Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Analysis of MV Dali's Collision Course

ladies and gentlemen it's your friend Mike Brady from ocean liner designs now we woke up to some pretty concerning news this morning that a bridge in Baltimore Maryland was taken down um by a collision with a ship it seems like a large ship has actually crashed into a section of the bridge very crucial section as it would happen and brought the bridge partially down now this isn't the kind of video that we normally make on this channel this isn't a news or current events Channel but every now and then when something happens in the world of Maritime safety people will want to know what we make of it because the channel focuses here on the history of ships the way they're built the way they're operated and their safety so what we'll do is we'll take a look at the area where this has happened uh in Maryland we'll take a look at the bridge itself and then we'll kind of look at the ship and how this could have happened because the the footage that's been released of this event is uh for one of a better term pretty remarkable uh very dramatic stuff and this is an ongoing um catastrophe and it seems like it's being described as a mass casualty event so clearly terrible news terrible thing that's happened so where has this happened Baltimore Maryland Baltimore sits here on the US East Coast this is a pretty important Place uh it's a real Center of of industry and commerce the ports of Baltimore are fairly comprehensive and very big and if we zoom in you can see here that the city is up here towards Northwest and there's a number of of um docking facilities and and ports for ships so very comprehensive network of private um boats private yachts and things like that but further down here you get a a large terminal um and a very big cargo loading and unloading area multiple docks multiple shipping companies will be coming in here taking in some pretty serious Commerce and taking it out in very large volumes and right at the uh entrance to the channel leading up to the major port here you can see the Francis Scott Key bridge now this is the bridge in question that's actually been involved uh in the incident but just looking at this um entrance here you can see that it's a pretty tricky one probably to navigate for ships as they're coming in um from the East Coast if you were to enter from the North Atlantic Ocean uh you would be probably sailing in straight through here it's a pretty wide uh Channel entrance there at 10 Mi 17 km and then it's a fair way up North through Chesapeake Bay to get to the entrance of the mouth of the river here to get into the Port of Baltimore now obviously there'd be a lot of Maritime traffic coming in and out of this area but critically the distances here are not great so the distance between these two points um entering the uh the port here uh it's pretty tight 1.8 miles 2.8 km so obviously navigation in this area is of the utmost importance because one wrong move and a ship the size of the one that we've seen involved in this uh Collision will do some very serious damage it just so happens in the last couple of weeks we've been doing videos on how do big ships stop you know in the event of a disaster how did they react to this kind of situation so seeing it play out in real life is a really weird thing so sitting across the entrance to the port here is the Francis Scott Key Bridge um the bridge has a pretty significant span so it um actually dates the 1970s the late 1970s it's a steel truss bridge and truss bridges are designed to be um as lightly built as possible while offering the most strength the most flexibility so a pretty pretty strong Bridge um a very long bridge so it's actually here just over a kilometer wide just about a mile um wide and if we put our uh little guy down here on street view we get a good view of the Bridge spanning um the river here and you can see that there are a number of large kind of support pylons that will be taking the the the brunt of this uh weight quite a lot of traffic because it it does run um up to the Northeast and connects to sort of halves of the of the city here you know connecting this side of the city the Southeastern side of town with um the rest of the state heading towards Washington so obviously a pretty um busy area but although having a bridge that's about a kilometer wide is impressive about a mile wide that's uh that's a pretty big bridge that's not a big area for a ship to navigate here we get a great sort of bird's eye view of the bridge and you can see that it rises up quite significantly in the middle here where you get the maximum height so that large ships can safely go underneath but you can see that it's not a very big gap big ships will only be able to pass through this Center span not any of these this is obviously too small um they would probably be able to get through from about here uh where these sailing boats are here down but they'd be aiming right through the middle of the channel to get under that Center span you can see it's not very wide it looks big and impressive and it is but when you imagine that this is about a kilometer wide and the big cargo ship laid out on its side across here would take up about a third of the distance so safe navigation through here absolutely of the utmost importance you can see over here the dock facilities that kind of large loading and unloading terminal that we were talking about so what about the ship that has actually been involved in the collision with the bridge um her name is the MV Dary she's a container ship um she's pretty decent size about 300 M long which is a fairly significant length 48 m across I'll add the conversions in feet on the um on the video here she's flagged to Singapore and she's just shy of 100,000 gross tons the dead weight summer tonnage about 116,000 tons so this is a pretty significant cargo ship very large vessel for those at home that's around about the size of uh two Titanics so it's a lot of ship so if we look on Port and follow the track we you can see that the ship has departed from the terminal here at Point Breeze and she's outbound for Chesapeake Bay and probably heading out to the uh the North Atlantic she's probably loaded up with a Tana cargo from the terminal and has come out into the river to execute a turn to enter the main Channel and head straight down the barrel for the bridge now we were talking earlier that the um navigation through this point is obviously extremely