what is the inside scoop on big Baltimore bridge crash?

Let's see if I understand this: They are suing the owner and manager because the ship is probably owned and managed by a limited liability corporation, which in turn has no net assets, because, like most large (and some small) businesses, they are perpetually in debt, borrowed against the prospect of future earnings.

The captain and normal pilot themselves, not only have very limited assets, but are probably protected because the law required them to surrender control of the vessel to a pilot certified to guide large commercial ships through the Chesapeake Bay. And that pilot probably has very limited assets too, and may have his own limited liability corporation.

And the owner and manager had very indirect control over the vessel, so they are probably well protected.

So - the federal, state and local governments are left paying virtually all the costs. Which in turn gets passed on to taxpayers, because governments also function while in debt, borrowed against the prospect of future taxes.

(And the money which flows through the salvage, repair and construction companies in turn gets much of its value from its use to pay future taxes, and to buy the power and influence needed to accumulate more money. A completely circular system which on the surface seems like it ought to collapse - but somehow that system has been in place for thousands of years, more or less works most of the time, and has become a fundamental part of how modern civilization works. Anyway, the way the monetary system works is a separate issue, peripheral to this subject.)

In the mean time, the people in charge of all of these corporations will now be paid, along with a team of lawyers, to handle the the legal consequences, and do whatever due diligence is now required. So they will be much in demand by other companies which might have to deal with similar issues in the future.

The politicians who insist on these pointless lawsuits know perfectly well there is essentially nothing to be gained from them, and a lot of resources will be spent on those lawsuits. But they will claim that they had no idea we have such a screwed up system, and make a lot of political hay over it, without changing much of anything.

The ship itself (I'm not a all sure of this), may be seized and be put on auction to pay debts, but anyone buying it might have to assume substantial liabilities. So the ship has no effective value.

Did I get that all right?

I'm not precisely complaining. This is the whole point of having limited liability corporations, which almost always operate while in nominal debt. We aren't going to change the legal system which has made a lot of large and small business possible to prevent this from happening again.

 

No, you didn't. There is approximately USD 3 billion in total insurance from all sources (and there are a whole bunch of them related by reinsurance agreements.) that is up for grabs. Getting the claims paid is another matter. It's not clear to me how an accusation of willful negligence (my take on what Baltimore is alleging) on the part of the ship's owners and operators will affect anything. The insurance (and reinsurance) conglomerates will do their own investigations. At this point, ie before any reports have been released, I think it is all just posturing and saving your place in the payout line. It doesn't cost much to file a lawsuit. The fact that six died will complicate matters immensely for those involved in Dali's operation. They can't just say "you know what - keep the damn thing - that's all your gonna get". That isn't going to work.

 

Let's see how many of those insurance companies go bankrupt.

And if evidence of willful negligence is claimed, maybe some of those insurance policies won't apply?

Maybe someone will try to claim Baltimore itself is partly to blame, because they allow vessels to go under the bridge without tugboat escort. After all, AFAICT, some other harbors have such a requirement. And the state of Maryland, because the bridge wasn't strong enough to take an impact by all possible ships, including (shock!) ships heavier than those that existed when the bridge was built. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if well qualified experts had urged Maryland to make bridge improvements. Given jurors without a technical background, maybe those argument will sound convincing.

For how many years can the legal battles proceed?

 

Bankruptcy would be fantastic . We could install executors and distribute all the assets immediately. Done and paid for in a couple weeks, if they wanted. Trust me, they will do absolutely anything to prevent that. If anything, it would be the US attempting foreclose on them and gain control of their assets. We could treat them like drug cartels and Russian oligarchs and start seizing anything that comes our way. But that isn't going to happen. Those 3 billion are for keeping rich people happy. None will be used for anything that would reduce the taxpayers burden. I wasn't really trying to argue with you. I just wanted to point out that there is a parallel universes thing here. And it helps to be aware that in the other one, there is 3 billion up for grabs. In this one, there will be many strange sights and sounds as that all shakes out.

 

Oh! OK.

Could what appear to be the responsible parties move themselves and their assets to countries with no extradition, and no easy way to recover the assets from there?

I'm reminded of what has occurred in various industries in the U.S., (e.g., energy futures, banking...) when insurance companies insured each other in a complex network, and the whole network collapsed, partly because some of them didn't actually have all the assets they claimed. Add the international dimension of the shipping industry, and it must be a little hard to be certain they all behave.

