[Music] in the early morning of March 26 2024 a
large container ship called MV Dolly Departed the Port of Baltimore a few minutes later it crashed
into the Francis Scott Key bridge causing it to collapse and sending cars and people caring off
into the cold pic River below six people died and one of the busiest ports in the US is now
blocked on the surface everything points to a mechanical failure but I went deeper and deeper
into the research and I found that there's a lot more not being to
ld about their story so why
did the dolly lose power why did it drift and crash against one of the bridg main support
pillars why couldn't they stop it in time and what really caused all this let's see if we can't
figure this out together I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci this video is sponsored by Novium the dolly departs around 1:00 a.m. from the port pulled by two tugboats that put it right into
the middle of the channel headed straight for the longest suspended span of the bridge sh
e was
heading to Sri Lanka with almost 5,000 containers on board weighing almost 100,000 tons after the
tugboat leaves she speeds up to around 8.5 knots or roughly 10 m an hour at 1:24 a.m. when it's
about 2/3 of a mile away from the bridge the ship loses [Music] power everything becomes
eerily quiet something is terribly wrong do they still have rotter control we don't actually
know can they maneuver no they can't because the ship clearly starts drifting off course impelled
by the current
and the wind one minute later the ship's lights come back on but not all of them you
can see lights on the side here but the big light in the front doesn't turn back on and that's
the forast light based on maritime law ships must have navigation lights to tell other ships
where they are and where they're moving every large vessel 50 m or more in length like the
dolly which is over 300 M long must have the following one a green Port light placed on the
left side wind facing forward which id
entifies the vessel's port side to approaching vessels
a red starboard light placed on the right or starboard side a white Stern Light placed on
the stern or rear of the vessel indicating its presence and direction from behind and two Mast
headlights one on top of the rear or at Mast and one on the front or for Mast that last one was
the one that didn't turn back on initially and that's pretty significant depending on the number
of Lights you see and their configuration you can tell which w
ay the ship is moving from around 3 to
6 miles away okay now back to the accident at 125 the four Mas light comes back on on very briefly
the dolly starts drifting Southward toward the bridges pylons interestingly the footage from
Marine Traffic shows the ship accelerating to around 8.7 knots this could be a delay in the
GPS signal or it could be evidence of something else we'll get back to that here in a minute at
125 thick black smoke starts coming out of the ship's exhaust many people th
ink this was some
sort of fire on board or the engines failing but that's probably not the case this could be from
the diesel engine starting back up or from the emergency power power generators kicking in and
now we see something interesting the ship slows down but now it's completely drifting off course
does that mean they regained power and hit reverse but had no Rudder control maybe some Reports
say the ship never got propulsion back online then the power does come back at some point th
e
Maryland Bay Master orders to turn the rudder hard to the left and she drops her Port anchor
to slow the ship and force it to straighten its course it's the only way to avoid a collision
since there's no way to stop it in time at this point a ship this massive could take 1 to 10
mil to do a full stop with its propellers in full reverse and the dolly lost power only 2/3
of a mile from the bridge it's obvious that the ship begins responding since it stops veering
toward the bridge but it's
also too little too late at 128 the dolly hits the underwater support
of the Southern pylon with a big splash but keeps moving forward 3 seconds later the front tip
of the hits the pylon Square on the side3 this mat the whole Bridge just fell down start start
whoever everybody the whole Bridge just collapsed so that's the gist of what happened but let's
see if we can't figure out what actually went wrong when you're sailing through a restricted
Waterway like a busy Port like the dolly was
losing power is an amazingly scary thing a
ship this size carries way too much momentum and there's almost nothing you can do to stop
if you don't have power I'll get back to that before the end of the video because it's at the
core of what actually went wrong here but in the meantime the more pressing question is why did
the power fail engine overload overheating bad fuel going into the engine well that part we
don't know just yet there's still some ongoing investigations and according to
the NTSB the
national Transportation safety board it might be one or 2 years before the full report is
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thankfully initial investigations seemed to rule out a terrorist attack wait what according
to a cyber security expert called Weston Hecker Hecker not hacker which is confusing because
he also turns out to be an ethical hacker it's perfectly possible for a hacker to cause power
outages like the ones that affected the doly but what's interesting is that they've ruled out
a Cyber attack so quickly so maybe they know something that t
hey hav disclosed but I would
generally try to leave every potential option available at least to investigate and not rule
out any too soon so what do you guys think what was actually at the cause sound off in the
comments below I will say I think it was a freak accident so if we switch gears and talk
about the bridge and why it collapsed things are also a little bit interesting at the time
of the Bridge's planning and construction the largest container ships carried around 2950 20t
contai
ners the dolly is rated for 10,000 teus or 20t equivalent units which is still almost four
