Latest news with #JenniferL.Homendy
USA Today
24-03-2025
- General
- USA Today
Span of disaster: US bridges face deadly risk of ship ramming, study finds
Span of disaster: US bridges face deadly risk of ship ramming, study finds Show Caption Hide Caption NTSB recommends bridge risk assessments after Baltimore investigation The NTSB said Baltimore officials who oversee the Francis Scott Key Bridge did not understand the bridge's vulnerability to collisions. A year after Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by an errant cargo ship, a new study indicates such incidents are more likely to occur in the U.S. than commonly known, with potentially similar catastrophic consequences. Some of the nation's busiest bridges are likely to be struck by ships within several decades, the study authors said, reflecting a dramatic increase over time in vessel size and shipping lane traffic. The two most vulnerable spans listed in the assessment – the Huey P. Long Bridge outside New Orleans and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge – face a likelihood of collisions of approximately every two decades. 'We have significantly underestimated the risk that large ships pose to existing bridges across the U.S.,' said Michael Shields, an associate professor of civil and systems engineering and lead investigator of the study conducted by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 'These results verify that the Key Bridge was not an aberration…. It's something we should have better seen coming and can now react to by putting appropriate corrective measures in place.' The study's preliminary findings echo a March 20 update from the National Transportation Safety Board on its investigation of the disaster. Board chair Jennifer L. Homendy faulted Maryland officials overseeing the Key Bridge for failing to recognize that the structure's vulnerability to such collisions was 30 times more than the federal standard. The MV Dali, a 984-foot container ship headed for Sri Lanka, struck a pier of the Key Bridge after losing power early on the morning of March 26, 2024, causing the structure to collapse into the Patapsco River, killing six road workers and forcing temporary closure of the Port of Baltimore. 'It was a shocking reminder of the fragility of the engineering marvels we so often consider indestructible,' the Johns Hopkins project site noted. The university's national risk assessment of bridge vulnerability was funded by the National Science Foundation's Rapid Response Program, which focuses on studies in the immediate aftermath of disaster. It focused on a central question: How likely was a disaster like this to occur? Its list of the nation's 20 most at-risk bridges includes seven bridges with a probability of being struck by ships every 50 years or less, including the Huey P. Long Bridge (17 years), the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (22 years), the Crescent City Connection in New Orleans (34 years), the Beltway 8 Bridge in Houston (35 years) and the Hale Boggs Memorial Bridge west of New Orleans (37 years). 82597412007 The findings are unsettling to commuters like Darby Li Po Price, a professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Oakland's Merritt College who drives across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge about once a month. He's sailed the waters underneath the bridge and knows how problematic they can be. 'We have a complex water system,' he said. 'The winds and currents are a lot more dramatic. And we have fog.' Price wasn't too surprised, then, to learn the bridge was among the nation's most at-risk spans of being hit by a ship, though the discovery did prompt some gallows humor. 'Maybe it just means I'll drive across the bridge a little faster,' he said. 'I'd rather risk a speeding ticket than the bridge collapsing while I'm on it.' Shields said the risk is incredibly low for the average daily commuter. 'You're talking about an event that will potentially occur over a span of decades,' he said. 'But if you compound that and say, what are the chances that this will occur in my lifetime ― the chances for an individual traveler are very small, but the risk to society and communities is very real.' Why the likelihood of collisions has risen Two primary factors contribute to greater than expected frequency of ship-bridge collisions, experts say: the immensity of today's ships and higher volumes of traffic prompted by the explosion of global trade. 'These are really large ships that you don't want anywhere near the piers of a bridge,' Shields said. 'They will be damaging, and it will be a consequential event.' Many large bridges, Shields said, were built more than 50 years ago, when ship traffic was one third or less of the volume it is now; meanwhile, ships are several times larger than were at the time, 'so you're seeing a much higher volume of really large ships.' The study focused on major bridges with high traffic including ships more than 150 meters long, or just shy of 500 feet. That narrowed the review to about 400 of the nation's roughly 80,000 bridges. Project engineers evaluated several factors to determine the likelihood of ship collisions for each bridge, including traffic patterns combined with the probability of ships veering off course and the chances that those that do will strike bridge piers. The researchers mined 16 years of U.S. Coast Guard data detailing the position, velocity, status and heading of ships in U.S. waterways, cross-referencing hundreds of millions of data points with port and bridge data kept by the National Bridge Inventory. They also considered the reasons a ship might deviate from its path, whether it be pilot error, weather conditions or a loss of power, using a base aberrancy rate calculated by the American Association for State Highway and Transportation Officials. Finally, they looked at the protections in place to prevent ships from striking piers – for example, arrays of so-called dolphins, pilings embedded into the seabed and visible above water level to aid navigation. Abi Aghayere, a professor of structural engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said the increasing size of vessels in navigable waterways makes it imperative that piers be protected from ship strikes. Aghayere, who is unaffiliated with the Johns Hopkins study, said an examination of Coast Guard data conducted by one of his students found 2,100 reports of engine failure within a mile of the U.S. coast or its waterways in the last 14 years; about 100 of those occurred in the area between the Key Bridge and the Delaware Memorial Bridge 70 miles away, he said. Meanwhile, just 2,360 of the more than 4,200 bridges with piers listed in the Federal Highway Administration's national bridge inventory, Aghayere said, feature protective dolphins, fenders or islands. 