IT USED TO BE MY JOB TO DRIVE SHIPS UNDER BRIDGES. THINGS DO GO WRONG
At midnight plus 30 local time on 26 March, the container ship Dali left the port of Baltimore, did a tug-assisted turn and started her passage out to sea. The tugs were then detached so they could proceed to their next job and to allow the Dali to safely increase speed. Two Baltimore harbour pilots, experts in navigating ships in confined waters and hugely knowledgeable about Baltimore harbour specifically, remained onboard.
So far so normal: an evolution that takes place a thousand times a day around the world, normally without drama and always unnoticed. However, just over an hour later the Dali suffered what maritime accident investigators call “a loss of control” and hit a support pillar of the Francis Scott Key bridge, which subsequently collapsed resulting in a tragic loss of life.
As ever with maritime incidents in the early stages there is much information missing which will emerge over time as investigations are completed. I’ll try to keep this to what we know, and make it clear if I’m filling in gaps based on my own long experience of handling ships.
Regarding that experience: I commanded four different ships during my 27 year seagoing career, one of which almost sank under me (not due to a collison, I hasten to add). Just for extra backup I have consulted various other people I know in the writing of this article. Even the Telegraph editor handling this piece has experienced a loss of control while handling a ship passing through bridges – in his case the Forth bridges of Scotland, fortunately without any collision. Both of us have had the slightly tense experience of conning ships through London’s Tower Bridge.
One thing that the emerging videos and reports of this incident make clear is that on approaching the bridge, the Dali suffered a loss of electrical power, indicated by all the internal and upper-deck lights going out. This is a horrible thing to happen at the best of times. Everything goes dark on the bridge. Radars, radios and any number of little lights, all dimmed to keep your night vision, all simultaneously go out. The constant hiss of the air conditioning which you never notice becomes deafening in its silence. Then the alarms start. Alarm panels on battery backup flash into life and all start beeping to tell you something is wrong. These need to be cancelled so you can hear yourself think.
Then you need to quickly assess what systems you have available. One of the problems with ‘dropping the plant’ is that the resultant equipment failures are never the same. Have you lost propulsion? If ‘no’, do you still have control over it or is it stuck at whatever setting you last ordered? How long before you can switch over to backup systems? Critically, do you have control over the rudder, if not, what angle is that stuck at? While you work this out you must ask are you navigationally safe and if not, how long have you got?
A total electrical failure (TLF) happens when whatever is producing your power trips out. There is always redundancy, especially when operating in confined waters, but the surge in load on those secondary systems can cause them to trip as well. It can also happen when the switchboard, or whatever you have in place to manage that power, itself trips. There are lots of variations within this: the point being, that the order in which it happens determines what systems you lose along the way and in those first few seconds, you don’t know.
In this case, Dali lost control and started being set to starboard (to the right as you look forward in a ship) either because the rudder was stuck in that direction, or by the wind (10 knots on her port beam) or by the current (unknown but can be significant).
On realising this was going to take them out of the navigable channel, and without knowing how long it would take to recover (the lights went out a second time indicating that all was still not well) the bridge team would have had no option but to try and slow the ship by coming hard astern. This could account for the black smoke coming from the funnel although this is just as likely to have been from an emergency generator kicking in. The way the ship sheers towards the pillar towards the end suggests that she was going hard astern – single screw ships react differently under astern propulsion and can swing, sometimes dramatically.
Stopping distances in ships of that size are significant. At 300 metres long and able to carry 9,971 twenty-foot containers (TEU), the Dali is large but not a monster – there are container ships of 400m and over 20,000 TEU. Either way, on realising they weren’t stopping in time, the ship’s Master ‘let go’ the port anchor. It’s unlikely this would stop the ship but would certainly slow it. What they did with the starboard anchor is unknown as that was lost in the collision.
While doing all this a Mayday call was issued (indicating an incident with risk to life is imminent), alerting the harbour authorities that the Dali had “lost control and that a collision with the bridge was possible”. This quick thinking allowed traffic to be stopped from heading on to the bridge and likely saved many lives.
Many have asked why tugs weren’t used. This is an important point and points to broader questions that will be asked of Baltimore port control about their overall safety management system, something that is every bit as relevant to this accident as the ‘loss of control’ suffered on the ship. Dali was doing about eight knots at the time of the incident which is approaching the upper speed of most tugs, certainly the upper speed at which they can have any lateral effect on a ship of that size, so a tug forward ‘pushing off’ in the traditional sense would have struggled. But there is no reason (other than time and money) why she couldn’t have had a tug attached aft or at least had one close by. This would have given the ship so many more options.
She also had a bow thruster but these are only effective at slow speed and that assumes they are working at all. In this case, given how much had failed, it is likely that the Dali’s bow thruster was not.
When accidents like this happen it is rarely caused by a single issue. That the ship suffered a ‘loss of control’ is clear and I have had a go at describing how that might have happened. But zoom out and we have reports that there were engineering difficulties onboard including dirty fuel that will now be investigated.
Then we have the tug management issue. This ship (with a questionable engineering state) was navigating a narrow channel, at night, under a bridge which (it’s clear to everyone now) had zero resilience. Who was adding all these together and evaluating how the port safety resources should be managed, or were they just treating this like every other movement?
The investigation will now look at all of this so that lessons can be learned and culpability assigned, if appropriate. In the past, major investigations like this have been conducted by multiple agencies some of whom come with an agenda. This will need to be avoided.
My overall assessment of this though is that this was a tragic maritime accident. Those pointing to a cyber-attack or terrorism should stand down. It is also far from unprecedented. A 2018 report for the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure catalogued 35 bridge collapses caused by boat strikes between 1960 and 2015. It’s a function of the complexity and harshness of life at sea that when you need power most, you are most likely not to have it. Every mariner seeing this incident will recall when something similar happened to them and ‘by the grace of God’ got away with it.
But that is no excuse. Maritime transport infrastructure must be resilient – seaborne trade is our lifeblood. ‘Freedom of Navigation’ is a basic human requirement and whilst the expression tends to be used in the context of those who wish to deny it, this incident makes it clear that it is equally applicable far away from those adversaries. The key port of Baltimore has now lost her freedom of navigation, potentially for a long time.
If we are to honour those who died and those who have yet to be found in this horrific accident then the global maritime and transport community will need to find out the facts and learn from them as quickly as possible.
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer who commanded four different ships during his seagoing career
2024-03-27T15:58:25Z dg43tfdfdgfd