The Dali tragedy: An enormous ship that has been crushed into a bridge and shipped hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and water in Baltimore, N.J.
In the early hours of Tuesday, the global supply chain and US coastal infrastructure collided in the worst possible way. An enormous container ship, the Dali, slammed into a support of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, crumpling its central span into the Patapsco River and cutting off the city’s port from the Atlantic Ocean. Rescuers called off their search for the missing at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, but six people were presumed dead.
In order to take vehicles from a ship and put them on a car carrier truck for Baltimore, the Port of New York and New Jersey would have to be three hours away.
The shipping picture won’t be easy to understand once the disaster is resolved. Changes to the routes and destinations of ships on the ocean can add a lot of time to a journey. If a ship is hauling a bunch of different cargoes for a bunch of different industries, a holdup along the way causes a lot of people to be screaming for their supplies.
“Everybody right now is saying, ‘We’re just going to reroute, it’s going to be fine,’” says Nada Sanders, an expert in supply chain management at Northeastern University. It won’t be good if this goes on for a while. Prices are going to be impacted by it.
The destruction of the bridge also underlines that boats are getting bigger. The trade transport volume has tripled over the past 30 years. At nearly 1,000 feet long, the Dali is emblematic of the ballooning shipping industry.
The growth of boats is down to simple economics: The more goods you can cram onto a ship, the more you save on costs. “The amount of cargo has increased tremendously,” says Zal Phiroz, a supply chain analyst at UC San Diego. Covid has impacted this greatly as well. The prices of containers exploded. Everything went through the roof.
Improving the Impact of the Collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge on Baltimore and the Middle East — Comments on the Case of Tradepoint Atlantic
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge was struck by a cargo ship and collapsed, it was a shocking disaster that took the lives of six men working on the bridge at the time, four of whom are presumed dead.
Automakers were quick to emphasize that they were adapting. GM says it is making changes to deliveries. “Contingency plans” is what Stellantis is working on. Mercedes says it has options. Mazda says it has yet to finalize alternatives to this “vital” port. It’s not easy.
That’s because rerouting an imported vehicle is a lot more complicated than redirecting a shipping container. Not all ports are equally equipped to unload the vessels that carry vehicles — a special “roll-on roll-off,” or ro-ro ship.
It’s a big reason why vessels can’t be sent to another port even if you can get them off the ships at another one, since the port facility where they are typically built is right next to where the ships unload.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge is near the Tradepoint Atlantic terminal. Volkswagen and BMW expect no impact from the disaster, since they operate there. The ship with Volkswagens was able to dock like any other ship.
Tradepoint Atlantic says it’s well equipped to handle more vehicle cargo. Plans to accept redirected cargo are underway, including the ability to handle the increased capacity.”
“Our thoughts are with all of those impacted by this collapse,” Bethann Rooney, port director, said in a statement, adding that the port “is proactively working with our industry partners to respond as needed and ensure supply chain continuity along the East Coast.”
Those two options would also have a benefit for Baltimore as the city reels from the loss of a crucial bridge. They would allow at least some port jobs to continue, boosting the local economy, while the waterways are blocked.
For instance, Brunswick in Georgia is the second busiest port for vehicles after Baltimore — and Mercedes and Subaru, which import many vehicles through Baltimore, also have large processing operations there.
Officials at Brunswick say that the port has been contacted by companies as an interim solution while the Baltimore port is partially blocked, and that the port has unused capacity to process another 200,000 vehicles per year.