'There are at least 1,800 bridges without any functional pier protection,' he said. 'What is even more worrisome is that many of these unprotected bridges are fracture critical, which means that if one member of the bridge fails in tension, the whole structure could suddenly come crashing down.' 1980 Florida bridge collapse 'a wake-up call' That's what happened in the case of the Key Bridge, which the Johns Hopkins study determined would have been among the nation's 10 most vulnerable bridges, with a 48-year likelihood of experiencing a collision. A pair of dolphins were placed too distantly from bridge piers to be effective, Shields said. According to the study, vessel collisions caused 17 major bridge collapses in the U.S. between 1960 and 2011 – or every three years – with varying consequences. In 1980, 35 people died when the Sunshine Skyway Bridge connecting St. Petersburg and Bradenton, Florida, collapsed after being hit by a freighter during a sudden thunderstorm; in 1993, an Amtrak passenger train derailed, killing 47, after barges pushed by a towboat lost in thick fog struck the Big Bayou Canot Bridge near Mobile, Alabama. In 2002, a freight barge struck a pier of Oklahoma's Interstate 40 bridge after the towboat's captain lost consciousness, collapsing a section of the bridge and killing 14. 'The important point is not whether it will occur every 17 years or every 75 years,' Shields said. 'It's that it's happening way too often.' The Sunshine Skyway's collapse was a wake-up call, Shields said, prompting new federal standards issued in 1994 requiring bridge designs to have no more than a 1-in-10,000 probability of collapse due to ship collision. However, no provision mandated that existing bridges needed to be retroactively protected. 'Most of these bridges were never designed with ship collision in mind to begin with,' Shields said, noting that just one of the assessment's 20 most at-risk bridges was built after 1994; most were built between the 1930s and 1970s. That's evident, he said, in some of the most at-risk bridges, some of which are shorter spanned bridges with piers nearer shipping channels challenged by the length of the vessels themselves. In the case of the Key Bridge, the width of the span was only slightly longer than the ship passing through it, Shields said. Meanwhile, bridges with lower risks – for instance, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Staten Island, New York, for which the assessment predicts a ship collision every 362 years – have longer spans and piers farther removed from shipping channels. Some busy bridges such as Minnesota's Deluth Lift Bridge and California's Vincent Thomas Bridge escaped the list altogether because their supports are on land. That's in contrast to the two most at-risk bridges, the Huey P. Long and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, each of which has at least four piers in the water where shipping traffic passes through. 'For every pier you put in the water, that's an additional risk,' Shields said. 'The physics take over' While the Johns Hopkins study examined the probabilities of collision, it stopped short of considering collapse because of the unique factors underlying individual bridges; analyzing even one bridge for that result, Shields said, is a mammoth undertaking. As part of last week's update, the NTSB urged bridge owners and operators nationwide to conduct risk assessments, identifying 68 U.S. spans for which it said evaluations had not been done. Shields said he hopes his team's findings, along with the NTSB recommendations, spur port authorities and bridge owners to follow up and act to minimize such collisions. Local authorities, he said, could also employ more extreme measures such as requiring very large vessels to be towed under certain bridges. Christopher Higgins, a professor of structural engineering at Oregon State University in Corvallis, said a lack of protective measures are likely more to blame than structural deficiencies. 'The main way you avoid ship impact, especially with large container ships, is with tugboats,' said Higgins, also unaffiliated with the Johns Hopkins study. 'If you have a ship with electrical difficulties and you lose power there isn't much you can do. The physics take over at that point and that ship's going to go where it's going to go.' Aghayere, of Drexel University, said the cost of protecting bridge supports pales when compared to the consequences of collapse. For instance, he said, while it would cost $100 million to install dolphins protecting the Delaware Memorial Bridge against ship strikes, the cost of replacing the Key Bridge is estimated at nearly $2 billion. 'I believe these incidents are more likely than we think,' Aghayere said. Given the scale of tragedy that could have happened had the Key Bridge been struck during rush hour and that so many bridges are susceptible to collapse if struck, 'it's all the more imperative that something be done,' he said. Ryan Zamarripa, who manages grants under the U.S. Economic Development Administration's Build Back Better Regional Challenge, fears a rash of recent federal cutbacks could affect the ability of ports to prevent such tragedies from happening again. 'Given the Trump administration's overt hostility toward federal agencies and civil servants responsible for keeping infrastructure like our ports running smoothly, catastrophes like what happened at the Key Bridge are at risk of increasing in frequency over the near term,' he said. The resulting chaos, he said, is 'severely disrupting the highly complex logistics required by modern-day commerce and transportation.' Shields said there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Each bridge will require its own set of protective measures and protocols. 'You're never going to build a bridge that can withstand the impact of the Empire State Building, in all reality,' Shields said. 'What you really need to do is put protections in place to ensure that ship never gets anywhere near the piers to begin with.'
