The Key Bridge Collapse - A Black Swan Event?

 

Last night a huge container ship rammed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and collapsed the bridge, taking with it a number of vehicles and tossing people into the frigid waters of the bay. Former National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, went to X (the former social media site known as Twitter), calling the bridge collapse a Black Swan event. A Black Swan Event is an unexpected major event that has unpredictable large scale impact. A Black Swan event is one that in hindsight could have been predicted, but seems so unlikely that we really don't think it will happen. 

As a Black Swan event, the Key Bridge disaster was entirely predictable. Some day, quite by chance, there was every chance that a giant container ship in the harbor would lose power, go astray and crash into the bridge. Ships move. Bridges don't. And bridges have been known fall before due to other factors like earthquakes, age, and structural issues. A surprising number of ships and barges have struck and damaged or collapsed a bridge. These incidents don't get beyond the local news in most cases if there is not a substantial loss of life, so we are therefore confident, perhaps more so than is warranted, that the ship guidance systems, trained captains and harbormasters would perfectly prevent such events. So, though it's predictable that such a thing could happen, it still comes at a surprise. After such a huge event, people get all a twitter and the ripples of the shock of the event pass through delicately intertwined social, economic and government systems. We should be resilient enough to resist knee jerk reactions to big scale traumatic events, but, though we should be able to, most of us don't. One can always tell folks, "Hey, don't panic," but people will panic anyway. 

Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse
Wikimedia Commons

But it's not like bridges haven't collapsed before. The Scottish railroad bridge over the River Tay in
a violent storm in 1879, collapsed carrying a train load of passengers to the bottom of the Firth of Forth. The engineer had failed to consider wind loading from storm winds when he designed the bridge. It was a shock, but it wasn't unpredictable had someone calculated wind loading into the design as it has ever since the tragedy. In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed into Puget Sound in a 40 mph wind due to a design that, like the Tay Bridge, also failed to take into account the lateral pressure of the wind on the suspension bridge and the need to consider both aerodynamic and resonance factors in the design. A dog was killed.

As recently as 2007, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13. In 1989, a massive earthquake collapse sections of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge and caused 63 deaths, nearly 3,800 injuries, and an estimated $6 billion in property damage. So despite our confident reliance on bridges, they do unexpectedly fail.

Strikes on bridges by ships have happened before: 

• In 2007, the container ship M/V Cosco Busan struck one of the towers of the western span of the rebuilt San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge because of a “pilot’s blunder in the fog,”. The bridge didn't collapse, but it was a near thing.  
• In 1974, a barge struck the Endom bridge over the Ouachita River in Monroe Louisiana and knocked it down. Thank God it was a swing bridge and was open. The inebriated tugboat captain rammed a heavy barge into a span of the bridge, collapsing it and leaving a police cruiser stranded on the center swing span. The barge rammed Pier No. 3, the rest pier for the western end of the swing span and the eastern pier for the Petit through truss No. 3. According to the local paper, after the barge hit the pier, "the span twisted and rolled to one side and collapsed into the river. It happened in the middle of the night so no one was on the bridge. It did, however, demonstrate once again that boats can knock down bridges. I drove over the adjacent Interstate highway bridge the next morning and saw a bridge I had driven over many times lying in the river. since then have avoided being on bridges when a ship was passing underneath. 
• In 2009, a vessel pushing eight barges rammed into the Popp’s Ferry Bridge in Biloxi, Mississippi, resulting in a 150-foot section of the bridge collapsing into the bay. 
• In 1998, a tow boat, The Anne Holly rammed the center span of the Eads Bridge in St. Louis Harbor . Eight barges broke loose. Three of them hit a gambling vessel permanently moored below the bridge. Fifty people suffered minor injuries.
  
• In 2002, A barge hit the Interstate 40 bridge over the Arkansas River at Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, collapsing a 500-foot section of road and plunging vehicles into the water. Fourteen people died and 11 were injured.
• In 1993, A towboat, pushing an empty hopper barge, hit a support tier of the Judge William Seeber Bridge in New Orleans. Two spans collapsed onto the barge and two cars carrying three people along with the four-lane bridge deck dropped into the canal. One person died and two were seriously injured.
• In 2001, a tugboat and barge struck the Queen Isabella Causeway in Port Isabel, Texas, causing the midsection of the bridge to drop 80 feet into the bay Eight people died as unsuspecting drivers drove off into the hole.
• In 1980, the Summit Venture was navigating the tortuous Tampa Bay shipping channel, when a sudden, blinding squall knocked out the ship’s radar. The ship sheared off a support of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, dropping a 1,400-foot section of concrete roadway during the morning rush hour. Seven vehicles, including a bus with 26 aboard, fell 150 feet into the water. Thirty-five people died.
  
• In 1993, a string of barges being pushed by a towboat in dense fog hit and knocked the Big Bayou Canot railroad bridge out of line near Mobile, Alabama. In minutes, an Amtrak train with 220 people aboard derailed on the displaced bridge, killing 47 and injuring 103.

And of course we will see an outburst of conspiracy theories from all the usual people after this latest tragedy. As it turns out, many people are just naturally fearful of randomness. They would much rather believe this was a deliberate attack by evil human beings, rather than cope with the fact that it happened due to blind chance. Random events really freak such people at. They cannot believe that everything is not planned and orchestrated by somebody somewhere. These guys would blame the Deep State if an asteroid dropped from the sky and obliterated Manhattan. They could never live with the idea that at any moment a space rock could drop on their heads or a volcano pop up in their back yard.