important um Chesapeake Bay in the surrounding area is quite shallow and very dangerous so the pilot would have been on board the ship and he will be kind of directing them um through this area the pilot who's actually familiar with the area and knows it like the back of his hand I would imagine they would probably have a pilot on board I assume as far as um the entrance to the ocean here it just out pass Virginia Beach because cuz again it's it's quite tight very shallow very narrow waterways you've got another Narrows here at um Kent Island uh with Annapolis over here in the west so it's a pretty tricky Waterway to navigate at :5 uh UTC on the 26th so they've finished loading and they have departed and they have executed the turn to get into the middle of the channel about 15 minutes later they are right in the middle of the channel approaching the bridge and it's unclear how accurate this data is but we can see that the wind 6.2 knots not particularly um severe the ship speed is 7.9 knots so in in tight waterways like this uh ship speeds are usually limited between about 5 and 8 knots thereabouts to prevent wash and specifically to make sure that um events like this are less likely to happen but something's gone wrong about here 5 minutes later 525 the ship has altered course slightly there's not been any gusts in Wind she's doing just in excess of 8 knots and she's altered her course slightly to starboard so she's heading out towards the bridge at this point the ship would have been about here heading towards the bridge and she's headed over to the right hand side of the channel now in the footage you can see a little bit of what has happened and maybe get a bit of an idea on what what could have gone wrong here you can see that as she's approaching the bridge her lights actually snap out twice the ship's power is lost and then she begins that that change of course heading straight for the the supporting pylon there's a huge belch of smoke out of the engines and she turns straight for the the pier that's essentially supporting the span of the bridge and that what she impacts so if we look at our bird's eye view of the of the bridge you can see this is the supporting pile on the pier that she's actually impacted that's just about the worst thing the ship could have hit because it's holding up a immense amount of weight and it's brought down the rest of the bridge around it so what's actually happened here well the clues are kind of there in the light snapping out is extremely unusual that just should not be happening it indicates potentially some kind of power outage on board the ship would make actually maneuvering the ship extremely difficult if um communication between the ship's Helm and engines and the rudder and the engine room are lost then the ship is essentially um out of control most importantly though the ship is is doing a fairly significant clip here she's doing about 8.8 knots which is when you think the fact that the ship's about 100 100,000 tons large that's just a lot of momentum in the video that we did just last week about how big ships stop we talked about this kind of exact scenario where a big ship like this has a number of ways of coming to a crash halt the first the most obvious one is to throw the engines in full reverse now a ship like the Daly is a massive diesel powered ship it'll have diesel engines down your engine room and one propeller and it's a very efficient setup but it's not particularly responsive especially with that much dead weight moving at that speed it takes a lot of time even with your engines in Full aern full reverse to actually bring your ship to a stop and with that much momentum behind them the uh the the stopping of a ship can take about a mile or more it can take a very significant amount of time to bring this ship to a complete stop the other way that ships can bring themselves to a to a stop is actually to initiate a turn so by turning and slowly powering the engines down instead of throwing them in full reverse um a big can actually bleed off a fairly significant amount of speed they can lose between 40 and 70% of their speed just in a sharp turn what's interesting about this bit of footage is the ship clearly begins a turn to starboard as she's approaching the bridge with smoke pouring out of a funnel it almost seems to me as if they were experiencing issues with their uh their power potentially their navigation and that the crew have possibly attempted to bring their ship to a sudden stop altering the state of their engines potentially by throwing them in in Reverse putting them a Stern which could account for that sudden belch of smoke that we see from down in the engine room typically another maneuver that ships like this can use is to suddenly deploy their anchors at either side of the ship which are usually kept on standby during departure and arrivals for for a sudden crash stop or to try to actually hitch the anchor and use it really heavy chain as kind of like a seab bre uh to suddenly pivot the ship around and it does almost seem seem like she might have dropped one of her anchors potentially her Port anchor here in an attempt to to cancel out this turn which might indicate that it maybe wasn't a uh intentional turn that they were maybe trying to desperately bring the ship's bow back towards the center span of the bridge what happened on board the ship we are likely not to know for a little time yet but what is really surprising to me is the fact that there weren't tugs alongside the ship tugboats are extremely versatile extremely strong um vessels that can support big ships on the way in and out of ports and usually tugs are brought alongside ships until they've cleared uh the most dangerous part of a Waterway specifically for this reason now different ports have got different regulations around when tugs are required it's really surprising to me that you've got a bridge span that wide just over a mile wide which is as far as ships go a little narrow because there's only a little window in the midd Middle where the the ship could be able to get through having a tug alongside to bring the ship to a sudden stop or to push the ship's bow out of Harm's Way is critical I mean that's what they they're designed to do I was actually invited out on a tugboat by viewer of the channel just a couple weeks ago he's a tugboat captain in melbour my hometown he invited me out and he told me some interesting things about the way that tugs actually operate they are very very powerful machines