The company that chartered the cargo ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was recently sanctioned by regulators for blocking its employees from directly reporting safety concerns to the U.S. Coast Guard — in violation of a seaman whistleblower protection law, according to regulatory filings reviewed by The Lever.

Eight months before a Maersk Line Limited-chartered cargo ship crashed into the Baltimore bridge, likely killing six people and injuring others, the Labor Department sanctioned the shipping conglomerate for retaliating against an employee who reported unsafe working conditions aboard a Maersk-operated boat. In its order, the department found that Maersk had “a policy that requires employees to first report their concerns to [Maersk]… prior to reporting it to the [Coast Guard] or other authorities.”

  • @exanime
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    23 months ago

    Ehmm… Not from collisions like this one

    From your link:

    Shahbodaghlou said Bay Area bridges are engineered to withstand massive earthquakes and even typhoons. But he admits you cannot design for every possibility, like a direct hit from a massive container ship.

    The San Francisco bridge is “protected” by the fact the water is too shallow for such large ships… So I guess the answer for Baltimore would be to ban ships this large

    • BaldProphet
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      fedilink
      03 months ago

      From the video I saw, it looked like the ship hit the support nearly straight-on. If they built some sort of underwater pile of rubble to cause ships to run aground earlier, or perhaps bumpers that extend further out to redirect ships, that could potentially work. But yeah, it was basically a head-on collision. An edge case.