Long before Key Bridge collapse, Baltimore mariners warned of ‘ship strikes’

The warnings came, sometimes in eerily specific terms, years before a giant cargo ship struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge: A ship could lose power “in close vicinity to a bridge,” an out-of-control vessel could cause “a bridge collapse,” and the Key Bridge was “not designed to withstand collisions from large vessels.”

After the strike caused the bridge’s collapse in March, horrified officials described the catastrophe as one that couldn’t have been anticipated. But a maritime safety committee, including experts from key government agencies, repeatedly raised the possibility of such a disaster over the past two decades, according to previously unreported records obtained by The Washington Post. For nearly 10 of those years, as ever-larger cargo ships visited Baltimore’s port, the committee included “Recommendations for bridge protection from ship strikes” on a list of its action items. In 2016, that action item stopped appearing in meeting minutes without explanation.

The group, known as the Baltimore Harbor Safety and Coordination Committee, discussed the Key and Chesapeake Bay bridges, among others. Maryland pilots - specialists who board large vessels and then guide them safely in and out of port - in particular sounded alarm about local bridges needing more protection from errant ships, the records show.

Six construction workers were killed and Baltimore’s port was crippled when the 984-foot-long cargo ship the Dali lost power and hit the bridge, bringing it down in seconds. As federal investigators continue to probe the causes of the accident, and who may have been at fault, the records show that state and U.S. officials invoked the high cost of adding protections in response to pilots’ cautions over the years.

The records include no indication that the safety committee’s discussions resulted in new physical protections for the Key Bridge. Federal investigators have said protections in place at the time of the crash dated to the bridge’s original construction.

Minutes from each meeting were circulated within the agencies represented on the committee, according to Frank Hamons, who helped start the committee as a dredging manager for the Maryland Port Administration in the 1980s and chaired it until he retired in 2013. But it is unclear who inside the agencies actually saw those minutes, and numerous former top Maryland transportation officials told The Post they did not recall ever being briefed on the discussions about bridge protections.

Told of the pilots’ long-standing concerns, Robert Flanagan, the Maryland transportation secretary between 2003 and 2007, said he wished now more had been done to raise the alarm.

“In hindsight, sure, I’m sure that every secretary wishes they had focused on this issue,” Flanagan said.

Bruce Gartner, the executive director of the Maryland Transportation Authority, which operates the Key and Bay bridges, said that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the transportation industry determined that the greatest threats to infrastructure were posed by terrorism. Decisions his agency made about risk mitigation were consistent with those made by its counterparts around the country, he said.

The Key Bridge disaster “raised industry-wide questions of how we build new facilities to withstand a direct, fully laden containership strike, and what we can do to retrofit existing facilities,” Gartner said in a statement.

Jonathan Daniels, executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, which oversees the Port of Baltimore, said he was shocked by the bridge collapse. “Those of us who dedicate our careers to ports and harbor safety of course examine all types of worst-case scenarios,” he said. “This type of incident is exceptionally rare and almost unimaginable.”

Richard Scher, a port administration spokesman, said he did not know why discussion of bridge protections was dropped from the safety committee’s meetings.

More than two dozen committee members did not respond to or declined requests for comment, some saying they could not speak because of ongoing investigations into the Dali disaster. Spokesmen for several entities represented on the committee, including the Association of Maryland Pilots and the U.S. Coast Guard, also did not comment.

Experts disagree about whether any protection could have saved the Key Bridge from the Dali given the ship’s size and speed. But they generally agree that bridge-protection standards have not kept pace with the risk posed by the huge container ships that now regularly call on Baltimore and other East Coast ports. Upgrades are expensive: A ship-collision protection system for the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which spans the river separating Delaware from New Jersey, is projected to cost more than $90 million. But the Baltimore disaster shows that a bridge collapse can be extraordinarily expensive, as well as deadly: Rebuilding the Key Bridge will cost nearly $2 billion, according to Maryland officials.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating bridge pier protections along with other safety measures, according to its preliminary report on the Key Bridge collapse, released last week. The report also said that the Maryland Transportation Authority is now studying options to upgrade the protections on the Bay Bridge. The Coast Guard, which is responsible for maintaining systems that help vessels safely navigate to ports, announced it was opening a national inquiry to assess its port safety work, including the risks that large modern ships pose to bridges.

Early warnings

Harbor safety committees exist for ports around the country. While they do not typically have powers to make formal rules or initiate construction projects by themselves, experts said they play an important role in helping officials and others with a stake in the waterways - such as ship pilots - coordinate their work and identify risks.