times what the bridge was designed to with stand in case of a collision and on that Tuesday the
dolly was carrying around 4,679 containers but most were 40t containers that's over 9,000 teus
so the ship was almost at capacity let's do a quick calculation 100,000 tons traveling at 7.6
knots which is 3.9 m/s has a kinetic energy of 760 megga that's equivalent to the explosive energy
of 360 pounds of TNT
but that comparison doesn't even really do it justice the reality is even
worse because all that energy struck the pylon on the most vulnerable point and from its most
vulnerable Direction which is the side a pylon designed in 1970 to withstand an impact of a ship
a quarter of the size never really stood a chance and Beyond the human loss of six lives there's
going to be a huge period of time before Baltimore recovers from this the Port of Baltimore is the
ninth most important port in the
US it directly employs over 15,000 people and indirectly supports
almost 140,000 jobs the collapse blocked the port [Music] entirely the port is now losing around
$100 million a day for every day that it's closed threatening the livelihoods of many Americans
and disrupting global trade worldwide many of the containers on board the ship's bow front
were crushed by the brid others toppled over and fell into the water the ship was carrying
some hazardous materials uh and a load full of diesel
gasoline of course but thankfully none of
that seems to have spilled out and not to mention now there's no Bridge connecting Baltimore to
DC a very busy thoroughfare here in the US and rebuilding the Francis Key Bridge is going to be
complicated some people speculate that it won't be rebuilt at all perhaps they'll build a third
underwater tunnel but if they do decide to re rebuild it could take years to finish like between
5 to 10 and be really expensive here's a table of some of the bridge
s built recently and how much
they cost the closest in terms of size and time is the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge which
has been an over budget nightmare costing $6.4 billion when it was initially estimated to cost
250 million most likely this bridge will cost $5 billion to rebuild and this takes us to the
ultimate question of could this have been avoided is there just inherent risk that you can't control
or was this something that we could have actually prevented as many as 35 other Br
idges worldwide
collapsed between 1960 and 2015 due to collisions from boats in just the same way here in the US in
1980 the Sunshine Skyway Bridge across Tampa Bay also collapsed after the freighter Summit Venture
rammed into one of its pylons only 3 years after the Key Bridge was built this bridge accident in
Tampa Bay changed Bridge construction in the US forever now Bridges must have large fenders
to protect the base some must add structures called Dolphins which are a group of pilings
around the main support structure that take the initial impact other engineering considerations
are Breakaway structures where the bridge is intentionally weaker at certain points where it
will break instead of collapsing the entire Bridge adding redundancy to critical support structure
so that if one pylon or one structure crashes and fails that others could pick up the weight
and hold the bridge at least for a while until repairs can be made so like most of engineering
a lot of what we l
earn about how to do things comes from the knowledge of experiences like this
future Bridges and everything that gets built from now on will inherently be safer because we'll
take all these Lessons Learned and this is not that uncommon in engineering we don't know what we
don't know until we do but what about cargo ships and cargo ship design that's where things take a
little bit of a darker turn there were actually some telltale signs that something was wrong with
this ship and that the do
c authorities might have known as much it's obvious there was a malfunction
during the accident since the vessel lost power we all saw that but what you may not know is that
the dolly was undergoing engine maintenance at the Port according to Julie Mitchell co-administrator
of container royalty Dolly experienced power issues for two days before leaving the terminal
on its ill faded departure so they knew that the dolly had issues all captains know how dangerous
it is for a ship that size to
lose power in such a restricted Waterway and yet they let it go anyway
and that kind of sounds crazy to me but at the same time if a ship reported that okay all outages
and all issues are fixed and addressed we're ready to depart then I think most people would take
their word for it so it's not really clear if anything else could have been done but one thing
that's very clear is that money is ultimately what drives people to push the limit here because these
ships have cargo to deliver and
there's a ton of money at stake and you got to remember that if
this vessel was experiencing engine failures what they could have done is grabbed a tugboat and
powered it all the way through their shipping Lane there are many restricted waterways where
a tugboat is mandatory for all large shipping transitioning out of the port so why wasn't it a
rule here so looking at this in its entirety it seems to me that there are things that we can do
to improve upon this in the future for one all ne
w Bridges obviously are going to be safer and safe
as we make them but we have to also remember how much aging infrastructure we have around the
world and there's also maritime law and Port operations and how we handle things in the future
I would imagine that they're going to make changes to a lot of that just like most of engineering
what we learn comes from experience and we have to remember that's kind of the reality that's a
quick look at what happened here I hope that's a little bit i
nsightful s off in the comments
below these are these are tough episodes to make but hopefully we can learn from them and
as engineers build better in the future all right thought that was cool check out this video
next thanks for watching we see you guys next week
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