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Could a vessel strike cause the Newport Bridge to collapse? What a federal report says
A year after the deadly collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland, federal officials are warning that dozens of bridges around the country – including one in Rhode Island – could face a similar risk. National Transportation Safety Board officials investigating the Baltimore bridge catastrophe issued a new report this week saying that 68 bridges in 19 states haven't been properly evaluated to determine their risk of collapsing. Some of the bridges included in the report are among the nation's most popular and heavily-trafficked, like California's Golden Gate Bridge and New York's Brooklyn Bridge. One bridge in Rhode Island made the list. According to the NTSB report, the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge could be at risk of collapsing because it hasn't been properly evaluated. The bridge, which is named after late Sen. Claiborne Pell, connects Newport to Jamestown, carrying Route 138 over Narragansett Bay. The span first opened in 1969 and is the longest suspension bridge in New England. The ramps to the bridge were reconstructed in 2023 to demolish the so-called "highway to nowhere" overpass, The bridge has also recently undergone a multi-phase road deck rehabilitation project. The bridge is also Rhode Island's only toll bridge, and the physical toll booths were recently demolished to convert to all-electronic tolling through E-ZPass. NTSB officials said the new report indicates where authorities haven't properly assessed bridges to see if they are at risk of collapsing. 'Frankly we've been sounding the alarm on this since the tragedy occurred,' NTSB Chair Jennifer L. Homendy said during a press conference. 'We need action. Public safety depends on it.' The agency said the 68 bridges in the report are not certain to collapse. Rather, they need to be evaluated to determine whether they meet the acceptable risk threshold based on guidance from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. The NTSB said the Key Bridge was found to be almost 30 times above the acceptable risk threshold. It collapsed after being struck by a container ship on March 26, 2024, killing six people. This story was updated to correct an inaccuracy. Melina Khan is a trending reporter for the USA TODAY Network - New England, which serves more than a dozen affiliated publications across New England. She can be reached at MKhan@ This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Feds say Pell Bridge needs to be assessed for risk of collapse
USA Today
21-03-2025
- General
- USA Today
Maryland officials should have known Key Bridge was vulnerable: NTSB
Maryland officials should have known Key Bridge was vulnerable: NTSB A top federal safety official said that state officials failed to conduct an assessment of the bridge's risk of collapse. Show Caption Hide Caption NTSB recommends bridge risk assessments after Baltimore investigation The NTSB said Baltimore officials who oversee the Francis Scott Key Bridge did not understand the bridge's vulnerability to collisions. Maryland officials overseeing the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore failed to understand the bridge's vulnerability to collisions like the one that caused it to collapse catastrophically nearly a year ago, federal officials said Thursday. Bridge authorities should have known that risk of collapse due to collision was 30 times above the accepted federal threshold, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer L. Homendy told reporters in an update on the agency's investigation into the disaster. Homendy's update on agency's findings come nearly a year after Dali - a 984-foot container ship - lost power and struck bridge supports, causing the piece of critical infrastructure to fall into the Patapsco River and kill six construction workers. She slammed the Maryland Transportation Authority for not conducting an assessment to understand vulnerabilities. 'The MdTA would have been aware that this bridge was at risk,' Homendy said. 'MdTA would have had information to proactively identify strategies to prevent the risk of collapse and loss of life.' Homendy urged bridge owners nationwide to conduct risk assessments. 68 bridges around the country in 19 states have not had assessments done, according to the NTSB. American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials established federal risk assessment guidance in 1991, authorities said. How Francis Scott Key Bridge was lost: A minute-by-minute visual analysis of the collapse What guidance were they supposed to follow? Risk assessment guidance Homendy says Maryland authorities should have followed was developed in response to another catastrophic bridge collision— the collapse of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa, Florida, in 1980. A 1,200-foot span of the bridge collapsed after a 20,000-ton freighter struck a bridge support during a thunderstorm. 