Is it possible that most of the genuinely available insurance money will go to the court cases that are settled first? E.g., what if the families of the people who lost their lives settle quickly, and take most of the available money?

I'm probably being too cynical here, about something I don't know a lot about. But it seems possible taxpayers will still pay a lot of the bills. And that might possibly significantly affect the value of the U.S. dollar, which is already a bit weak.

I'm not sure I can imagine all that is likely to be affected economically by this crash. Presumably a substantial amount of cargo has been lost or delayed, from and to a huge number of companies and individuals. And there must be a huge network of people and industries involved in transporting and unpacking the containers, and repacking them into smaller shipping units. It's hard for me to even imagine how much fuel is involved, and how many people are involved, and how much equipment is involved, for the ship itself, and the trucking and train networks they unpack goods to.

I can also imagine bad people taking their cue from what has happened. In principle, a container ship could carry much more explosive power than the aircraft that crashed into the NYC World Trade Center. And perhaps with a little state sponsored help, it would probably be easier to import a WMD that way. Just imagine trying to impose the controls and inspections that TSA imposes on passenger flights, on routine cargo ships.

My experience is largely limited to hand paddled kayaks, and I love the lighter weight variety, that is easy to carry, and is fairly easy to maneuver. The amount of damage I can do with such a boat is somewhat limited. I have bumped into bridge pilings, and have also pushed off of them with a paddle. None of those bridges collapsed. (Yet...) Container ships are on a such different scale. They don't really have much in common.[/QUOTE]

 

This note was in Lloyds List almost a month ago now, but I think it is all still applicable.
Marine insurers face billion-dollar payout on Baltimore bridge collapse https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1148669/Marine-insurers-face-billion-dollar-payout-on-Baltimore-bridge-collapse

Edit - I don't think that any of the Insurers can 'wriggle out' very easily - and it should be within everyone's financial capabilities if the risk is spread widely enough in the re-insurance market.
I saw another article recently from Lloyds where they seemed fairly confident that they would be able to cover it all.
However it is all going to take YEARS to resolve - and many lawyers will do very well out of all the wrangling.
The estimate for rebuilding the bridge alone is around US$ 600 million.

Here is an excerpt - but click on the link, there is a lot of other useful info within as well.
----------------------------
The primary insurance carrier for the Francis Scott Key Bridge — named for the man who wrote the lyrics for the Star-Spangled Banner more than 200 years — has been revealed as Chubb, one of the giants in the property insurance niche.

If Chubb does have to pay out, it can reasonably be expected to seek “subrogation” — pursuing a third party that caused an insurance loss to recover the cost of the claim.

In practice, the bulk of what is starting to look like an outsize bill will end up in the protection & indemnity sector, with the first $100m split among the 12 members of the International Group and the excess passed on to the reinsurance market.

Much will depend on who is deemed legally liable for the casualty and the size of compensation demanded. Given the infamously litigious nature of insurance claims in the US, there is a real prospect of a decade or more of legal wrangling, as seen after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in 2010.

 

Based on Chubb's quarterly report, they can probably handle their share. And maybe the others can too. So maybe I was overly concerned about that.

And maybe it's would be a good time to be a lawyer specializing in these areas. And if the insurance companies weather this, maybe it will increase their future business, because people will want insurance to be able to cover even more.

And if this is drawn out for as long as you say, the payments by the US, state and local governments in the meantime might still affect the economy significantly.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with boat design. I assume ship designers will learn from what happened. But, AFAICT, it was already the case that emergency power generators should already have been on as they approached the bridge. And according to some sources, large ships are already expected to have triply redundant steering mechanisms. Maybe they can find a way to make anchored steering work better - but this is a pretty heavy ship. You'd need a lot of anchors and a lot of lines. Plus, this is just one type of possible accident. A heavy ship could also collide with something important with a deep water approach. Ship collision can also damage safety systems, like lighthouses, buoys, navigation beacons, coast guard radio antennas, etc.

The bridge collision alert system apparently worked - they stopped traffic onto the bridge before the collision, which given the small amount of time they had to prepare, is pretty amazing, and saved a lot of lives.

No doubt politicians and regulators will try to come up with ways to make it more likely that ships that are not fully seaworthy can not leave port as easily. But that would motivate people not to report problems to outside authorities. So maybe we just have to expect this sort of thing to happen once in a while.

