A simulator is giving investigators insight into what happened last month when a container ship named the Dali crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The simulator modeled the exact conditions during the collapse to determine if it could have been prevented.
The simulator is at California State University’s Maritime Academy (Cal Maritime) where researchers put in the exact conditions at the time of the Key Bridge collapse.
They found that, with a ship that large, with no power, little could have been done to stop the tragedy.
"Unfortunately, all of the factors that went wrong, or could go wrong did go wrong, and that essentially all happened at the worst time that it could have," said Kevin Calnan, Assistant Professor of Marine Transportation at Cal Maritime. "We could compare it to the perfect storm of accidents where everything that could go wrong did go wrong at exactly where we would not want it to go wrong.”
The simulator found that the containers on the Dali acted as sails with winds pushing the ship toward the bridge. It also found one of the few scenarios that could have prevented the disaster was two tugboats at full power pulling the Dali away from the bridge, which is something that would not have been common practice.
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Source: CBS News