35 people died. National transportation authorities responded by developing what Homendy called a 'mathematical risk model' used to determine a bridge's risk of collapse. Factors involved in the calculation, according to Homendy, include everything from data on the speed and traffic of vessels in the water to bridge and water channel geometry. The guidance was developed well after the bridge opened in 1977 but Maryland officials still should have done an assessment then, Homendy said, or when transportation authorities recommended bridge owners do the assessment in 2009. Federal Highway Administration officials have required new bridges to be built using the risk assessment guidance since 1994, according to the NTSB. What did Maryland officials know? Homendy lambasted Maryland transportation officials for not conducting a risk assessment and also not even having the necessary data to conduct an assessment. 'What's frustrating is not only did MdTA fail to conduct the assessment on the Key Bridge, nor did they provide the NTSB with the data used to conduct the assessment,' Homendy said. 'We asked them for that data; they didn't have it.' The failure of Maryland authorities to conduct an assessment, she noted, comes despite the role they played in shaping it in the first place. Homendy said they were on the developing agency's executive committee in 1991 and served specifically on a committee focused on bridges. As of last October, Maryland authorities had also not done a risk assessment for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Homendy said, a four-mile long set of parallel bridges crossing the estuary. The eastbound bridge opened in 1952; the westbound in 1973. A Maryland Transportation Authority spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. What other bridges are potentially at risk? Homendy warned that 68 bridges in 19 states have not done risk assessments. The NTSB will issue an urgent recommendation to bridge authorities to do an assessment, the agency chair said. Among the authorities she named for reporters Thursday were: the Bay Area Toll Authority, CalTrans, the Florida Department of Transportation and the New York City Department of Transportation. Homendy said the need to understand what level of risk bridges face has grown as container ships carry more and more weight. A vessel in 1950 carried some 800 containers. Today they can carry up to 24,000, she said. 'Frankly we've been sounding the alarm on this since the tragedy occurred,' Homendy said. 'We need action, public safety depends on it.' More: Francis Scott Key Bridge to begin rebuilding after Baltimore collapse Michael Loria is a national reporter on the USA TODAY breaking news desk. Contact him at mloria@ @mchael_mchael or on Signal at (202) 290-4585.
USA Today
21-03-2025
- General
- USA Today
68 bridges in 19 states potentially at risk: Is one near you?
68 bridges in 19 states potentially at risk: Is one near you? A top federal transportation official is warning bridge authorities to assess what risk the critical infrastructure faces in the light of the investigation into the Baltimore-area bridge catastrophe. Show Caption Hide Caption Baltimore Bridge Collapse: a timeline of the incident The container ship that hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland appeared to lose power two times before hitting the bridge. Federal officials investigating the catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, warned on Thursday that 68 bridges nationwide could be at similar risk. The bridges that National Transportation Safety Board officials say potentially face similar risk of collapse include some of the most iconic and heavily-trafficked spans in the nation: the Golden Gate Bridge, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and major New York City bridges. The NTSB warning came during an update on its investigation into the Key bridge disaster. The Baltimore-area critical infrastructure collapsed into the Patapsco River nearly a year ago when Dali - a 984-foot container ship - lost power and struck bridge supports. Six construction workers died. National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer L. Homendy warned that dozens of authorities nationwide haven't assessed bridges to see what chance of catastrophe they face. 'Frankly we've been sounding the alarm on this since the tragedy occurred,' Homendy said. 'We need action. Public safety depends on it.' NTSB investigators found that the Maryland Transit Authority had never done a risk assessment of the Key bridge. A federal postmortem found its risk of disaster was 30 times above established guidance. Bridge authorities haven't assessed 68 bridges across 19 states, Homendy warned. What bridges are potentially at risk? Bridges that could potentially face high levels of risk of collapse from collision span the entire country. In New York, 13 bridges have not been assessed; eight in Louisiana; seven in California and Texas; six in Ohio; four in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; three in Delaware and Maryland; two in Florida, New Jersey and Oregon; and one in Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin. Among them are major New York City bridges including the Verrazano, Brooklyn, George Washington, Manhattan and Williamsburg. Also on the list are the Chicago Skyway, Mackinac Bridge in Michigan and Huey P. Long Bridge near New Orleans. A full list of the bridges is available in an NTSB report on the Key bridge collapse. The NTSB said it will issue an urgent recommendation to bridge authorities to do an assessment. Where did the assessment come from? Among the bridges on the unassessed list is the same bridge whose collapse in 1980 spurred the development of the risk assessment standard — the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa, Florida. A 1,200-foot span of the bridge collapsed after a 20,000-ton freighter struck a bridge support during a thunderstorm. 