President Biden vowed Tuesday to rebuild Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it collapsed into the water when a cargo ship rammed into it, echoing what some Maryland officials said earlier but adding that he expects the federal government to foot the bill.
“It’s my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect the Congress to support my effort,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “This is going to take some time, but the people of Baltimore can count on us though to stick with them at every step of the way until the port is reopen and the bridge is rebuilt.”
He said he spoke with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) on Tuesday morning, as well as Maryland officials including its congressional delegation and two U.S. senators. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg traveled to the Baltimore site.
I’m pretty sure they were going to do that with or without him. the party responsible for the incident should be the one fitting the bill
Yes, but ascertaining liability and securing a payout is a process that may take many years of being dragged through the courts, if it is even successful at all.
The government making money available immediately does help get things going with less uncertainty about who can foot the bill.
this is all good… the problem is that, with the issue solved, nobody will put pressure to get that money back
look at the BP spill, they barely took a hit on their profit margin and left a mess that nobody is looking at anymore
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Yeah that’s a great way to get an immediate injunction from a judge. That’s not how these things work.
they think the shipping company owns it’s cargo?
I seriously doubt people who say that kind of thing have thought this through for more than about 4 seconds. It’s like having a conversation with a Michael Bay movie.
Damn, I had to drop my phone so I didn’t feel that burn myself.
Unless you’re a pirate 🦜
I’m gonna ignore all the legalities that would have to be worked around to even attempt that plan, and skip straight to the final step of selling the seized goods.
Not sure that fire damaged and/or waterlogged goods are gonna fetch a good price. The ship burned, and partially sank.
Why didnt the bridge have insurance?
That’s the federal government
… why?
Bridges are fucking expensive, I’m not certain if the government will be able to recover a significant portion of the cost.
Someone doesn’t remember the 9/11 responder funding, hurricane funding, the rhetoric around COVID funding, etc. etc.
Footing the bill… but yes. Then again, maybe with the amount of shipping traffic a tunnel makes more sense.
We have two nearby tunnels. They’ll be packed now. But hazmat trucks and larger oversized vehicles can’t go through tunnels. There’s also a longer way around the northwest of the city, but that’ll be crowded now too. That’s where everyone lives. The bridge over the river was the interstate trucking corridor from DC to Philly up to New York and Boston.
The problem was the boat. It has done this kind of shit before in 2016.
… and the bridge. Evidently there’s no safety structure around the support that would have prevented a ship from hitting the bridge.
They thought about installing bumpers but decided it was too expensive. Gotta wonder how the cost compares to replacing the whole fucking bridge.
Remember everything seems obvious in hindsight. I’m sure there’s a significant number of bridges with no bumpers have operated without incident for their lifetimes.
A significant number of bridges that would block a major port if they collapsed? I doubt it.
Pretty sure the HRBT down in Hampton roads could cause such a blockage. We live in a capitalistic society, why spend a dollar to protect for a risk that could only happen once every couple hundred thousand ships tends to be the usual thought process unfortunately.
That’s actually exactly why it (and the MMBT and the CBBT) is a bridge tunnel, so that a failure cannot block the port, military base, and shipyards
…this is a joke, right? I don’t know anything about bridge engineering or shipping, but what kind of bumper could stop a couple-million-pound ship, even if it was unpowered?
Probably a large fender system designed to get the ship to slow down by breaking apart to absorb the energy.
Do you understand HOW BIG it needs to be and how deep the anchoring need to be to do that? It would be more expensive than building the bridge to not have single points of failure
Every bridge in the SF Bay Area has fenders and the Bay Bridge had a container ship hit the fenders. The bridge was unaffected but the ship had a hole torn in it which led to a huge oil spill (Cosco-Busan oil spill). Repairing the fender itself only took 1 month and $1.5 million. IMO any bridge that ships pass under it needs appropriately sized fenders for those ships.
It will be a very big system, but it will be cheaper than building double the piers as you described.
And it is still common today to design bridges with single points of failure today. You just increase the factor of safety for it.
Presumably it would mostly redirect any ship, rather than try to just stop it. Or if it’s possibly to build shallows around it, you can use the weight of the ship against it
The fenders on the SF Bay Bridge have successfully prevented damage to the bridge twice so far. Every bridge in the SF Bay Area has fenders to prevent exactly what happened in Baltimore. They work.
Wow, TIL. That’s amazing!
It was a 70’s bridge built to take collisions from 70’s boats of 1/3 the weight.
Bridges can and should be retrofitted as their use and environment change.
Well, that’s also a problem, yes