Such committees have also played a role in preparing for the safe arrival of massive modern container ships in East Coast ports in recent years. A harbor safety committee working group for the port of New York and New Jersey established guidelines for the vessels, spelling out requirements for ships in narrow passages to be escorted by tugboats. A Delaware River committee issued similar guidance for ships bound for the Philadelphia area. In Baltimore, officials have said decisions about whether to use such escorts are left to ship captains and local pilots and that tugboats had left the Dali before it lost power and hit the Key Bridge.

Baltimore’s harbor safety committee was created in the 1980s as a way for the Maryland Port Administration to bring together stakeholders in dredging projects, which were meant to make way for larger vessels by clearing and enlarging the port’s channels.

In 2000, the group expanded its focus to include safety, according to an archived version of a Maryland Department of Transportation website. The site also includes minutes from the committee’s quarterly meetings in 2004 and 2005.

Discussions about the possibility of a ship hitting the Key Bridge show up in the minutes as early as 2004, the first year for which The Post reviewed records. Joe Smith, a veteran captain and representative of the Association of Maryland Pilots, asked whether a hotline was available to quickly stop traffic on the Key or Bay bridges if a ship “dangerously veered” toward one of them. Over the next six years, the minutes show, Smith repeatedly warned that bridges needed more protection from ship strikes - and that ship captains needed clear communication protocols in case of such an emergency.

“I still feel that way, that we should support the bridges,” Smith said in a brief interview outside his home, 10 miles from the stricken bridge. But he added that the protections he’s advocated for are expensive. He said the pilots, wary of litigation over the bridge collapse, had agreed not to talk publicly, and he declined to comment further.

“The minutes tell most everything,” he said.

Smith’s concerns about communication foreshadowed a key element of the Dali disaster: the challenge of warning bridge users of impending danger. In the minutes before the Dali hit the Key Bridge, an apprentice pilot aboard the ship used a mobile phone to call a pilot dispatcher, who called a transportation authority police officer, according to the NTSB’s preliminary report. Officers managed to halt traffic, but seven workers repairing potholes and an inspector were still on the bridge when the ship hit. The inspector ran to a surviving bridge span before the collapse, the NTSB report said. The workers were plunged into the Patapsco River. One was rescued with serious injuries. The rest died.

In March 2006, two years after Smith’s warning, a barge hit a bridge over Maryland’s Severn River. That accident and its implications came up during a meeting of the safety committee the following day, minutes show. The Post found those minutes uploaded to an online document-editing service. Scher, the port administration spokesman, said there was no reason to doubt their authenticity.

Nafiz Alqasem, an engineer with the Maryland Transportation Authority, told the committee that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials had issued guidelines for protecting bridges from ship strikes in 1991. But because bridges in the area were built before 1991, those guidelines did not apply, he said.

Alqasem told the committee that potential protections included “islands surrounding piers, fender systems, slide and ring structures, concrete walls around piers, stand alone structures, and small fender structures,” according to the minutes. But he said there were no plans in place for any Maryland bridges, noting that such projects would be “very costly.”

The minutes show that Smith urged action. “Captain Smith stressed the importance of bridge protection, and noted that Agencies should be meeting and discussing implementation possibilities,” the minutes say.

Then Hamons, who had helped start the safety committee, inquired specifically about the level of protection for the Key Bridge, meeting minutes show. “The Key Bridge is not designed to withstand collisions from large vessels,” Alqasem replied.

Alqasem declined to comment.

The bridge had 25-foot wide concrete bumpers known as “dolphins” in the water nearby, dating to the time of its construction in the 1970s, according to the NTSB’s preliminary report. The bridge’s supports were surrounded by concrete and timber boxes, according to investigators.

Three years after it opened in 1977, the bridge was struck by a container ship and suffered only minor damage. That same year, 1980, a 609-foot ship hit Florida’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge, triggering the bridge’s collapse and killing 35 people. In the decades since, cargo ships have become longer, broader and heavier.

“We’ve always known that it is possible for ships, barges and other things to hit and damage the bridge, so it’s always a factor of concern,” Hamons said in an interview. “And as we watched the ships get larger and larger and larger, the question was: Do we have enough protection to protect this bridge?”

Hamons said he didn’t recall any specific committee recommendations to protect bridges against ship strikes. “There was a lot of concern, but it was difficult to assess the level of risk involved,” he said.

