Buttigieg: Possibly No Bridge In Existence Could Withstand Impact From Biggest Ships

WASHINGTON — Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday said it was unclear that any bridge in existence could have withstood the impact of a modern freighter that the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore suffered earlier this week, which demolished the structure and shuttered the city’s port.

“It’s not just big as a building, it’s really as big as a block,” said Buttigieg, appearing on the podium with Coast Guard Vice Admiral Peter Gautier for the White House’s daily press briefing. “A bridge like this one, completed in the 1970s, was simply not made to withstand a direct impact on a critical support pier from a vessel that weighs about 200 million pounds, orders of magnitude bigger than cargo ships that were in service in that region at the time that bridge was first built.”

A Singapore-flagged container ship lost power Tuesday and struck a key structural component of the bridge, sending it tumbling into the Patapsco River where it enters Chesapeake Bay. Six highway maintenance workers on the bridge at the time are believed to have died in the accident.

Buttigieg said state and federal authorities are currently working to clear the debris, move the 984-foot Dali — out of the way and reopen the channel so ships can resume traveling in and out of Baltimore, the fifth busiest port on the East Coast. Neither he nor Gautier would provide a ballpark estimate of when that could be.

Officials are also investigating the bridge’s collapse, both to understand why the portions that came down failed and assess the condition of the sections that remain standing, so that plans can be drawn up to replace it.

Buttigieg said rebuilding the bridge would obviously take much longer than reopening the port, and that he expected