Dali is a massive container vessel, but much smaller than Ever Given. But she was enough to bring down the Francis Scott Key Bridge across the Patapsco River when a powerless drift made Dali dash against one of the bridge’s towers. The tumbling of the bridge into the water and onto Dali and the loss of life that happened are all in the public domain now. If the accident spelled disaster for Baltimore Port and City, the logistics industry has been at the receiving end of natural and manmade troubles for some time now.
Recovering from the Covid-imposed shutdown and supply doldrums, the shortage of containers was the initial hassle. The Israel-Hamas conflict resulted in the Houthis of Yemen targeting the ships that use the Suez Canal in their transit between Asia and Europe. This forced freighters of late to take the circumvention going around the African continent – more fuel, time and opportunity for pirates.
In the other hemisphere, the Panama Canal has been showing a worrisome shortage of water thanks to a lack of rain and global warming. Ships have to wait for longer periods to cross the channel connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The real fear is the Canal becoming non-navigable and then ocean carriers going around the South American continent to complete the east-west journey. In a nutshell, Houthis with their ‘heroics’ are already hurtling vessels to the Cape of Good Hope while around Cape Horn shall be the future refuge of carriers unable to use Panama Canal thanks to scarce water in it.
In this scenario, Dali’s fatal and destructive dalliance with Key Bridge is the last straw, err, container on the shipping industry’s back! Collateral damages in this instance are more due to the prime location where the mishap occurred. A key artery of the State of Maryland was brought down, and Baltimore Port was rendered inoperational affecting thousands of jobs and many more lives. The disruption will add to supply snarls and cost overruns not just in the US. The logical steps have been to identify what went wrong and indeed measures to avoid them in the future.
“A ship in a harbor is safe but that is not what ships are built for” is often quoted to underline the necessity of a marine vessel to take the plunge. With the size of modern ships increasing substantially, risks are also higher though technological enhancement is mitigating such exposures to an extent. It’s not just the cargo ships, even the cruise ship industry has recently seen the unveiling of the latest leviathan – Icon of the Seas – by Royal Caribbean. The trend thus towards higher, bigger and mightier is irreversible, even if questionable. Dali, after all, is not in the super mammoth category of Ever Given but proved strong enough to knock down the bridge standing tall since 1977.
Prevention is better than cure is a truism. For the shipping industry, the words of Benjamin Franklin “Beware of little expenses – a small leak will sink a great ship” holds great value to this date. Dali’ ‘s troubles started soon after leaving Baltimore Port on her long cruise to Colombo, Sri Lanka. The power went off within a few minutes and she turned to be rudderless – a damsel in distress – in no time. The crew did alert all who matter – Mayday call – and their action seems to have saved lives. While the investigation is on to pin down the cause, contaminated fuel – dysphemistic christening as ‘dirty oil’ – is the initial whipping boy. It turns out that ‘dirty oil’ has been muddling – as one would rightly expect! – with ships’ operations for quite a while. Several ships have lost power mid-ocean with the blame falling on the lack of purity of the bunker oil – the name of the fuel used by water vessels. Such incidents rarely come to light as they happen in the open sea and the crews appear to have developed an expertise in ‘rising to the occasion’ and continuing the voyage. If necessity is the mother of invention, dirty oil seems to have prodded the maritime expertise to restart the power flow of dead liners! But not when the vessel was moving at 8 knots and the victim bridge was just within shouting distance!
While there can be other reasons like mechanical breakdown, the fact that power went off, returned and disappeared again, according to experts, put the blame more clearly on the impure fuel. CNBC reports that the United Nations’ Long-Range Identification and Tracking System (LRIT) that tracks ships based on satellites and other reports, Dali had picked up fuel from two ports in China and one in South Korea before reaching Baltimore. It’s not clear how they managed to reach Baltimore without further refueling. Also, it was impossible to reach Colombo with the balance propellant assuming she didn’t visit any pump further! Thus it is possible that she was scraping the barrel literally and the sediments at the lower levels did the mischief.
In any case, ‘dirty fuel’ is a known, if not accepted, fact in the shipping industry – an area that is opaque with little oversight and accountability. The contaminants include water, gunk, dirt and debris. Operators are looking for that one fast buck with intentional adulteration happening in the absence of culpability. The Baltimore episode is likely to bring what else, but a sea change to this neglected area if the inferior oil was indeed the villain of the piece!
Another step is to improve the bridge construction technology to make the spans withstand the impact of the jumbo ships that traverse the oceans nowadays. In the 1970s when Key Bridge took birth, the ships were ‘small change’ compared to the behemoths like Dalis, not to mention the ever ultimate in Ever Given league. But then experts aver that it is impossible to fortify any bridge against the gargantuan ships that bring economies of scale to world trade.
Thus there may not be a total escape from a repeat of Baltimore. As Murphy’s Law states “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” – well sometimes for sure!
If one can suspend the disbelief: why not bridges sans pylons or towers?
