Let’s begin with what has to be the most important reading of the deadly accident that destroyed a huge section of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, 2024. It appears near the middle of a NBC News report with this headline: “Why the Baltimore bridge stood little chance against a fully loaded cargo ship.” It takes the form of a statement made by Roberto Leon, “a structural engineer at Virginia Tech.” According to his perspective, which is, of course, a professional one, “while engineers try to account for ‘extreme events’ during the design and construction process, ‘when this bridge was built, there were no ships of this size.'”
And there you have it. That bridge, which was completed in 1977, had no chance against a 21st-century cargo ship carrying 4,700 containers. Indeed, the builders and designers of the bridge could never have imagined, and therefore factored in, a ship like the Dali, which, despite being nearly 1,000 feet long and able to carry a confounding 10,000 standard containers, is not is not even one of the behemoths of today’s seven seas. There are ships out there that can carry twice as many containers. And keep in mind that when construction began on Francis Scott Key Bridge, container-ship capitalism was still in its infancy.
Please everybody reorient your sense of scale about what happened here pic.twitter.com/kwlTUIQSdA
— Joseph Rezek (@RezekJoe) March 27, 2024
Let’s turn to the book that makes sense of the present economic situation. It’s not old (it was published in 2020), and it’s not written by Marxists or socialists or anything like that, but rather by business journalists, Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis. The full title of the book, which can be read in two or three days (it’s not technical): Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace.
According to these authors, a big component of what many social theorists and historians call capitalism’s second era of globalization (the first happened at the end of the 19th century) is the containerization of the economy. This mode of transportation did not exist in any meaningful way in the 1960s, and it found its first major opening not in the market but in war, the American war in Vietnam.
Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis write:
[Due to issues concerning logistics and theft, the] U.S. Army hired Malcom McLean, the original innovator of container shipping, to build and operate a container port at Cam Ranh Bay. He had two conditions: each box would be packed with a single type of item, and each box would be packed for a specific unit, which would be responsible for returning it. Within months, McLean had solved the army’s logistics problem and shown the world what was possible with containerization.
Malcom McLean is now called “The Father of Containerization.” The year he first made his mark on the history of capitalism is 1966. By the time the construction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge began (and its design by engineers was settled), 1972, containerization was still in its infancy. Its future was at this point mostly unknown or unreadable to the builders of bridges and the dreamers of tomorrowland.
But a few years afters cars and trucks started crossing the 1.6 mile steel structure that pragmatically (or, put another way, gracelessly) spanned the Patapsco River and celebrated the name of the man who wrote America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” container ships were fully embraced by the captains of a new form of capitalism, one that had abandoned a post-war order broadly defined by the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 and Keynesian (but I would add Whitean) social and fiscal commitments. We now call this period neoliberalism, which is synonymous with trickle-down-economics and globalization.
By the time the bridge was struck by the Sri Lanka-bound Dali and collapsed as if it were made with glue-all and toothpicks, ships on average, according to Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis, carried “about ten times as many containers as they did during [the Vietnam War].” Couple that fact with the one that rates Baltimore’s port, by American standards, as second-rate. (Seattle’s and Tacoma’s are equally third-rate.) This is an ordinary port doing ordinary business. Nothing exceptional in any of this but that the economy we have today, even at a mediocre level, is far more intense and massive than anything found during the Nixon years.
To make matters more vivid, or depressing, the US, which promised to rebuild the broken bridge with federal money, may never be able to build bridges that can withstand such blows and dangers. The price tag on that kind of engineering and retrofitting would break the back of our water-land infrastructure. It would be better to just not bother building bridges near ports and to let the container ships grow and grow to cut costs more and more and cross the seas with the stride of Godzillas.
NBC News:
Kevin Heaslip, director of the Center for Transportation Research and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said the cost of designing bridges to withstand fully loaded cargo ships like the Dali would ‘be so high that we wouldn’t be able to have any bridges.’
This is where we are now. Our stage of capitalism is so extreme, so out there, so inhuman that not only can we not build an adequate infrastructure for it, but we can’t stop it from destroying our planet.
There’s a case to be made for just not rebuilding this bridge. It’s part of the outer freeway ring of Baltimore, I-695. Maybe better to add more lanes to I-895.
But what do I know. I voted for Cary Moon.
It is very difficult to impossible to design a bridge to withstand a ship strike. The goal should be to put systems in place to keep the ship from hitting the bridge in the first place. Escort tugs to steer the ship if it loses power are a well-proven system for doing just that.
