Trending
Written by: Raji Sivaraman and Dr. Te Wu
During the early morning hours of March 26th, 2024, a Singapore registered container ship, the m.v. DALI, (deadweight* of 116,800MT with a capacity of 9, 971 TEUs**), collided with one of the support structures of the Francis Scott Key Bridge spanning across the Patapsco River in Baltimore Harbor. Initial reports suggested that the ship lost propulsion and power, traveling at about 8 knots southeast with a light northeast wind blowing on to its port (left), with 8 or 9 tiers of containers on deck (mid ship).
Within seconds, and almost instinctively the personnel onboard executed the five principles of risk management:
Plan and prepare, take stock of known risks, anticipate unknown risks:
Taking stock of the situation, the known risk was that the ship will drift, possibly veer, and maybe go aground. However, the unknown risk at that time was that the ship may hit the bridge. Their training and preparation for emergencies kicked into high gear to the next step.
Detect and analyze risks and events:
As the engine could not be restarted, the ship continued to drift, it became quite evident that they were going to collide with the bridge.
Communicate and collaborate across functions and organizations:
On board the ship, there was collaboration among the pilots, the deck crew, and the engineers to try to slow the ship down by calling for tug assistance, dropping the port anchor, trying to restart the engines and putting through a MAYDAY call, alerting the organizations ashore to stop traffic from getting on the bridge and getting people off the bridge. Tragically the ship hit the bridge’s support and the bridge collapsed. Sadly 6 lives were lost on the Key bridge.
Conduct a post incident evaluation:
The immediate evaluation was to ensure that the integrity of the ship was not compromised and was not taking on any water into the vessel or spilling fuel. The ongoing longer-term evaluation is the ensuing investigation by the government agencies, the ship managers, owners, and operators of the ship.
Establish and maintain a strong risk culture:
Although seafaring has a strong risk averse culture with redundancies and resilience, such incidences where a ship hits a bridge and the bridge immediately collapses is rare. However, this incident is expected to strengthen the risk culture within the shipping companies and managers, and the industry.
From a project management view, these disruptions will stem new projects that supply chain professionals will need to put together quickly. This article highlights some of those key supply chain activities and associated risks required to tackle the consequences and also to prevent another similar tragedy.
With the closure of the Port of Baltimore, ships are already being diverted to other ports in the eastern seaboard such as New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia PA, and Norfolk, VA. CSX and Seagirt terminal are working on ways to move import containers from other northeast ports into Baltimore for local pickup so as to reduce congestion at the other northeast ports. This situation creates the following additional projects.
Firstly, the dislocations of import and export cargo stress tests the agility of onshore infrastructure such as trucking and warehousing. As distribution centers of the shippers in the Baltimore area are equipped and trained with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, it is unlikely that shippers will make major changes to the locations of these centers. What is likely to happen is for supply chain project managers to remodel their current transport network and assets quickly and connect to alternative ports to cater for this emergency. Agility is important as any delay will create congestion at the various interchange points.
Secondly, planning teams of the ships’ operators and marine terminals formed task forces to cater for the influx of cargo at these terminals and possibly longer dwell time of the ships, possibly causing congestion offshore.
Thirdly, project teams of manufacturers and retailers are already looking into their risk management playbook to cater for contingencies by pulling in materials and assets from other parts of the country. As expected, what has been mustered is an industry-wide effort to mitigate the stress on the supply chain. Ironically, just coming out of the pandemic situation, our memories are still fresh as to what will be the anxiety when supply chains breakdown.
Finally, while the commercial sector is addressing the disruption, the government and the related agencies’ project teams are feverishly working to safely open the ship channel to the Port of Baltimore. The co-ordination among the various stakeholders is probably an undertaking of a well-staffed PMO and EPMO. Each task, of opening an alternative channel, removing debris, hazmat mitigation or the human aspect of this exercise impacting the communities are all projects of their own consisting of unique expert resources. There are still many unknowns such as the environmental impact or the behavior of the area of operations to weather changes. These will be uncovered as projects progress. Besides commercial reactions, communications remain crucial for all teams.
In closing, almost all US ports are either up-river or in an inlet or a bay with bridges that span across them, and daily ships traverse beneath these bridges. So, what can be done quickly to mitigate another collision while we work out long term solutions. From this incident we painfully learnt that there was not much time to raise the alarm to further reduce the loss of life. If it was during peak hours, then the catastrophe would have been unimaginable.
To implement short term risk mitigation:
-
Could a possible quick fix be to equip all bridges with emergency alert lights and loudspeakers that could transmit sirens?
-
As all large ships going under these bridges and channels are usually under pilotage, could pilots through their VHF channels (or other cellular means) be able to activate the alarms and warnings directly to the people on the bridges?
-
Could a tug escort for these large ships be useful until the ships clear all bridges enroute to port or the open sea?
In conclusion, revision of navigation practices in ports that have bridges seems to be forthcoming. Although the time to implement these practices could be in the distant future.
*Deadweight - Deadweight is the actual amount of weight in tonnes that a vessel can carry when loaded to the maximum permissible draught.
** A TEU or Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit is an exact unit of measurement used to determine cargo capacity for container ship
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Dali
https://www.joc.com/news
https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/9771677/Mercator_Wind_kort_endelig.pdf
https://journaltimes.com/what-were-the-weather-and-water-conditions-in-baltimore-at-the-time-of-the-crash/video_44e00b5b-9546-56f9-b324-d7f7d43f6cfe.html
https://www.marine-pilots.com/videos/158462-wind-impact-on-ships-turning-motion
https://amberalert.ojp.gov/resources/wireless-emergency-alert
https://www.dataminr.com/resources/insight/top-tips-for-more-effective-and-efficient-incident-management/