What we can really learn from this is that American consumers buy an awful lot of stuff. It's all our fault. If we didn't buy so much stuff, the accident wouldn't have occurred.

 

Seems like the Quick Fix would be require more tug-boats when near any bridges or other valuable stuff. Don't think it would jack up prices at Walmart enough to matter.
I don't see how in this day and age these Harbor Pilots couldn't do their jobs via radio or Zoom, more like Air Traffic Controllers. Even if they gotta "sense the currents" they could do that from a small boat around the ship, maybe even do it better.

Or just AI. Pretty sure a few sensors placed around the harbor could tell and PREDICT water (and wind) flows better than human.

 

People are really good at assessing the natural world. I think a better target is the boat control system and predicting the diverse responses of a ships to the pilot's commands. A really cool application of AI would be to use it to get all ship (+tugs) to track the same given the same inputs. Each port would have a set of standardized handling maps, and the port pilot would select that mode while aboard. Then he could use his local knowledge and senses to best effect. And if a ship's maneuvering capability was inadequate for conditions, it would have to wait for better conditions (or use tugs to augment ability). AI could provide an excellent analysis of maneuvering capability with or without tug assist.

What I'm trying to say is that the AI would integrate propulsion, helm, thrusters and the tugs to provide a standardized response across an entire class of large ships. But the commands would still be human commands.

 

Know what they are even better at? Convincing themselves they can, then re-proving that to themselves by coming up with wise sounding reasons why their last prediction didn't pan out. Had recent job that entailed docking a boat in a little deep water cove who's inlet was a tidal river/slough. You'd never know what the currents were going to be doing and it wasn't just my limited experience. All sorts of Old Salts were struggling, and "wave offs" and re-trys frequent. I'd imagine many harbors got tidal sloughs which due to wrong combo of length and depth are "3 body problem" sorta like out of balance fume-tank.

I'm thinking:
1)this sort of (to a human) very complex system of irregular flows over irregular surfaces with mostly regular lunar tides is exactly what computers are good for.
2)flow meters should be cheap and reliable. Maybe an anchor plate with a pole, and at the end of the pole is an arm with a float, and it sends how far the arm is pushed over and in what direction. But I guess what flow really counts is surface, but that should be easy to track (somehow).

But this Baltimore accident wasn't caused by any Harbor Pilot issues, but a (not really, given ship's history) Black Swan event that "no one could predict"(rolls eyes). As far as I can tell, there is no shortage of tug-boats, and they seem to spend 9/10th of the time docked for days if not weeks on end.

 

The best way to use AI would be for the AI to tell the captain he is erring. Then the Captain has someone helping.

Humans are fallible. We make mistakes. We hope these mistakes are not big enough to result in horrible outcomes.

When I’ve led projects; the best thing that happens is when I get correction. Even if that person is wrong; they are in the game enough to point out flaws. I’m think AI offering corrections is a good way forward vs AI correcting the (I dunno), aircraft.

 

Trouble is, the ship owners do not want to have to pay to use them.

In many ports the use of escort tugs is compulsory, sometimes even with one attached to the ship at each end.
Maybe Baltimore might do this in future, especially with the rather large ships?

 

AI certainly wouldn't have helped the MV Dali. Tugs might have. Maybe the issue has more to do with maintenence and engineering

Bridge Collapse: Initial Reports Suggest a Loss of Power

This sounds like a culture problem. Thinking Beyond Cultural Legacy: The Case of Korean Air

Perhaps the Dali's issues were not due to a strict hierarchy, but something more like, cost savings, coupled with the deadline keeping culture of large commercial enterprises.

-Will

 

Supposed to be some big HazMat road. Just rig a temp floating bridge across it, and swing it out of the way every two days to allow ships to enter and exit.

 

Except we haven't bought, maintained, or practiced with that stuff in forty years. What hasn't already been scrapped is garbage, and it is probably in Diego Garcia, Sweden, and Korea or Japan. And we can't move it anymore because we don't have any boats. The ones we have are being decommissioned as they return from current duty. Their average age is 45 years. I think the Marine Corp has maybe 3 supply ships built in the last 20 years that could haul that bridge kit. We can't even get a basic dock built in Gaza, and we've been working on that for months. China could put one together over night.