Going to be expensive and drawn out

It was shocking video to wake up to on March 26, 2024 with the accident to have widespread and unimaginable impact. As one of the world’s oldest continuously running journals, the British-based Lloyd’s List has been providing weekly shipping news since 1734, with Editor-in-chief Richard Meade offering this update:

Just a couple of minutes after suffering loss of power, Maersk-operated boxship Dali struck a bridge over Baltimore’s Patapsco river and brought it down like a pack of cards. But the consequences of that brief impact will be felt for many years.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge is no mere minor prang. Six lives have been lost, and the dependents of the deceased will rightly expect compensation. So will those injured.

Joe Biden has pledged to shell out for the reconstruction work, with all the alacrity one would expect from a beleaguered president in an election year. But he almost certainly has the legal right to send the bill to the insurers, who in turn have the legal right to recover it from marine insurers.

Given the infamously litigious nature of insurance claims in the US, there is a real prospect of a decade or more of legal wrangling, as seen after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in 2010.

This is going to be expensive and drawn out. Numbers at this stage are guesstimates, but market chatter suggests insurers should be very pleased if they can keep payouts much below $1bn.

In some ways, the only surprise is that we haven’t been here before. There have been more than 200 cases of containerships around the world striking infrastructure over the past decade, mostly jetties, harbor walls, and the like.

In the wake of COVID, the Suez Canal blockage, and wars in the Black Sea and Red Sea both, the meteoric rise of the armchair supply chain pundit has been an unusual byproduct of global trade disruption.

But who knew there were equal legions of amateur bridge engineers just waiting for their opportunity to ensure their expertise shines through?

If you have a few minutes to spare and are in need of amusement, take to X — as we must now call Twitter — and you can find out why vaccine manufacturers must be held accountable for the Dali casualty, and/or it’s all Obama’s fault, or the dirty work of cyber hackers.

Alternatively, stick to Lloyd’s List for the best coverage of this story as it unfolds over the years ahead. If the truth is out there somewhere, it’s more likely to be on our website than anywhere else.