The problem is that there are a thousand merchant marine vessels operating right now that are all doing great - until the next loose wire. The problem is that nobody knows about that wire and it worked fine on the last trip. The other systems are all just as marginal as they were on the 'Dali' but that one shitty little wire is masking that.
Running a 'tight ship' is great when you have a budget to burn on excellent quality crew. But shipping is so incredibly cut-throat that the crew members make very little money, are effectively modern slaves and tend to carry responsibilities way above their pay grade. They did what they could, and more than that, and for their efforts they were rewarded with what effectively amounted to house arrest while the authorities did their thing. The NTSB of course will focus on the 'hard' causes. But you can see a lot of frustration shine through towards the owners who even in light of the preliminary findings had changed absolutely nothing on the rest of their fleet.
The recommendation to inspect the whole ship with an IR camera had me laughing out loud. We're talking about a couple of kilometers of poorly accessible duct work and cabinets. You can do that while in port, but while you're in port most systems are idle or near idle and so you won't ever find an issue like this until you are underway, when vibration goes up and power consumption shoots up compared to being in port.
There is no shipping company that is effectively going to do a sea trial after every minor repair, usually there is a technician from some supplier that boards the vessel (often while it is underway), makes some fix and then goes off-board again. Vessels that are not moving are money sinks so the goal is to keep turnaround time in port to an absolute minimum.
What should really amaze you is how few of these incidents there are. In spite of this being a regulated industry it is first and foremost an oversight failure, if the regulators would have more budget and more manpower there maybe would be a stronger drive to get things technically in good order (resist temptation: 'shipshape').
> But you can see a lot of frustration shine through towards the owners who even in light of the preliminary findings had changed absolutely nothing on the rest of their fleet.
Between making money, perceived culpability and risks offloaded to insurance companies why would they?
> The problem is that there are a thousand merchant marine vessels operating right now that are all doing great
Are they tho?
I generally think you have good takes on things, but this comes across like systemic fatalistic excuse making.
> The recommendation to inspect the whole ship with an IR camera had me laughing out loud.
Where did this come from? What about the full recommendations from the NTSB. This comment makes it seem like you are calling into question the whole of the NTSB's findings.
"Don't look for a villain in this story. The villain is the system itself, and it's too powerful to change."
> Between making money, perceived culpability and risks offloaded to insurance companies why would they?
Because it is the right thing to do, and the NTSB thinks so too.
>> The problem is that there are a thousand merchant marine vessels operating right now that are all doing great
> Are they tho?
In the sense that they haven't caused an accident yet, yes. But they are accidents waiting to happen and the owners simply don't care. It usually takes a couple of regulatory interventions for such a message to sink in, what the NTSB is getting at there is that they would expect the owners to respond more seriously to these findings.
>> The recommendation to inspect the whole ship with an IR camera had me laughing out loud.
> Where did this come from?
Page 58 of the report.
And no, obviously I am not calling into question the whole of the NTSB's findings, it is just that that particular one seems to miss a lot of the realities involving these vessels.
> "Don't look for a villain in this story. The villain is the system itself, and it's too powerful to change."
I don't understand your goal with this statement, it wasn't mine so the quotes are not appropriate and besides I don't agree with it.
Loose wires are a fact of life. The amount of theoretical redundancy is sufficient to handle a loose wire, but the level of oversight and the combination of ad-hoc work on these vessels (usually under great time pressure) together are what caused this. And I think that NTSB should have pointed the finger at those responsible for that oversight as well, which is 'MARAD', however, MARAD does not even rate a mention in the report.
Oh, there are plenty of villains here. But they're in offices and wearing ties.
And they should be smacked down hard, but that isn't going to happen because then - inevitably - the role of the regulators would come under scrutiny as well. That is the main issue here. The NTSB did a fantastic job - as they always do - at finding the cause, it never ceases to amaze me how good these people are at finding the technical root cause of accidents. But the bureaucratic issues are the real root cause here: an industry that is running on wafer thing margins with ships that probably should not be out there, risking peoples lives for a miserly wage.
Regulators should step in and level the playing field. Yes, that will cause prices of shipping to rise. But if you really want to solve this that is where I think they should start and I am not at all saying that the system is too powerful to change, just that for some reason they seem to refuse to even name it, let alone force it to change.
Fwiw and since you received several comments about it, your first comment did not come off to everyone as making excuses. It was pretty clear you were trying to turn peoples attention to the real problem.
There was also no fatalistic tone about the system being too powerful to change. Just clear sharing of observations IMO.
It is not unusual to receive this reaction (being blamed for fatalism and making excuses) from observations like these, I have noticed.