35 people died. It was rebuilt in 1982. National transportation authorities responded by developing what Homendy called a 'mathematical risk model' used to determine a bridge's risk of collapse. Factors involved in the calculation, according to Homendy, include everything from data on the speed and traffic of vessels in the water to bridge and water channel geometry. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials published the risk assessment guidance in 1994. Why haven't they been assessed? Bridges that haven't been assessed share something in common — they're old, dating as far back as 1883 in the case of the Brooklyn Bridge. New bridges have to undergo assessments. Federal Highway Administration officials have required authorities to do so since 1994, according to the NTSB. But many older bridges have not been held to the same standard though the NTSB has recommended multiple times that authorities perform assessments. 'When we issue urgent recommendations, we're saying there's an immediate risk,' Homendy said. 'You need to take action.' Michael Loria is a national reporter on the USA TODAY breaking news desk. Contact him at mloria@ @mchael_mchael or on Signal at (202) 290-4585.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- New York Times
After Baltimore Collapse, Risk Reviews Urged for Dozens of U.S. Bridges
Maryland had not conducted a recommended risk assessment on the Baltimore bridge that collapsed after it was struck by a ship last March, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Thursday. In a news briefing, the board's chairwoman, Jennifer L. Homendy, said if Maryland officials had conducted the assessment, they would have found that the bridge, the Francis Scott Key, was at serious risk of collapse from a strike by a large ship. Six workers on a crew doing overnight repairs to the bridge roadway died in the collapse, which paralyzed one of the nation's busiest ports for days. Dozens of other bridges across the country, including landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, have not had the same recommended assessment, and thus carry an unknown level of risk, Ms. Homendy said. 'Frankly, we've been sounding the alarm on this since the tragedy occurred,' she said at the news conference in Washington. Investigators with the board found that dozens of bridges in 19 states had not been assessed for risk of collapse, even though the volume of vessel traffic passing underneath these bridges suggested a strike by a ship was a distinct possibility. The N.T.S.B. has contacted the operators of these bridges — in most cases, state transportation departments and regional port authorities — to urge them to conduct assessments and, if needed, come up with measures to reduce the risk of collapse. Had officials with the state of Maryland done this, Ms. Homendy said, 'the collapse could have been prevented.' The Maryland Transportation Authority did not respond to messages seeking comment. The report comes almost exactly a year after the Dali, a 984-foot-long container ship, crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The federal government sued the owner and operator of the Dali last September, announcing a settlement roughly a month later, with the defendants paying more than $100 million to cover the cost of the federal response. The F.B.I. opened a criminal investigation into the incident last year, though details have not been made public. The Dali, which has returned to transcontinental shipping after undergoing repairs, is registered in Singapore and owned by Grace Ocean Private Ltd. and managed by Synergy Marine Group, both of which are based in Singapore. The process of replacing the bridge is well underway. Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland has unveiled the design of a new bridge, the state Department of Transportation has entered into contracts with construction firms and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has issued permits. Construction of the new bridge at the site is expected to begin in early fall. A federal spending package that was passed late last year includes the cost of rebuilding the bridge, though the state is continuing to pursue the Dali's owner and operator in court to force them to pay for damages. Along with the state, victims' families are suing for wrongful death claims, local governments are suing for economic damage and various private businesses are suing for economic loss. Days after the collapse, the Dali's owners and operator petitioned in admiralty court to limit their damages, an issue that needs to be resolved before much of this litigation can proceed. A federal judge in Maryland has scheduled a trial on this question for June 2026.
