A container ship colliding into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is drawing attention to potential vulnerabilities among some of America’s more than 600,000 bridges.
The Key Bridge stood for 47 years, and in that time it never received the sort of jolt that anyone could have thought would bring it down.
Extreme weather events, increasingly heavy trucks and collisions from larger container ships pose significant risks to US bridges, engineers and other infrastructure experts say.
The Key Bridge was “fracture critical,” the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday.
To minimize the potential of ships bringing down bridges, bridges need to be built with what are known as redundancies— protections around bridges’ danger points.
Persons:
Francis Scott Key, Dali, Ananth Prasad, Prasad, ”, Jessie Yeung, Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Isabelle Chapman
Organizations:
American Society of Civil Engineers, Congressional Research Service, National Transportation Safety, World Association, Transport Infrastructure, Florida Transportation Builders ’ Association, CNN
Locations:
Baltimore, America, United States, China, Argentina, Florida