When a container ship struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in March of 2024, causing its catastrophic collapse, Associate Professor of Civil and Systems Engineering Michael Shields described the collision as “a wake-up call.”
So he turned to the National Science Foundation and its Rapid Response Research (RAPID) program for funding to investigate the event’s implications.
If the Key Bridge, which carried more than 30,000 vehicles across the Patapsco River each day, was so vulnerable, Shields wanted to know what that meant for other U.S. bridges. Shields assembled a team of 13 students and two other faculty members to assess the country’s bridges and develop new risk models.
The students analyzed dozens of bridges, wrote data-collection programs, and built a virtual portal to report their findings. Using this information, they calculated collision risk for major bridges and pinpointed which are most vulnerable.
Their findings, released in March, revealed that 19 bridges are at risk of catastrophic collision. Among the most vulnerable are the four bridges highlighted at left. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty in predicting the frequency of ship collisions,” Shields says.
But the important point is not whether it will occur every 17 years or every 75 years. It’s that it’s happening way too often.” — CLAIRE GOUDREAU