R. Nesbitt | Red Phoenix guest contributor | Maryland–

On March 26, 2024, the cargo ship MV Dali coming out of Baltimore Harbor collided with a crucial support on the Francis Scott Key Bridge across the lower Patapsco River preceding Baltimore Harbor. The ship had suffered a loss of power and was unable to steer timely away from an impending collision. The crew were able to send out a Mayday call which allowed workers and authorities to close off the bridge and begin clearing it of traffic.

Unfortunately, six construction workers, including Jose Mynor Lopez, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, Dorlian Cabrera, and Miguel Luna, did not survive the bridge collapse. Another two workers were rescued from the frigid water. The Mayday call put out by the Dali has been credited with helping to save lives and reduce the casualties of this tragedy. Since that horrific night, it is estimated that the blockage of the Patapsco due to debris costs about $15 million a day as trade can no long flow in and out of Baltimore until the wreckage of the bridge has been cleared. More importantly, recovery efforts have been completely exhausted in bringing the vehicles and victims of the collapse out of the Patapsco. The collapse of the Key Bridge itself will cost insurance agencies approximately $1-4 billion in damages, liability, and “business disruption” of which the State of Maryland’s insurance will cover $350 million. The federal government has also intervened, with President Biden vowing $60 million in “quick-release” funds for emergency relief, design, and reconstruction of a new bridge in place of the Key. 

The true scope of this disaster is incredibly difficult to process. According to Maryland Governor Wes Moore, some 8,000 jobs have been impacted by the collapse. Disruptions in trade in a city like Baltimore, which has tried to cope with the ravishing effects of free trade, automation, and economic crises through its historic natural harbor on the Patapsco into the Chesapeake Bay, will be particularly felt in a city that has also been infamous for gentrification, redlining, and population decline. The Governors of New York and New Jersey have offered the use of the ports in their states to redirect shipping so as to avoid an even larger supply chain disruption.

It is no secret that infrastructure in this country and the ways in which our capitalist system utilizes it leaves much to be desired in every aspect from safety to accessibility to basic convenience. While it is true that no bridge would have survived a collision from even an empty, modern cargo vessel, there were potential steps that might have been able to mitigate the damage, the loss of life, and the economic and societal disruption created by the Key Bridge collapse of 2024. 

To begin, there are structures used in engineering bridges over busy waterways meant to deflect or absorb the impact of vessels, such as “fenders” and “dolphins,” and while authorities at the Port of Baltimore report that “dolphins” were built into the Key Bridge, they would be submerged. With recovery efforts taking priority there is no way to confirm nor deny this statement from authorities. Regarding “fenders,” footage taken of the bridge before the Dali collision show an absence of this infrastructure. Engineering experts such as Barzin Mobasher, a professor at Arizona State University, has contested claims that such infrastructure would have successfully prevented a collapse where the Dali struck the bridge, and that with cargo ships as large as the Dali any one of them passing under the bridge and hitting a sensitive area would have caused a progressive collapse of the whole structure. 

While deflective infrastructure alone may not have been able to save the Key Bridge, other utilities such as camera tracking, infrared scanners, and observation posts to be used by Highway or Port authorities may have been able to detect an uncorrected course from a malfunctioning vessel sooner, and thus could have evacuated the bridge in greater speed. Then, of course, there is the issue of such large vessels coming through the Patapsco at such high traffic — this bridge was built before watershed free trade agreements like NAFTA or CAFTA, and so the issue of modern, hulking craft passing through could not have been conceived of in 1977 when the Key Bridge was inaugurated. 

And this, more damning than the lackluster safety measures to prevent or minimize essentially natural or unavoidable disasters, is the fundamental reliance that the American economy has stocked on uninterrupted and ever-expansive free trade, whereupon a single crisis can reap such unexpected and protracted impact locally, nationally, and globally. Trade in itself is essential for production and economic function, but capitalism’s chief approach to it, free trade, does not afford much breathing room for the productive elements of society in recuperating from crises that are either inevitable or artificial (such as economic recession or depression). This has been proven time and again with incidents like the Suez Canal Blockage in March, 2021, that led to an estimated economic loss for the United States of $60.4 billion during the 151-hour stoppage in the delivery of trade goods. 

Why is it that production is so skewed towards free trade, where countries other than the United States produce an increasing amount of industrial product which is then shipped back to the US for consumption, utilization, or refinement? Because it is profitable. Take for instance the auto industry, which has lost over 350,000 employees in the United States from 1994 (the year NAFTA was ratified) to 2024, according to the New York Times, which in itself constitutes over a third of the workforce for the whole industry and does not account for the loss of jobs from automation. The freedom for American auto companies to move plants and facilities to other countries were spawned out of the cost effectiveness of utilizing the less extensive labor reforms and standards of Mexico to cut costs in workplace safety, wages, and benefits, that had been hard-won by autoworkers unions since the 1920s.

Incidentally one of the key imports of Baltimore’s harbor has been vehicles produced abroad and then distributed commercially in the United States. The reorientation of production does not fundamentally remove the need for consumption of certain goods like automobiles among others, but it does create problems of impracticality where a model auto industry is hamstrung in the name of profits and sold back to the public now scraping by on service and secondary work since their previously reliable manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas.  

The fact is, even with domestic production, disturbances in the supply chain would still hang over the national economy because of the chronically starved infrastructure in this country. Take the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, the health and environmental effects of which have — along with the 2022 railroad labor dispute –shone a spotlight on the mediocre stability of railroad trade in America, with 742 train derailment incidents in 2023 alone as reported last October by the Federal Railroad Administration. Or the January, 2022, collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, PA, injuring several people just hours before Joe Biden was set to speak in the city about the need for infrastructural renewal in federal budgets. Officials investigating the collapse said that “if proper oversight had been exercised, this bridge would have been closed down years ago.” 

The depressing state of affairs has long exceeded irony. Tying all of this back to Baltimore, we have to grapple with the fact that some crises are unavoidable — earthquakes, storms, loss of power, and so forth — but we cannot accept the mediocrity of insufficient funding for basic transportation, trade, and safety in our day to day lives. With domestic production’s decline, the subsequently improper reliance on inexorable and fragile trade from abroad, and the dependency of single-vehicle transit over large distances in a country with little infrastructure for public transportation, all reveal nothing but a systemic inefficiency in the entire framework of capitalism. The system is not broken; this dependency, this lack of funding, is working very well for the beneficiaries of free trade and the owners of outsourced properties. But for us, the workers who commute two hours each day to and from work in over-expensive cars, to our underpaying jobs, at some point have to have had enough of the cracks in the foundation. 

Categories: Economy, U.S. News