In Baltimore, Maryland, the container ship Dali lost power. It signaled for may day shortly before it struck a support of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge then collapsed into the harbor on March 26, 2024. Today, pieces of the fallen bridge still lie across the harbor, closing off the port. Ships can no longer enter or leave, and the Dali lays trapped beneath the rubble.
One question in the public’s mind is: how will this event affect the economy? For information on this subject, the Norse Star interviewed Pat Schneider, a social studies and economics teacher at Stoughton High School.
“It’s a big deal for the Baltimore area,” Schneider said. “There’s a lot of people who work at the dock itself, and they’re going to be laid off until they can get enough of the bridge out and get the ships going back in and out. They’re going to be out of work for a while.”
Schneider said that the port in Baltimore is used to transport cars and auto parts. As the parts come in, they’re shipped elsewhere in the country for assembly.
“On the nice side, there’s also a port in Philadelphia, there’s a port in New York City, so [the ships] should be able to reroute around [the Baltimore port],” Schneider said in regards to possible effects on the greater U.S. economy. “The biggest problem would be in Baltimore itself as a city.”
“The big picture is, [the port’s] only a small piece of the world economy,” Schneider said. “Because we produce things with lots of parts from lots of locations, it’s a small piece of the overall puzzle of how we build things. So, [with] the car example: there might be parts from Japan that are going through the Panama Canal, and then end up in Baltimore, then get shipped by rail to wherever you build cars. […] Losing the port is probably not going to affect our GDP, but it does make things remarkably inconvenient for the businesses that are connected there.”
That said, Schneider stated that the situation in Baltimore was unlikely to affect citizens in Wisconsin. Comparatively, the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in March of 2021, ultimately affecting the world economy. Fortunately, the Key Bridge won’t have as significant an effect. Schneider also predicted the bridge’s collapse would weave into U.S. politics.
“They’re gonna have to rebuild this bridge, and the Federal Government has said it’s going to pay for it,” Schneider said. “But, there’s going to be a political battle over how they pay for it because a lot of conservatives in Congress will [say], ‘Sure, we’ll pay for it, but if we’re going to pay for that, we’re going to have to make spending cuts in other locations.’ The other thing is, that Baltimore is a Democratic stronghold, so are conservatives going to be willing to vote to help out an area that has Democrats without cutting spending in other areas. The Biden Administration would say, ‘When there’s an emergency, we just fix it, and we worry about how it gets paid for, later.’”
On the topic of rebuilding the bridge, the Norse Star also interviewed a Marine Surveyor, who preferred to remain anonymous.
According to the surveyor, planning reconstruction began the night of the collapse. The construction of the new bridge will only begin once the pieces of the collapsed bridge have been removed. The current estimate is that all of the pieces will be removed in about eight months.
“Once the new bridge is designed and approved, a marine construction company will be awarded the bid for the project,” the Marine Surveyor said in an email. “Once new construction starts, it could take upwards of 3-4 years or more, depending on the design.” The construction of the new bridge will start with concrete piles in the seabed to anchor the bridge. The supports for the bridge will follow, and finally, roads will be paved.