Baltimore: Frame – Frame of collision between ship and bridge

A second-by-second video showing the fatal collision of the freighter Daly on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has gone viral online in the past few hours after the unprecedented incident was reported.

As the aforementioned video shows, from the moment of impact at 01:24:32 local time, the ship appears to have lost power for approximately 60 seconds. One minute later, smoke billowed from the ship as the lights went out for a second time, about two minutes before it hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

This is the scenario in which the large ship suffers some major damage and falls onto the bridge, which is reinforced by a video clip that reached the public.

The video shows the ship moving normally before all its lights went out. It is possible that there was a power outage that resulted in the loss of the rudder or some other system. When power was restored, the ship was already on an irreversible course toward the bridge despite an attempt to change course (apparently “against the engines”), a scenario reinforced by the thick smoke billowing from her smokestack.

Watch the video:

Shocking footage reveals the beginning of the incident in the Port of Baltimore, where 20 people are now missing. Our hearts go out to Baltimore, Maryland. #Breaking news pic.twitter.com/BNfl9aPhca

– CP Kapadia 🇮🇳 (@cpk18) March 26, 2024

At 01:28:44 Baltimore local time, the ship struck the bridge pier, which collapsed in just 4 seconds.

So far, two people have been recovered alive from the waters of the Patapsco River after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed, as the chief of the fire department in this city in the US state of Maryland announced today during a press conference.

See the live photo from the scene of the accident

The reasons that led to the collapse of the bridge

Civil engineer Julian Carter He told Sky News that bridges Like the city of Baltimore, “it's very weak in places.” “It turns out with a lot of these structures – and we have similar structures in the UK – that they are actually very simple in concept… but very weak in places,” he explains.

Other large bridges may have central piers where the main structure is separated from the rest, but in this case the interconnected nature of the bridge means that “when you remove part of it, the interconnected system fails.”

Carter argues that the bridge's structure was likely tested at some point by ship collisions. It may have then proven suitable for the time, but container ships are now “twice as big”.

Finally, the civil engineer said in his interview that he expects many ports and bridge piers to be assessed again, for the risk of similar situations occurring again.