New Report on Francis Scott Key Bridge

NTSB
When something as massive as the container ship Dali gets going, it doesn’t need to go very fast to pack a huge wallop.
0 0
Read Time:3 Minute, 7 Second

The preliminary NTSB report on the Francis Scott Key Bridge catastrophe came out in mid-May. Pete Buttigieg recently got grilled about it on Capitol Hill. So, now’s a good time to dig into what it had to say. For one, they recommend that ships leave the fine maneuvering to the tug crews from now on, just in case.

NTSB documents repeated outages

Investigators with the NTSB have been working a whole lot of overtime since Pete Buttigieg took over as Transportation Secretary. Trainloads of toxic chemicals have been flying off the rails, Planes lose door panels which fall from the sky. Truck drivers can’t or won’t move anything in or out of California. Boats have challenges, too. Barges can’t seem to make it down the Mississippi because of crumbling locks and not enough water.

Then, there’s the cargo ship which totally demolished a crucial piece of our infrastructure. The Francis Scott Key Bridge. The National Transportation Safety Board is still working really hard to figure out exactly what went wrong in the early morning hours of March 26.

High school physics teaches us that the amount of force available to an object in motion depends on only two things. How massive it is and how fast it’s moving. When something as massive as the container ship Dali gets going, it doesn’t need to go very fast to pack a huge wallop. As soon as it hit the bridge support, it was all over in an instant.

We know, now, that the ship was having electrical problems before it ever left port. The captain was convinced that they were resolved, and even if they weren’t they were on a totally separate power system, anyway. According to the NTSB, that assumption was a crucial mistake. It wasn’t unreasonable enough for anyone to be in trouble for, though.

A full 10 hours before weighing anchor and leaving port, the Dali “experienced a blackout during maintenance.” That was simple human error, the NTSB notes. It was easily fixed. “A crewmember accidentally closed an inline engine exhaust damper. This blocked the engine’s exhaust from exiting the vessel and stalled the engine.

The crew “restored power by manually closing two breakers.” Then, “a second blackout occurred due to insufficient fuel pressure in one of the ship’s generators.” That’s when the crew figured out that the exhaust damper was closed and opened it up properly.

Maryland made changes requiring all ships require two escort tugs.

A different set of breakers

Things get interesting at this point. “While recovering from this second blackout,” the NTSB report notes, “the crew switched the ship’s electrical configuration to use a different set of breakers than what it had been using for the past several months.” There’s no reported explanation for that.

It was these new breakers that were in use when the ship departed hours later.” The city of Baltimore used that information in their lawsuit against the ship’s owner.

Grace Ocean Private Ltd. holds the title and Synergy Marine Private Ltd. operates the vessel as manager.

The city alleges they “failed to properly train and supervise the crew, failed to follow safe work and operational procedures, and failed to properly maintain, equip and inspect the vessel.” The NTSB says they’ve been cooperating.

Based on the preliminary NTSB report, Maryland made changes requiring all ships require a pilot licensed in their state and also two escort tugs when transiting through sensitive channels and waterways.

Six maintenance workers were killed in the collapse. The traffic that bridge normally carries has to be rerouted many miles and it won’t be repaired anytime soon.

About Post Author

Mark Megahan

Happy
Happy
0 %
Sad
Sad
0 %
Excited
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
Angry
0 %
Surprise
Surprise
0 %
Related Posts