they have um essentially like thrusters hanging underneath the the tugboat they can spin on a dime they can do a full 360 degree spin no problem and the way that they actually bring big ships to a halt is they'll have these big lines attached to ships like this and the tugboats will actually swivel their thrusters to point outwards away from one another which sounds counterintuitive but by blasting the throttle out to the side the jet of water creates so much drag kind of like the wings of a butterfly suddenly being turned sideways that it will just bring the ship to a to a stop of course being connected to a 100,000 ton cargo ship it can take a little bit of time and so typically ships like this will have two or three tugboats one forward one after and maybe one in reserve somewhere alongside to actually maneuver the ship ships are very capable of doing their own maneuvering they need steerageway which is the amount of speed required to actually get water over the rudder to turn that happens at around about 8 knots so this ship had steerage ways she was able to turn herself but what is really unusual is that there weren't any tugs with her to actually help her out in case of a situation like this when Queen Mary 2 was being pulled out of Sydney Harbor just the other week when I was visiting there were tugs alongside Queen Mary 2 has actually got very significant maneuvering equipment down below including bow thrusters and then her own thrusters at the stern her AIP pod thrusters which can turn instead of a conventional Rudder and it means that the ship was perfectly capable of maneuvering herself out of the dock and in the video I took just the other week you can see tugboats positioned for and after with toe lines attached but they're slack because they're not really doing anything Sydney Harbor is also a very shallow Waterway see here that it kind of similarly to um the entrance to Baltimore has got a number of Narrows so as Queen Mary 2 was coming out of this area she's going to then enter kind of like the danger zone where between the Sydney um opera house here and the point on the other side it's only about um, 1500 1600 ft so obviously turning and maneuvering getting that dead Riot is extremely important but the tugs would stay with the Queen Mary 2 very very far until at least she had cleared the heads here quarantine head to the Hornby Lighthouse it's about 1 and 1/2 km 5,000 ft the reason being were Queen Mary 2 or a similar ship to suffer a power failure or to suffer any kind of issue the tug at the forward end of the ship would be able to either bump up against the ship and push its nose in a certain direction or pull it on the on the tow line in another direction as with the the TG at the stern they'd be able to um pump the brakes and bring the ship to a a slow stop they would be able to actually respond and what's really interesting is the fact that in the footage I I can't see tugs helping Dary navigate the channel here it could be that tugs aren't required for for cargo vessels entering and exiting the port but I would be very surprised if that were the case after this event If This Disaster um doesn't rewrite the rules for Big Ships coming into and out of Baltimore it would at least make sense to have big tugs of scorting them as far as the um the entrance here to the the Baltimore port beyond the bridge out as far as this because then the ships will have steerageway they'd be able to make it down south um and out of Chesapeake Bay so it's a pretty horrendous event and it's a little bit surprising that this has happened because you know we have the technology to essentially prevent things like this from happening and um it's a little bit strange to see a ship this big maneuvering her way out of a fairly tight space without any kind of um support from tugs anything to back her up it's unusual there was nothing alongside to help prevent this kind of situation because although it does seem to happen fairly quickly I do wonder if tugs positioned at the forward end of the ship and the stern might have been able to at least swing the the bow around maybe get it pointing in the in the correct direction um or might have even been able to bring her to a a slow stop unfortunately it seems like in this instance dropping the anchor throwing the engines a stern was just too little too late given the huge amount of uh momentum behind the ship if you're interested in the way that these kind of physics work on ships like this go and check out the video that we did on on how big ships stop um because it'll explain a lot of what's going on here so there you go I hope you found this interesting please let me know if you've got any questions in the comments or if anything new has kind of popped up since we we talked about this video um naturally this will be probably investigated by a number of authorities but I'm sure the uh NTSB the national transport safety board of the US will be heading up some kind of Investigation what will be really interesting is seeing what happened down in the engine room um why the ship executed that sudden turn to starboard why the power went out the way it did it's just not designed to happen and ships have got a number of systems uh like backup Power Systems and generators and things to actually prevent that from happening so clearly something has gone very wrong but we'll keep an eye on what's going on it's pretty horrible to see this kind of thing safety standards and Protocols are Written in Blood they say and in this instance it seems that there may be some alterations to the way that ships are guided into and out of the Port of Baltimore because uh yeah although the ship was underway although she had steerage way it is extremely counterintuitive I think to have a ship operating in such a narrow confine with no support vessel alongside to kind of nipp her out of Danger's way if it came to it so he is hoping that there is only good news in the next few days over people uh being found safe and sound but until then until we find out more stay safe stay happy and I'll see you again

Channel: Oceanliner Designs

Views: 319,072

Keywords: great ocean liners, maritime history, ocean liners, famous oceanliners, ships documentary, history of ships, engineering, history, ships, documentary, origins explained, world history project, animated history, open educational resources, titanic, shipwreck, sinking, boats, ocean, disaster, tragedy

Id: R4AuGZIhJ_c

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024