Buttigieg: Possibly No Bridge In Existence Could Withstand Impact From Biggest Ships

LOADING ERROR LOADING WASHINGTON — Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday said it was unclear that any bridge in existence could have withstood the impact of a modern freighter that the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore suffered earlier this week, which demolished the structure and shuttered the city’s port. “A bridge like this one, completed in the 1970s, was simply not made to withstand a direct impact on a critical support pier from a vessel that weighs about 200 million pounds, orders of magnitude bigger than cargo ships that were in service in that region at the time that bridge was first built.” A Singapore-flagged container ship lost power Tuesday and struck a key structural component of the bridge, sending it tumbling into the Patapsco River where it enters Chesapeake Bay. Buttigieg said rebuilding the bridge would obviously take much longer than reopening the port, and that he expected President Joe Biden would soon ask for money from Congress to start the project. Buttigieg, though, said it’s unclear whether even those features would protect a bridge from the largest, heaviest ships in use today, the “NeoPanamax” freighters constructed to take advantage of the new, wider set of locks on the Panama Canal.