Container Ship hits Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor

FBI opening criminal investigation

Everyone being very tight-lipped about it, though. May be a standard procedure in a case of this magnitude.

Gift WaPo article here.

The FBI has opened a criminal investigation focusing on the massive container ship that brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last month — a probe that will look at least in part at whether the crew left the port knowing the vessel had serious systems problems, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

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Looks like this isn't anything new

‘We’re a dead ship’: Hundreds of cargo ships lost propulsion in U.S. waters in recent years

Less than two weeks after Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge was destroyed by an out-of-control cargo ship, another huge container ship passed beneath a busy bridge connecting New York and New Jersey and then suddenly decelerated in a narrow artery of one of the nation’s largest ports.

“We’re a dead ship,” said a voice over the maritime radio a short time later, invoking an industry term that often refers to a ship that is unable to move on its own.

Three tug boats helped shepherd the APL Qingdao — a vessel more than 1,100 feet long and flying under the flag of Malta — from where it lost propulsion near the Bayonne Bridge to a safe location, authorities said. The ship dropped anchor just upstream from the even busier Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which carries about 200,000 vehicles per day.

The April 5 incident is one of hundreds in which massive cargo ships lost propulsion, many near bridges and ports, according to a Washington Post analysis of Coast Guard records...

...Around Baltimore alone, ships lost propulsion nearly two dozen times in the three years before the tragedy last month, the Post review found — including a November 2021 incident in which a 981-foot container ship lost propulsion for 15 minutes soon after it passed under the Key Bridge...
 
Can't say I'm surprised. Merchant ships are built to a price, so they are not fitted out for graceful degradation. Many have a single large diesel as the prime mover. If that chokes, chaos follows.
 
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