Chesapeake Channel, a bit further south, showed only about 0.5 to 0.7 kt ebb at the time (about -16 hours). The ebb at the bridge would have been far less. Transiting in the same direction as the current can be challenging during manoeuvring, but likely not a big factor here. Mind you, say 0.2 kt x the ship’s displacement likely did add to the damage.
The black smoke can be an indication of incompletely burnt bunker fuel in the exhaust. That can be normal at high RPM or full throttle, and if so, I imagine while desperately in reverse. I suspect that before I suspect fire, in particular because it dissipated immediately after the collision.
There’s even a term for this…“Panamax” - the maximum size that can fit in the locks of the Panama Canal* - which has generally governed the size of cargo ships since the canal was built. The Port of Baltimore is one of the few east coast ports that recently upgraded their facilities to handle the newer “New Panamax” class ships. New York actually raised the deck height of the Bayonne Bridge 64 feet to allow for bigger/taller container ships to pass (very similar architecture to the Francis Scott Key Bridge).
For comparison, the Ever Given is a class G ship which can hold over 20,000 containers. It’s too big for the Panama Canal but can (sometimes) traverse the Suez. The Dali which just crashed in Baltimore is a class E and can only carry 10,000 containers.
*Back in 2015 I visited the canal zone and had dinner at the restaurant overlooking the Miraflores locks. The ships were so close it seemed like you could lean out and touch them. Here’s a selfie with one of the “mules” pulling a container ship through the lock
Unless they can prove that this was somebody else’s fault, there is no way the shipping company survives. Not just the Billions to fix the bridge, but all the shipping companies that have ships trapped in the harbor. All the companies that have to arrange other, more expensive shipping ports for their goods, etc.
Yep. Having worked in combustion systems and power generation, “fire” never occurred to me and it still doesn’t feel like a noteworthy possibility.
The smoke is absolutely consistent with a very fuel-rich start of the drives and / or full throttle - pushing all the fuel you can through the engine and letting the airflow do its best to keep up. Serious “Hail Mary” stuff. I saw that black plume spewing out the funnels and my heart broke a bit for the poor buggers doing everything they could to stop.
Barring “The extremely opaque nature of global ship-owning”, as the nytimes puts it
According to Singapore company records, Grace Ocean is owned by the British Virgin Islands-based Grace Ocean Investment Limited. Lloyds List, which first reported Grace Ocean’s infractions in 2021, reported that Grace Ocean Investment is based in Hong Kong. But the company matching the name and address in Lloyd’s database dissolved in 2015, according to Hong Kong company records.
The Singapore company has four directors — two Filipino citizens, a Singaporean and a Japanese person — with all listing addresses in Singapore, records show.
Alexandra Wrage, the president and founder of Trace, a group focused on anti-bribery, compliance and good governance, said that ship ownership structures are designed to maximize opacity and minimize accountability.
Knots: an extremely rough but good enough approximation is each is about 1MPH. So 8 isn’t very fast until you look at the number of containers on the thing and figure each empty container weights what a car does, each pair of full containers probably weighs what a 18 wheeler does. Cargo ships rarely go anywhere with empty containers. So 8 knots you could out pedal with a bicycle. Maybe you could outrun on foot. However given the weight if it touches your house the house isn’t damaged, it is gone.
(edit: had misspelled “full” as “fuel”, corrected it. Ok, maybe a typo. At any rate “full containers”, not fuel…)
