The disastrous collision that collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore could exhaust the U.S. government’s emergency relief fund for highway infrastructure, and is shining a light on the hazards of running huge container ships through small municipal channels in an era of “hyper-globalization”.
The emergency fund run by the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), which reimburses state transportation departments for repair or reconstruction after highway disasters, was already staggering before the March 26 ship strike, with US$2.1 billion in backlogged projects and only $890 million on deposit, the Washington Post reported last month. Some states have been waiting a decade or more for federal funds to arrive—including $8.9 million to California for storm damage dating back as far as 2005, $61.8 million to Tennessee for storms, floods, and landslides, $81.4 million to Hawai’i for storm and fire recovery, and $257 million to Puerto Rico for damage caused by Hurricanes Irma and María in 2017, according to data uncovered by the Post.
But now the disaster in Baltimore, in which the container ship Dali slammed into the bridge, killed six people, and dumped tonnes of concrete and steel into the Patapsco River, could push the city and the state of Maryland ahead in the queue, the Post says. Repair costs could exceed $1 billion.
“We have to come to the realization that [the emergency fund] needs to be tripled, quadrupled, just to have that money ready so we’re not debating it while one of our key arteries is broken,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), who sits on the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee, told the Post. “We have to be honest with ourselves. This fund always needs more money. It’s critical for people, for our economy, for safety. And now, this should be bipartisan. I hope it will be.”
While both the repairs and the funding battle get under way, the Post is also looking at the economic impact for a community that had built up its port as “the last refuge for blue-collar workers seeking a decent paycheck” after the local steel mill and auto plant closed down.
“Revitalizing the trade gateway amid the competitive pressures of the 2000s took years. Specialized maritime vessels carved deeper channels in the harbour, workers buttressed aging wharves, and towering new cranes took their place along the water,” the Post writes. “The ambitious makeover enabled the port last year to process a record amount of cargo. But it also tied the city’s fortunes to giant oceangoing vessels that some experts warned were prone to accidents, difficult to manoeuvre in tight quarters like those in Baltimore, and likely to make global supply chains less resilient.”
At about 300 metres long and nearly 50 metres wide, the Dali wasn’t the biggest of those ships. And it was just one of more than 200 reported incidents in the decade ending in 2022, and four in the weeks bracketing the Baltimore crash: the Post lists a collision in Guangzhou, China, that killed five people in February, and two others in New York City and Kocaeli, Türkiye.
“We’re at the point where a lot of the costs of these mega ships have become bigger than the benefits,” Olaf Merk, author of a 2015 study that was critical of the expansion trend, told the Post.
“Modern container ships are a miracle of efficiency, designed during the era of ‘hyper-globalization’, when merchandise trade flows grew year by year,” the news story states. “But for several years, Allianz, which insures many of these behemoths, has warned that putting so much cargo on a single ship guaranteed a massive bill if something went wrong. The largest ships, able to carry more than twice as many containers as the Dali, pose especially costly dangers, according to the insurer.”
“Yes, we keep bringing the per unit cost of transportation down using these larger vessels,” said Rahul Khanna, Allianz’s global head of marine consulting. “And it all makes sense. But what has happened as an unintended consequence of this increase in size is that the risks associated with these vessels also significantly increased.”
The Post has more on how reimbursement works (in theory and in practice) in the U.S., and the politics of getting a bigger funding commitment through a fractious Congress.
