Effects of US bridge collapse will be felt for long time

You see it as soon as you make the turn from the road to Washington DC onto the complex of motorways and tunnels that skirt Baltimore, one of east coast America’s busiest ports.

A huge, 300m long cargo vessel, the Dali, stranded in the middle of the bay.

Around it is the tangled wreckage of what used to be the Francis Scott Key bridge, named after the author of the US national anthem, ‘The Star Spangled Banner’.

The concrete pylons that supported the main span of the bridge jut from the water like a few broken fence posts.

It is the absence of the bridge that is most notable in the scene.

From the first sighting, it took us about 25 minutes to get to 303 Authority Road, the location of the management offices for the bridge, now the scene of a vast media swarm of hundreds of cameramen and reporters and the additional telecoms equipment brought in to cope with the demand.

Roadblocks have kept everybody else out of the area, which is part of a neighbourhood called Dundalk.

Inside the offices, an incident centre has been set up to manage the response.

Top priority is the search for the people who went into the water when the bridge collapsed.

This includes eight construction workers who had been repairing potholes on the road at night – two have been found so far, both alive, one badly injured and the other apparently utterly unscathed – and the people driving across the bridge.

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Sonar used by the fire and rescue services have found five vehicles on the seabed, three passenger cars, a cement truck and one so far unidentified vehicle. Dive teams will investigate.

It could have been a lot worse, this is a busy crossing at all times of the day and night.

The drifting ship had radioed in a mayday signal when a power outage caused it to drift towards the bridge at around one thirty in the morning.

Officials scrambled to close the bridge to traffic and are convinced this action saved more people.

Governor of Maryland Wes Moore has declared a state of emergency.

This will help in his quest for federal funds for the immediate rescue operation, but also for the economic fallout which will be considerable.

Firstly one of the busiest ports in America, a key import/export site for the motor industry, is now blocked by the bridge wreckage.

Clearing that will take weeks if not months.

Replacing the bridge will take years and cost probably a billion dollars or more.

The last big bridge collapse cost $250 million to replace and that was in 2007 and was a smaller bridge.

Baltimore is pretty traffic-snarled at the best of times.

Now a four-lane highway that carries 30,000 commuters a day is gone for years to come.

It also carries a lot of commercial traffic – most importantly consignments of chemicals that cannot travel through the tunnels that also cross the harbour.

So all this extra traffic is now going to end up clogging I-95, the freeway its management company likes to call “America’s main street”.

It is a sugar-coated way of saying it is an incredibly busy motorway, with frequent traffic jams.

The effects of this bridge collapse are going to be felt for a long time to come.