I suspect a lot of people commenting in this thread have never been on one of these ships or have any idea of what the typical state of maintenance is, and how inaccessible the tech compartments are when the vessel is underway. This isn't exactly a server room environment. When vessels are new (in the first five years or so) and under the first owners they are usually tip-top. Then, after the first sale the rot sets in and unless there is a major overhaul you will see a lot of issues like these, usually they do not have such terrible consequences. They tend to last for 25 years or so (barring mishaps) and by then the number of repairs will be in the 100's and the vessel has changed hands a couple of times.
Passenger carrying vessels are better, but even there you can come across some pretty weird stuff.
I agree with all of this and everything you've said thus far. I hope my prior comment was not interpreted as some sort of indictment or attack on your motives.
This, 100%. I forget the specific numbers but regardless, the kinetic energy of a thing with that much mass, even moving at a very slow speed, is off the charts. Designing a bridge or protections for a bridge to survive that would at a minimum be cost prohibitive, if even possible with today’s materials and construction technologies.
> The NTSB found that the Key Bridge, which collapsed after being struck by the containership Dali on March 26, 2024, was almost 30 times above the acceptable risk threshold for critical or essential bridges, according to guidance established by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, or AASHTO.
> Over the last year, the NTSB identified 68 bridges that were designed before the AASHTO guidance was established — like the Key Bridge — that do not have a current vulnerability assessment. The recommendations are issued to bridge owners to calculate the annual frequency of collapse for their bridges using AASHTO’s Method II calculation.
Energy doesn't mean squat without a time component over which it's dissipated.
Stopping a car normally vs crashing a car. Skydiving with a parachute vs skydiving without a parachute.
For something like ship vs bridge you have to account for the crunch factor. USS Iowa going the same speed probably would've hit way harder despite having ~1/3 the tonnage.
Plan the bridge so any ship big enough to hurt it grounds before it gets that close. Don't put pilings in the channel. It's just money. But it's a lot of money so sometimes it's better to just have shipping not suck.
Alternatively, the Chunnel will almost certainly never get hit with a ship.
Yet another idea: if a ship's motors fail, have a ship ready that can push it in the right direction, in time. Probably need 2x the amount of horsepowers to make up for lost time, but it's not impossible.
Yes, that's called a tug and in plenty of harbors a vessel of this size would not be permitted to do close quarters maneuvers without the mandatory assistance of one, or in this case more likely two, tug boats of a certain minimum size relative to the size of the vessel.
Yes, but if you think of a ship once underway when the engine fails as an unguided ballistic missile with a mass that is absolutely mind boggling (the Dali masses 100,000 tonnes) there isn't much that you could build that would stop it. The best suggestion I've seen is to let the ship run aground but that ignores the situation around the area where the accident happened.
This ship wasn't towed by a tug, it was underway under its own power and in order for the ship to have any control authority at all it needs water flowing over the rudder.
Without that forward speed you're next to helpless and these things don't exactly turn on a dime. So even if there had been a place where it could have run aground it would never have been able to reach it because it was still in the water directly in front of the passage way under the bridge.
100,000 tonnes doing 7 Kph is a tremendous amount of kinetic energy.
The exact moment the systems aboard the Dali failed could not have come at a worse time, it had - as far as I'm aware of the whole saga - just made a slight course correction to better line up with the bridge and the helm had not yet been brought back to neutral. After that it was just Newton taking over, without control I don't think there is much that would have stopped it.
This is a good plot of the trajectory of the vessel from the moment it went under way until the moment it impacted the bridge:
You can, if you're prepared to pay for it. You could halt shipping while people are working on the bridge. You could make tunnels instead of bridges.
The question is simple: who will pay for it? Apparently we are ok with this kind of risk, if we weren't we would not be doing this at all.
There is a similar thing going on in my country with respect to railway crossings. Every year people die on railway crossings. But it took for a carriage full of toddlers to be hit by a train before the sentiment switched from 'well, they had it coming' to 'hm, maybe we should do something about this'. People don't like to pay for risks they see as small or that they perceive as that they're never going to affect them.
This never was about technology, it always was about financing. Financing for proper regulatory tech oversight (which is vastly understaffed) on the merchant marine fleet, funding for better infrastructure, funding for (mandatory) tug assistance for vessels of this size near sensitive structures, funding for better educated and more capable crew and so on. The loose wire is just a consequence of a whole raft of failures that have nothing to do with a label shroud preventing a wire from making proper contact.
The 'root cause' here isn't really the true root cause, it is just the point at which technology begins and administration ends.
IIRC the biggest issue with the jones act is the supply of US-built vessels, which are expensive, the current fleet is aging and, outside of defence, there's no real domestic shipbuilding industry anymore. This also means that domestic shipping (especially to populated areas that are not part of the lower 48) can't use anywhere near as much in the way of modern containers. This is anecdotal, but I've heard that people in Puerto Rico and Hawaii routinely order stuff from foreign countries as even with duties, it can be cheaper than ordering it from the mainland.