The Post was unable to find minutes for subsequent safety committee meetings in 2006. The port administration provided minutes beginning in 2007. Minutes from March of that year contain the first mention in the records reviewed by The Post of the action item, “Recommendations for bridge protection from ship strikes.”

‘A substantial amount of money’

Nine months later, in December 2007, Smith asked whether any progress had been made on bridge protection, according to the minutes. A Coast Guard official, Brian Dunn, told the group that the Coast Guard doesn’t own bridges itself and has “limited capability” to require fenders. Dunn, who is now chief of the Coast Guard’s bridge program, told The Post he stood by his assertion in the minutes. “We don’t have the authority to direct pier protection systems,” he said. “That’s up to the bridge owner.”

At the meeting, Alqasem outlined several bridge-protection recommendations from his agency, the Transportation Authority. He urged committee members to share any questions or comments.

The minutes do not make clear what the recommendations were but explain that they were developed following a 2003 study that included examination of the Key and Bay bridges.

The Post requested a copy of the 2003 study under Maryland’s public records law, but the Transportation Authority has not yet released it. John Porcari, state transportation secretary from 1999 to 2003 and again from 2007 to 2009, said he thought the 2003 study focused on the potential for terrorist attacks on bridges after 9/11.

“The information that we got at the most senior level at the time was very much related to terrorist vulnerability,” Porcari said.

During the December 2007 meeting, the minutes show, Smith repeated his concern that bridges needed more protection “to prevent damage resulting from a potential ship strike.” He also reiterated the question he had posed in 2004 about how to stop vehicle traffic on the Key Bridge, raising the possibility that a ship could lose steering or propulsion nearby, according to the minutes.

Smith again raised the issue of emergency communication in March 2008, expressing concern about “the potential of a ship losing power in close vicinity to a bridge.”

The committee’s bridge-protection action item appeared in minutes for the June 2008 meeting and remained for every meeting but one until mid-2016. Minutes from some of the meetings include no description of any discussion about it. Minutes from other meetings offer brief glimpses.

Umesh Murthy, an engineer representing the Maryland Transportation Authority, asked about the action item in 2010. Smith explained it “was developed based on Pilots concern for a bridge collapse as a result of ship strikes.” Murthy told the committee it would cost $65 million to protect the Bay Bridge against an accidental collision, saying the cost of retrofitting existing bridges was much higher than building protections into newly constructed bridges. Murthy, who is no longer an agency employee, declined to comment, citing a transportation authority “gag order.”

In his statement to The Post, Gartner, the current executive director of the transportation authority, said that “experts constantly evaluate the likelihood of catastrophic events versus realistic mitigation efforts” and that decisions are influenced by “available funding resources, risk assessments, and the prioritization of potential threats.”

Smith attended his last meeting in 2013, telling fellow members he planned to retire from piloting the next year.

At a meeting in 2014, committee members again considered the need for bridge protection, and again, discussion turned to the expense.

John Walters, a Coast Guard official, “expressed that protecting bridges from ship strikes would cost Maryland a substantial amount of money,” the records show. An unnamed Coast Guard official said the agency could not mandate such protections and suggested that the action item be placed under the transportation authority’s purview.

A port administration official, David Bibo, said he would explore obtaining a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant to cover the cost.

Bibo, who had taken over as chair of the safety committee when Hamons retired, did not recall his comments in that meeting, according to Scher, the Port Administration spokesman.

After a reporter read Walters the minutes, he said he did not recall the discussion but added: “It’s obvious that the lines of authority are not clear, or not well understood. ... It looks like everybody’s passing the buck.”

Asked if he was among those passing the buck, Walters, who is now retired, said: “Probably. It wasn’t my responsibility. It was outside my wheelhouse, as far as what my area of responsibility was.”

The 2014 exchange was the last substantial discussion on the topic recorded in the minutes.

In December 2023, John Kinlein, a Maryland pilot, rekindled discussion of the same concerns Smith had previously voiced. Kinlein mentioned that the committee might need to consider how crews would communicate in an emergency involving “the loss of steering or propulsion of a ship approaching the Bay Bridge or Key Bridge.” He said his concerns were “due to the unreliability of reaching someone in the current protocol.”

Kinlein declined to comment for this story.

Hamons, the port administration official who helped create the committee, emphasized that the committee had no significant funding or authority of its own. It could only identify issues affecting the port of Baltimore and urge relevant agencies to take action.

“It did that, and it did well,” Hamons said. “Looking back, of course, everyone wishes that something had been done to prevent this particular ship strike.”

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Alice Crites contributed to this report.