Charles, the more you know about world merchant shipping, the more appalled you would be.
Pompeii wasn’t built to withstand a volcanic eruption. The Titanic wasn’t built to withstand the first 5 compartments flooding. The Banqiao dam in China wasn’t built to withstand a typhoon. The Hood Canal Bridge wasn’t built to withstand the extreme winds in 1979. The Twin Towers weren’t built to withstand plane collisions larger than 707s.
Not every disaster is the fault of the underlying economic system of the time, nor everything else that happens, for that matter.
I envy anyone whose job allows them to cast about phrases like “containerization of the economy” before lunchtime.
A perfect world has no big ships, no bridges, and no monetary economy as we know it. Humans are terrible for the planet regardless of what economic team they play for, let’s not pretend otherwise (see also China, USSR and other socialists track record on the environment).
Oh, I-895 is a tunnel under the river. So, not adding lanes there.
My Urbanist fantasies will fall on deaf ears. Freeways forever!
Wouldn’t it be easier to say that anything designed in the past is probably ill prepared for the future? Not much fun in that though.
@7 Why would shipping companies pay for it? Because the port, state, or feds makes a rule that says they have to. The shipping companies won’t ever do it on their own, sure. Doesn’t mean the regulators or legislators can’t get involved. If you want to deliver to that port, you pay for the ship assist tugs you’re already hiring to escort the ship past the bridge(s). And before you gripe about added costs to the consumer, consider economies of scale. A $25K bill for escort services would add about $2.50 per container load of stuff on board. That’s utterly insignificant in the grander scheme of consumer prices.
Escort tugs are required for tankers going in and out of Prince William Sound, San Francisco Bay, and North Puget Sound, among other places. That didn’t happen out of the generosity of ship owners or insurers’ fear of paying out for another Exxon Valdez. It was because of federal and state law.
This is such an ignorant and stupid column. “No bridges” are built for container ships? You live in Seattle, Charles. Look out your window at the West Seattle Bridge.
@11 You’re not listening. The marginal costs per container or ton of coal are insignificant. Let’s just look at a port call for a ship the size of the Dali, as it stand now. 950 feet, 52,000 net tons, 95,000 gross tons, 5,000 40′ containers (10K TEU), ~100,000 tons of cargo.
Port fees: $120K to move inbound containers off the ship, another $60-$90K to load outbound cargo on. Add another $8K for the privilege of using the dock. And another $250K to get the containers out of the terminal on rail cars ($10/car, 2 containers/car, 5K containers). So we’re up around $450K to the port.
That makes the tug charges of $9.5K (2 tugs, $4750 each) seem positively cheap. Even if the escort service added $20K like it does in North Puget Sound, it would be a drop in the bucket next to the port fees. Since the transits through the Chesapeake Bay bridges (25-30 miles) are shorter than the transits from Anacortes to Port Angeles (50 miles), they’d probably be cheaper over there.
https://mpa.maryland.gov/Documents/MPAScheduleNo23.pdf
https://assets.ctfassets.net/l47fhzirj3ln/3VxzaYmC3jAqo5dG5hhCZo/90a4fdad33acd8a50e83e8c05437126c/baltimore-tariff-mcallister.pdf
So shippers will want to go to other ports? Good luck finding one that has capacity. And yes, humans are great at ignoring future potential costs. They are also really good at responding to the latest big thing right in front of them. And looky here, we’ve got a big catastrophe in front of us with an obvious solution!
@13 You are conflating two different concepts.
The Limitation of Liability Act of 1851 allows vessel owners to limit liability to the post-casualty value of the vessel (provided certain conditions are met). This applies to a wide variety of claims, not just those for economic loss due to business interruption. This should be obvious, but to clarify: legislation from 1851 is not “Supreme Court precedent from the 1920’s.”
The Supreme Court precedent you mentioned is a completely separate issue. Under Robins Dry Dock and its progeny, a party cannot recover for economic loss unless it also suffered some physical damage to its property. So, for instance, if the bridge was a toll bridge, the the bridge owner/operator could recover for the loss of toll revenue, because the bridge itself was damaged. But the port facilities and vessels stuck behind the bridge, which did not sustain any physical damage, cannot recover economic losses.
