Bridge Collapses in Baltimore

[fsanford]

Seems to me a Rail Road company that had an ugly derailment is going to pay out a lot of money. So tell them to cough up. I understand fixing and building infrastructure in this country. If you or I cause a bad accident and 6 people die, we won’t get off Scott free.

Railroads are bound by US law. Steamship lines are bound by international law.

There is a list of multiple events which absolve carriers of liability as it relates to property damage both cargo and infrastructure.. Countries with commerce are aware of these laws and sign off on it. A computer failure that shuts down the ship would probably fall under you cannot touch me. A drunk crew, you can probably sue them.


For containers that are damaged or lost from this accident the carrier is not liable. They will do a General Average. Anyone with cargo on the ship will share the cost of loss of goods and reimburse the cost to companies that lost cargo. Well the importer/exporter's insurance company will.


Oh, It's a pain in the butt to file GA paperwork with the carriers.

 

[jmb]

President Biden said our Country would pay the bill to rebuild the bridge. Why not talk to the owners, and the company that manages the ship?

Because their liability is limited due to a Supreme Court case from the Titanic.

 

[simply1]

President Biden said our Country would pay the bill to rebuild the bridge. Why not talk to the owners, and the company that manages the ship?

Could do some basic research first before having a set opinion on such things.

 

[JEFF420]

a lot of divorced dad energy in here

 

[Haverhill]

I always laugh when people want to defund government agencies but expect them to also work better. You can't cut off someone's arms and expect them to paint.

 

[Bret44]

Port of Baltimore has limits on ship sizes. The port is not deep enough to take larger ships.

The size of the ship that hit the bridge is probably one of the smaller Trans Atlantic/Pacific ships still available.

If they don't take that they probably would need to start shutting their doors.

The Maritime industry is one of building bigger ships first and worry about infrastructure last. That is why backlogs at the ports is some of the worst in history.

It probably would make more sense to do a tunnel vs a new bridge at this point, if the ground allows

Frank Sobotka tried to get it dredged.

 

[MeanDean]

On water right-of-ways are always favorable to shipping. They had unhindered passage on all navigable waters. The law (generally) looks at bridges and anything else put in the water as a hazard to shipping.

The laws go back at least to before the Civil War. There's a famous case of Effie Afton that hit a Mississippi River bridge about a month after it was completed and burned it (the bridge) to the ground(water?). The Effie Afton was cleared of any liability. (Abraham Lincoln was one of the lawyers. I think on the losing side,)

 

[CascadeClone]

If only Grand Moff Tarkin had decided the additional cost would be no hinderance when it came to fixing that small thermal exhaust port just below the main port...

Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6,001 hulls!

 

[JEFF420]

yall wont go to therapy but youll spend 4 hours on riparian doctrine wiki page

 

[WooBadger18]

I always laugh when people want to defund government agencies but expect them to also work better. You can't cut off someone's arms and expect them to paint.

Don’t tell me what unreasonable expectations I can and cannot have

 

[cowgirl836]

If people need some perspective on the size of the ship:

my brain is really struggling to make that compute. I'd imagine a good chunk of the ship is underwater though

 

[KidSilverhair]

my brain is really struggling to make that compute. I'd imagine a good chunk of the ship is underwater though

Surely they mean 948 feet long, not tall, right?

Yep, and actually even that’s wrong, it’s 984 feet long.

 

[cowgirl836]

Surely they mean 948 feet long, not tall, right?

Yep, and actually even that’s wrong, it’s 984 feet long.

ok THAT I can believe. I feel better now.

 

[isufbcurt]

Good point, that would kill it.

By the way wish this idiot was on the bridge

WTF happened to her. I used to love watching her on 60 minutes. Now she is a nutcase.

 

[iahawkhunter]

yall wont go to therapy but youll spend 4 hours on riparian doctrine wiki page

Any time I see the word "riparian"...

 

[BMWallace]

Again though, i'm sure efforts will be made to claw back money from them. With it being a foreign entity we will see what challenges there are to that.

But regardless that will be a civil case, and those take years. And even if that case is won, the entity that owns this ship may not have the billions of dollars it would need to pay this anyway (again, being subject to another country's laws could also make this part tricky). There's only one way the funding appears rapidly so that cleanup, design, and construction can begin right away, and that's with the government stepping in and putting up the funding.

I would guess similar would happen with a critical piece of railroad infrastructure as well, but it would be a lot easier to go after a railroad as well as it would be a domestic company.

It was a smaller scale, but this is similar to the 2023 Philly I-95 collapse. A vehicle crash caused a major interstate artery to be closed. The federal government stepped and funded the construction of a temporary structure to reopen 6 lanes of the interstate in just 12 days. They were able to build and reopen all the permanent lanes in six months from the time of the collapse.

If this was left to municipalities, private businesses, and legal proceedings, funding and repair of these large infrastructure projects would take ages. The federal government can foot the bill to get the ball moving while the legal process plays out.

 

[jdoggivjc]

And wait ten years for a court to decide? You build it immediately and try to recoup the funds later.

Will be an interesting case, foreign carrier and likely insured by a foreign group like Lloyds but this isn't in international waters. Hell, it's not even off shore territorial waters of the USA , it's on a river in one of our states.

To parrot this, many, many years ago, before I was even in elementary school, my parents decided to move the family from the Washington, D.C. area to Iowa, and instead of selling the mobile home we lived in and buying something else in Iowa, they decided to have it moved to Iowa as well. Long story short, the movers had some kind of accident and our home was flipped in the process, destroying it. Of course my parents lawyered up… but even then it wasn’t until I was in high school that all parties - my parents, the moving company, insurers, and the lawyers - agreed to a settlement out of court.

Now keep in mind this was personal property involving tens of thousands of dollars that took more than a decade to resolve. What happened in Baltimore is billions of dollars worth of damage and replacement that’s going to affect at minimum trillions of dollars worth of international trade for as long as the port is closed, as well as local and interstate trade for as long as it takes to build a new bridge. And people honestly believe the shipping company and/or the insurance companies are going to WILLINGLY shoulder that bill? This thing is going to be tied up for decades in various courts because NOBODY’S going to want to pay for this. All the while, one of the nation’s busiest ports is shut down until they can at least clear open the shipping lane.

And right-wingers are up in arms about Biden saying the Federal government will foot the bill to get this process going - whining that it’s the companies involved that should be forced to pay for this - and nothing should be done until they do. Of course they should - but they act like we can just wait decades until all of this is sorted.

These idiotic people don’t understand how any of this works.

 

[cyputz]

Keep into additional perspective:
987 feet long - crap that is longer than three football fields.

 

[BCClone]

We should. But that bridge in the middle of no where that 30 vehicles drive over each day should not be high on the priority list. Most of these roads should probably just be shut down, but the Farm Bureau gets in the way of that happening.

You do understand that what you described is actually the responsibility of the county and not state or federal? It seems many people don't understand the difference between who maintains which roads/bridges and their general funding sources.

 

[BCClone]

Open the door and jump out 10 ft before the car hit the water. a moon roof is good for this too.

If you have a moon roof, why not just install an ejection seat?