your very own "black-swan-event? (looking at you, @Doctor_Faustus 
)
IIRC most containers carrying goods from China return empty to China, because there isn’t enough cargo going to China to fill them.
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Not a bad summary of what is publicly known a day later. The YouTube channel does super yacht news so it is not his area of expertise.
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was there a fuel changeover involved?
Many ships run on dirty fuel, and a number of jurisdictions require them to switch their fuels before coming into port.
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The channels I usually go to for shipping info are What’s Going on with Shipping and Casual Navigation.
It is their area of expertise (Sal is a former merchant mariner and a maritime historian while Casual Navigation is a former ship master (captain) and pilot, as well as a maritime safety video producer now).
(Sorry, I didn’t want to dismiss the source you posted, I just have a visceral dislike of anyone connected to the superyacht world)
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Hmmm, I thought they ;largely returned with “recycling”, but that was largely a scam and has ended. So yes, ok, I think you are right a lot of cargo containers return to China empty…
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I estimate, based on the published speed and weight of the MV Dali, that the impact force was in the range of 30 million pounds.
Slugs. Slugs is the unit of force! Holy crap, who still uses imperial/American units in physics? It’s like a prescription for a guaranteed brain aneurysm.
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Not tugboats; instead they use harbor pilots to guide them in and out of ports. They are local mariners who know the waters, the safe routes through them, and the local procedures.
This ship had two pilots on board at the time of the crash.
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Slugs are a mass unit, and are defined in terms of pounds force.
(I studied engineering in Canada, and we had to be conversant in both systems of measure. It was every bit as horrible as you say…look how the slug can trap you at the end of that pdf! 
)
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Drone Survey:
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Just saw this comparison
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it seems a little misleading though. the post above mentions that baltimore upgraded to new panamax size. which, if i understand correctly, is about that 2006 size
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That’s the port, though, not the bridge.
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i’m not discounting that the bridge needed better protection - even regardless of ship size ( because while i’m not an engineer, i can’t imagine any large vessel striking the support would have been good. )
it’s just that ship size chart implies those largest kinds of ships are - or even could have been - involved here, and they’re not
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But halfway down the chart (where New Panamax ships would sit) still impresses the point pretty clearly that ships using Baltimore Harbor are many, many times bigger than when the Key bridge was built.
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Exactly. As ships got bigger, the infrastructure should have gotten bigger to support that. The government and the shipping companies should have split the cost. But no, spending money is wrong so infrastructure never gets improved until something bad happens.
Kudos to the Biden admin for making investments in that area, but too much more needs to happen.
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i just feel the actual facts are important without need for hyperbole.
here’s the ship. still huge. 300 meters, 116,851 max tonnage. but again with the building sizes, it’s misrepresented.
those larger sizes exist, but they don’t appear at baltimore
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apparently when ny upgraded its port, they installed large protective barriers around bridge supports; but baltimore didn’t. i’d be curious why… regulations at the time, state policy, or simply lack of care?
from an interview i heard, it sounded like they ( the powers that be ) could have protected the bridge, but didn’t
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Huh? It’s the still functionally the same size as the Empire State building, minus the tiny pointy spire and antenna. It’s an apt comparison, not hyperbole.
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if the chart ended there, i would have agreed with you
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