@13 As usual, when proven wrong you just swing on over to another hobby horse that you don’t really understand. Hint: unless you’re an admiralty lawyer, you don’t know how it works. The people that the networks have opining on issues are regularly wrong.
And why would you think that would drive me crazy? I’ve never expressed an opinion one way or the other about who ought to pay.
@17 You continue to illustrate exactly how little you know about the topic. First of all, the standard for escort tugs is two tugs per ship anyway. Second, tugs have been escorting ships for a significant period of time. Go ahead and find out how often escort tugs have lost ships on to the beach.
On to ports. And you’re not getting any more knowledgeable. You’re missing the fact that ports aren’t fungible. Baltimore imports a lot of the cars that arrive in the US from Europe. How exactly do those shippers decide to switch to Seattle or Tacoma? Ship them three quarters of the way around the world? The rest of the East Coast is struggling to figure out how they’ll manage the cargo coming in while the port of Baltimore is down. They’re going to be working overtime, which means it’s more expensive. So when Baltimore reopens, they’ll be cheaper than the other alternatives even if they require escort tugs. You’ll notice that most of the costs above are due to cargo handling. Overtime would add big bucks.
And your economic analysis doesn’t get any better. Just after reminding everyone that the ports and other taxpayers are likely to be on the hook for much of the 1-3 billion in damages, you say that it’s too expensive to add $20K to a transit to prevent the losses. Of course, the cost of the accident is worth 50,000 or so ship visits. How long would that take to pay off?
If you want to show that you know something instead of just flinging FUD like a capuchin monkey throws shit, go ahead and find out what East Coast ports have capacity for the cargoes shipped through Baltimore. And what their rates are. And how much it would change shipping costs on the US end to go to that port. You see, Baltimore is the closest port to the upper Midwest. Sending that cargo through, say, Savannah would add hundreds of miles of travel time and far more money than the $4/container that adding escort tugs would.
Can we all agree now that these columns are being written by a satirical bot?
@19 You just can’t help being wrong. In detail and in the big picture. Wrongity wrongity wrong.
For starters, there are three bridges, but two are quite close together (~25 miles from the berth), and the third is far down at the mouth of the Chesapeake. Any reasonable tug company (and I know McAllister is reasonable–I’ve worked with them) would station one pair of tugs at the mouth and another pair at the port, Total escorted distance would be less than 50 miles, or less than the distance escorted in North Puget Sound. And that’s if Virginia decides to require escorts at the mouth. It’s a much simpler bridge carrying much less traffic, so they could quite reasonably decide it’s a low risk.
OK, so a shipping company decides to move to Portland ME to avoid $4/container in extra fees due to escort tug requirements. Then they’re paying to move those containers 400 miles further than Baltimore to get to the Upper Midwest. And they’ll spend at least $100 more on train fees. What rational business would spend $100 to save $4? You just don’t get how transportation networks work.
Kobe is apples and kumquats. The port of Baltimore isn’t destroyed. It will be back up and running at near full capacity in 2-3 months when the bridge wreckage is removed. It’s far easier to come back from a short term disruption than a long term one.
You sure have some selective reading. In the USA Today article you linked, the master mariner who works as a professor in maritime business said that tugs would work and should be required. the merchant mariner (hint, not master), historian, and Youtuber says maybe it wouldn’t. Which one sounds like they know more to you? Also, the Youtuber says that the tugs can’t stop ships, and implies that they can’t maneuver them either. If that’s the case, how do tugs get ships into the dock? Hint: he’s wrong. And you can tell because tug companies do full scale escort exercises all the time.
As for public officials calling for tugs, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait. They’ll at least wait until NTSB issues a preliminary set of facts in a week or two. They might wait until the full report is out in a year or a blue ribbon commission issues findings after that. Right now, they’re focused on immediate recovery of the remaining bodies and of port operations. You know, as they should be.
@4 Capitalism is not a Natural Disaster. It is man-made.
I could tell this would be another unhinged Mudede rant before I even opened the article lmao so predictable
@24 me too. Been reading TS so long I can tell Mudede articles just from the title. And all read: capitalism sucks. Amazing he’s able to monetize that obsession for so many years.
@4: “The Twin Towers weren’t built to withstand plane collisions larger than 707s.
“Not every disaster is the fault of the underlying economic system of the time, nor everything else that happens, for that matter.”
But to the very best of Charles’ knowledge, Marxist Socialist regimes never built overly huge, massively expensive engineering projects. 😀