The Wire producer and longtime Baltimore chronicler David Simon ripped into conspiracists spreading unfounded theories that today’s tragic and deadly collapse of the city’s Francis Scott Key Bridge could be a terrorist attack. Simon, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun before creating Homicide: Life On The Street, reserved a special ire for Marjorie Taylor Greene, […]
My current conspiracy theory as to the accident:
The ship lost main power because the corporation that leases it doesn’t pay for sufficient maintenance because that would eat into executive bonuses and shareholder dividends. The ship lost control at a pretty pivotal time with no safety measures whatsoever in place, because “most of the time they aren’t needed.” And because this is the chronically negligent maritime industry, not much will be done about it industry wide.
Casual Navigation has (amazingly) already made a video about this accident and hypothesizes that the geography of the channels in the harbor may have pulled it to starboard. Had they not lost power they could have corrected, but it looks like happened at the worst possible moment.
Believe it or not, the insurance companies drive maritime safety requirements since they hate having to pay out for things like this. The classification societies that regulate and inspect ships to approve for insurance coverage have very strict and well thought out safety requirements that get better any time a new failure mode is discovered.
I personally think this one was human error in an emergency situation.
Theory: They lost primary electric service and began a slight drift to starboard. When they got backup power online, they began a crash reverse to slow down. This would hinder rudder control since the ship was still going forward and now just creating turbulence with the prop. Reverse would torque the stern to port, swinging the bow to starboard, as we saw. The bow thruster was offline due to the power issues.
Insurance companies, being for-profit institutions, are poorly suited to manage industry safety.
As for theories as to exactly what happened in terms of “the power failure caused the rudder to remain 4 degrees to port and stopped the bow thruster, causing the ship to veer off course” or whatever…I’ll wait until Brick Immortar reads me the NTSB report.
Being a pilot (as in an airplane driver, not a harbor pilot) as long as I have, I’ve had this conversation a lot:
“Did you see that airplane crash in the news?”
“No.”
“Here look:” 3 seconds to look at a hastily googled headline and a badly taken photo of what looks like a mangled Piper Cherokee wing sticking up from behind something “What do you think happened?”