Baltimore Bridge Collapse Demands Nuanced Response Beyond Slogans
One thing that echoed mightily amid the chaos spawned by the huge cargo ship that brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore’s harbor, was just how more complicated the response needs to be than the usual, emotional outbursts for certainty and immediacy.
Simplicity seems to mean that deciding that bridge chaos is someone else’s responsibility.
The distinct messages from all the safety and rebuilding briefers, the ship-savvy and those involved in investigative, environmental, market, safety and legal responsibility responses were two — that the job ahead is complex and that it is something that will require all of government’s efforts and the private sector to coordinate.
It’s not going to be solved by easy slogans, though there were plenty of those — along with conspiracy theories — already starting to mount over how to go about paying for the harbor cleanup and eventual bridge replacement.
The number of unprepared, inapt questions aired from journalists at press conferences about exact repair cost and time estimates vied with continuing kooky suggestions from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., that some kind of terrorism must be responsible are off-base reflections of just how layered the set of next steps is going to be.
Of course no one in the first days of such a mess will know the estimated costs of a new bridge or how long traffic will have to be rerouted — we don’t even really understand what happened yet.
Surprisingly, Plentiful Details
If anything, what was impressive was the amount of detailed information that was available within 24 hours of a 1000-foot stacked container ship slamming a bridge pillar with 200,000,000 pounds of force, felling the span in 40 seconds — as well as the willingness to share it all.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a Coast Guard admiral, local harbor officials, the NTSB and others were able to offer quite detailed assessments that require more understanding than fit a television news bulletin chyron. Maybe it’s because of the nature of the accident itself or the lack of obvious political byplay, but, for once, officials seemed relatively transparent about what we all wanted to know.
Securing the contents of 4,700 containers on the Dali alone is a massive job — clearing the harbor of debris is huge. Finding lost vehicles falling from the bridge was proving difficult in moving, murky waters. One can just imagined the eventual environmental, engineering and legal issues will be murkier yet.
Still, congressional politics were just kicking in over the weekend about Joe Biden’s promise that the feds will underwrite the entire cost of cleanup, rerouted sea and land traffic and the bridge replacement. Though Biden naturally won praise from Maryland legislators who noted that the Baltimore port serves the entire nation, there was the beginning of backlash from conservative spending opponents already upset over last week’s budget approvals.
Apparently, they think the cost of such disasters should be borne by regional governments — until a disaster hits their own state.
Is a regional bridge collapse affecting the national economy different from the response to a door popping off a plane — a near disaster that has been laid at the feet of manufacturers more than on government? Maybe. But that kind of nuance escapes the budget-suspicious.
We’re revisiting whether government exists to fix what’s wrong. Joe Biden has said the federal government should pay all the costs; Donald Trump, so voluable on other topics, has been silent about the bridge collapse.
“The very thought of having the Federal Government pay for the Baltimore bridge is TOTALLY ABSURD!!” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-SC, texted The Hill. Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., called Biden’s plan “outrageous” for adding to federal spending.
Others want the ship’s foreign owners to pay a substantial amount of repair costs, which jumped the fact-finding effort currently under way. Insurance, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin suggested, will be part of the total.
There already is talk of linking bridge replacement to the supplemental budget bill to cover foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, or tapping federal emergency funds.
Expecting uninterrupted business and transit services and broken bridge replacements are simple if you just throw slogans at them.