The act is problematic because it hasn't really been modernized, with the handful of revisions essentially just expanding its scope. The US either has to seriously figure out getting domestic shipbuilding going again (to the point where it can be economical to also export them) or at least whitelist foreign countries (eg South Korea) to allow their ships to be used. But that's unlikely in today's political climate.
The US government used to provide differential subsidies for cargos shipped on US flagged ships. This ensured that US shipping was competitive with the bottom dollar global shippers, at least for some cargos.
This ended under Reagan.
At first lots of people didn't care because Reagan was also doing his 600 ship navy so everyone was busy doing navy work, but after that ended the MM and american shipbuilding entered a death spiral.
Now the only work US flagged vessels can get is supporting the navy, and a tiny sliver of jones act trade. This means there are no economies of scale. If a ship is built, one is built to that class not 10. Orders are highly intermittent and there is no ability to build up a skilled workforce in efficient serial production. On the seagoing side, ships either get run ragged on aggressive schedules (ex: El Faro) or they sit in layup for long stretches rusting away.
If the US wants to fix its merchant marine it needs to provide incentive for increased cargos and increased shipbuilding. As Sal points out, the US is the second-biggest shipowning country in the world. US business like owning ships, they just don't want to fly the American flag because their incentives are towards offshoring.
The incentives are also all over the place. The shipping industry uses a lot of labour from "poor" countries, but on bulk shipping the labour costs are often a rounding error. The main issue is, of course, working conditions. Americans don't want to sit on a freighter for 6 month tours away from their families. The US navy has a hard enough problem doing it for people in their early 20s, and even then that's usually to get access to education funding. People from the Philippines will do it because it is life-changing amounts of money and the alternative is abject poverty.
It is usually 3 month tours, twice a year. So 3 months out, 3 months at home. Repeat.
>"Americans don't want to...."
This phrase needs to die. Americans(or any population) are not some sort of monolithic group that can only do some small subset of work.
"There are approximately 5,600 container ships operating worldwide as of early 2023"(from DuckDuckgo AI). Assuming a crew of 10 per ship; 56,000 people total are required.
"As of August 2025, the civilian labor force is approximately 171 million people."(from DuckDuckgo AI)
So to fully staff the WORLDWIDE fleet with Americans, it would take 0.03% of the labor population. This is a vanishingly small amount and since labor cost is as you say a rounding error, if it offered a competitive pay I am sure that there would be enough takers.
> Americans don't want to sit on a freighter for 6 month tours away from their families
And yet finding crews was never a problem before differential subsidies ended.
In fact crewing US flagged is harder now because the work is intermittent. If people can't find berths they time out on their licenses and go do something else in a different industry.
> People from the Philippines will do it because it is life-changing amounts of money
The international minimum wage for seafarers is about $700/mo. In comparison wages in the Philippines are between 20k-50k pesos a month or $340-$850. Seafaring is an above-average income job in the Philippines but not "life-changing."
IIUC, the only issue with the jones act requiring US-built vessels is that previous the US Navy used to buy US-built vessels and lease them out below-cost and don't do that anymore. It was never economically to use US-built vessels but we've stoped subsidizing it anymore.
The US navy did not. The US Treasury used to provide "differential subsidies" to allow US flagged vessels the ability to win cargos in international trade versus non-us flagged vessels with lower operating costs.
Running a 'tight ship' is great when you have a budget to burn on excellent quality crew. But shipping is so incredibly cut-throat that the crew members make very little money, are effectively modern slaves and tend to carry responsibilities way above their pay grade. They did what they could, and more than that, and for their efforts they were rewarded with what effectively amounted to house arrest while the authorities did their thing. The NTSB of course will focus on the 'hard' causes. But you can see a lot of frustration shine through towards the owners who even in light of the preliminary findings had changed absolutely nothing on the rest of their fleet.
The recommendation to inspect the whole ship with an IR camera had me laughing out loud. We're talking about a couple of kilometers of poorly accessible duct work and cabinets. You can do that while in port, but while you're in port most systems are idle or near idle and so you won't ever find an issue like this until you are underway, when vibration goes up and power consumption shoots up compared to being in port.
There is no shipping company that is effectively going to do a sea trial after every minor repair, usually there is a technician from some supplier that boards the vessel (often while it is underway), makes some fix and then goes off-board again. Vessels that are not moving are money sinks so the goal is to keep turnaround time in port to an absolute minimum.
What should really amaze you is how few of these incidents there are. In spite of this being a regulated industry it is first and foremost an oversight failure, if the regulators would have more budget and more manpower there maybe would be a stronger drive to get things technically in good order (resist temptation: 'shipshape').