Titanic Redux a la Baltimore
At 1:30 a.m., Mar 26, the MV Dali, a 91,128-gross-tonnage container ship, slammed into one of the concrete-and-steel support piers holding up a four-pillar structure of the Francis Scott Key Bridge spanning the Patapsco River in Baltimore, Maryland. The support pier and its column went down immediately, and with it went much of the 1.6-mile (2.6‑kilometer) bridge, killing six maintenance workers on the bridge and possibly some drivers of vehicles passing on the bridge. Rebuilding the bridge may require $400 million to as much as $2 billion. Recriminations began to fly almost as quickly as the bridge fell. There was an initial report that the ship’s captain was a Ukrainian probably angry about the slowdown of military aid to Ukraine from the United States. A later report clarified the Ukrainian captain had served in 2016, about 8 years previously. At the time of MV Dali’s collision with the bridge crash, the captain and all crew were India...