in a ballot initiative - a bond issue - in 2008, it was supposed to be completed in 2020. However, it is over a decade behind schedule and $100 billion short of cash. The first leg will supposedly connect the metropolises of Merced and Bakersfield sometime between 2033 and 2035, but I wouldn’t buy any tickets just yet.
If you think it will ever be completed, I have a bridge to sell you.
Back to Baltimore: Politicians are already hyping the national impact of the bridge collapse as they look ahead to federal funding in an election year from a sharply divided and contentious Congress. And there’s some truth to that, given that the I-695 Key Bridge connects to I-95, a major north-south thoroughfare serving more than a dozen states. However, given the just-enacted pair of Fiscal Year 2024 appropriation “mega busses” with thousands of congressional earmarks, you would think another pork fest of epic proportions is enough to fill this election's troughs.
You may be wrong.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge should be rebuilt and follow the fine example of the Florida Department of Transportation, which implemented several National Transportation Safety Board recommendations following the 1980 Sunshine Skyway disaster. From ClickOrlando.com:
“…the new Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which opened in 1987, was built with safety in mind, with features meant to make navigating in and out of Tampa Bay easier for large ships and to lower the risk that the bridge will get hit or suffer catastrophic damage.
“‘These measures include elevating the bridge, widening the channel, and incorporating two layers of protection for bridge piers. Most notably, features such as ‘dolphins,’ which serve as physical barriers as well as rock islands that completely surround the main channel supports and go all the way to the sea floor,’ said Kristen Carson, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Transportation.”
While there is no guarantee against catastrophe, the Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway has managed without one since 1987. Sadly, many of these safety improvements could have been made—and still can—with any new or existing bridge structure serving a port facility. However, most federal reports are better at gathering dust than being read, much less implemented. Sadly, history has repeated itself, with lessons left unlearned from the last time.
Let’s hope Congress and the Biden Administration will do the right thing, at least this time, and avoid future political and other catastrophes.
This is super informative. Quite an education in what lies ahead for Baltimore as it looks to replace the Francis Scott Key Bridge.