Sal Mercogliano on the Baltimore Bridge Collapse

Tracy Alloway (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Joe Weisenthal (0:04)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Tracy Alloway (0:17)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:21)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

So Joe, this is an emergency episode of Odd Lots. Anyone waking up on Tuesday morning would have seen the very, very dramatic news coming out of Baltimore.

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

I slept in today, and now I'm never going to make that mistake again, because then I walked into the office and I literally asked Tracy, is there some sort of huge port disaster? And so, yes.

Tracy Alloway (0:43)

And I thought you were trolling me initially, but it turned out you hadn't actually seen the news. So what happened this morning? We are recording on March 26th, and a container ship called Dali crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. This is the Key Bridge in many senses of the word. It is a vital commuter lane, and it is just outside the port of Baltimore, which means ships go under it in order to get in and out of the port. What we know so far about the ship is it was a Singaporean flag ship. It was chartered to Maersk, the shipping giant, and it's kind of reminiscent a little bit of what happened in March 2022 in the Chesapeake Bay with the Ever Forward.

But it seems like the results of this are much more dramatic. So the bridge is entirely collapsed.

As we are recording this, the search and rescue mission is still underway. They are still looking for survivors of this tragedy. So clearly a loss of life there. But Joe, this opens up a whole bunch of questions about how exactly this happened, what it means for shipping and freight, what it means for the wider economy.

Joe Weisenthal (1:56)

Let's jump right into it.

Tracy Alloway (1:57)

All right. We're going to be speaking with one of our favorite Odd Lots guests. We're speaking with Sal Mercogliano, professor at Campbell University and the host of the What Is Going On With Shipping show on YouTube.

Sal, you've become the person that everyone calls whenever there's a maritime disaster, it seems.

Sal Mercogliano (2:14)

It does. Unfortunately, that phone rings a little too often some days.

Joe Weisenthal (2:18)

Why don't we just start with, as of right now, the basics of what you understand happened.

Sal Mercogliano (2:22)

Yeah. Dali was just finishing up an East Coast run. It hit a couple of East Coast ports. It was leaving the Port of Baltimore, heading down to the Panama Canal, and was heading over to Sri Lanka, the Port of Colombo. The ship is owned by a company out of Singapore, which is not unusual, and it's actually leased and operated for Maersk Lines.

The ship had on board two Maryland pilots, Chesapeake Bay pilots. The ship was doing as it normally would do. A ship just before it had come off the SeaGrid terminal. This is the container terminal just outside of Baltimore, but it's inside the harbor there.

The ship had gotten into the channel and was heading outbound at about eight knots, and everything seemed to be normal. Now, there are reports that when the ship was coming up the bay, and even when the ship was pier side, that the ship suffered some engineering issues. There were some issues with black smoke, there was some issue with power loss. But before the ship ever would have thrown off lines, it would have done a series of tests at the dock to make sure that it had propulsion, it had rudder control, and it would have been cleared to leave. Matter of fact, this ship was recently inspected by the US Coast Guard under a port state agreement. The ship headed southbound, and what we have is both the information from marine traffic and from video provided from the Port of Baltimore. What we see in these two images is the ship as it was heading toward the Francis Scott Key Bridge lost power, the ship went dark. As a former mariner, I could say this, that the worst feeling I've ever had on a ship is when everything goes quiet. There's always noise, because that's a sign that you've dropped the plan. In other words, you've lost the engine.

Silence is deadly, it just means everything has gone wrong. Now you have a 100,000 ton ship at 8 knots, roughly about 10 miles an hour, with no control. Very quickly, within 10, 15 seconds, we see lights come back on, but that's not clear that the ship's engines have come back on. That could be the emergency backup engines coming on to give you propulsion. We know, and I've talked to a tug operator in Baltimore, they heard the ship's pilot, and they remember ships will have a crew on board. We believe this crew to be an Indian crew.