Baltimore Key Bridge Collapse

[odessasteps]

 

[Dolfan in NYC]

 

[Greggulator]

2 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

We have some examples on the bullshit people are Tweeting out over in the Discord, but I got it straight from the horse's mouth today. I went to a local Chinese buffet for lunch and they had CNN playing on their TV set. An old lady eating (who somehow did so while talking to her friend non-stop the entire meal) piped up "I wonder what happened. The driver probably couldn't speak English."  This, in a restaurant owned and staffed by people who have English as a second language and definitely heard what you blurted out at full volume in a half-empty open-air room with nobody else talking.

Making it better — I don’t know if this 100 percent true since I saw it on social media somewhere. But it was mentioned that it’s required for local harbor pilots to steer vessels in and out of the harbor directly. I used to write about oil tankers — Baltimore doesn’t have an oil refinery, so I never wrote about that port specifically. But other ports have those kinds of requirements or something similar logistically. 

[Greggulator]

Also: The bridge is going to really make supply chains on the east coast interesting. Baltimore is the biggest hub of auto imports and exports and parts in the country, one of the biggest two terminals for coal exports, a port where we ship liquified natural gas out of, and a big intake for sugar. (The Domino Sugar refinery is a Baltimore landmark.)

One interesting thing about the Baltimore Port I did not know — it does not handle a lot of containers. It’s more of a “roll on and roll off” port. 

I read a few places that it’s going to be a messy few days to try and reroute everything, but the rest of the east coast ports are big enough to handle the loads, but they might have some logistical issues to figure out because they handle container ships more. Plus, there will also have to be a lot more trucks rerouted from Baltimore to those ports.

An economist in an article I read said that the Baltimore bridge collapse meant America’s ocean shipping industry now essentially had no room for error in terms of capacity. 

Also interesting — shipping insurance might not change too much. The stuff in the Red Sea already jacked up those rates, and the shipping insurance industry is more of a collective pool than how homeowner’s insurance or something like that works just to handle things like this.

 

[odessasteps]

 

[Zakk_Sabbath]

On 3/26/2024 at 4:56 PM, Greggulator said:

Also interesting — shipping insurance might not change too much. The stuff in the Red Sea already jacked up those rates, and the shipping insurance industry is more of a collective pool than how homeowner’s insurance or something like that works just to handle things like this.

I'm not 100% certain on this so don't quote me, but at least one major insurer I know of designates their marine pool as workers comp (I think it's a similar idea to, for example, something fire-specific or flood-specific under an umbrella homeowner policy). I wish I had more info on that for you, but I'm on the review/audit side of things, so the liability stuff is well finished by the time I ever see it.

[zendragon]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/04/11/baltimore-bridge-collapse-ship-blackouts-incidents/73262682007/

not that uncommon apparently