Posted on 03/24/25
| News Source: FOX45
New analysis released Monday by Johns Hopkins University researchers says that ships are highly likely to collide with major bridges across the United States, with the potential for catastrophic collisions happening every few years.
Researchers conducted an "urgent assessment" of the nations bridge vulnerability following the 2024 Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore. The team aimed to estimate the chances that a large ship would hit the country's most significant bridges.
Officials said that they went over 16 years of U.S. Coast Guard data, which they say included hundreds of millions of data points, port data, bridge data, and traffic data.
That study found that some of the nation's busiest bridges will likely be hit by ships within our lifetime, and some of the most vulnerable bridges, including the Huey P. Long Bridge outside New Orleans, and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, are likely to be hit by a ship within about 20 years.
Researchers said if the Key Bridge were still standing, it would have been among the 10 most vulnerable bridges in the country, according to the study. The team predicted it would have likely been hit by a ship within 48 years, and the bridge was 46 years old when it fell last year.
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge ranks as the twelfth most vulnerable bridge in the nation, with a collision expected once every 86 years.
"With this investigation, we wanted to know if what happened to the Key Bridge was a rare occurrence. Was it an aberration? We found it's really not," said Michael Shields, a Johns Hopkins engineer specializing in risk assessment and lead investigator of the National Science Foundation–supported study, via a press release. "In fact, it's something we should expect to happen every few years."
Researchers said that to lower the risk for these bridges, the critical thing is to keep ship traffic away from the piers and to build protections and other structures that keep ships from approaching the piers.
"There's still a lot of uncertainty in predicting the frequency of ship collisions, even with the best data we have," Shields said, via a press release. "But the important point is not whether it will occur every 17 years or every 75 years. It's that it's happening way too often."
"If one of these massive ships hits a bridge, it's catastrophic," he said.