Dozens of highway bridges around the country are at risk of a major collision from a ship within the next few decades, and five bridges could suffer a “catastrophic” strike within less than 40 years, according to research from Johns Hopkins University.
Researchers in the school’s engineering department began looking at the potential for bridge strikes last year after a runaway cargo ship destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, killing six people.
“With this investigation we wanted to know if what happened to the Key Bridge was a rare occurrence. Was it an aberration? We found it’s really not,” said Michael Shields, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins and lead investigator of the National Science Foundation–supported study. “In fact, it’s something we should expect to happen every few years.”
The results underscore the need for state highway departments and other bridge operators to protect their bridges with so-called dolphins and other structural barriers, the researchers wrote.
