BALTIMORE — Engineering studies commissioned by the state of Maryland in the early 2000s contemplated vulnerabilities to the area’s critical bridges, including the possibility of a “ship impact” at the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and threats to California’s Golden Gate Bridge in November 2001, consultants studied potential threats to five bridges in the state of Maryland. Two Key Bridge-focused reports from 2002 and 2004 “recommended countermeasures to mitigate the [bridge’s] intentional destruction” and prompted a “feasibility study” for “pier protection” at the bridge, according to two studies and one slideshow from the time, obtained Friday evening by The Baltimore Sun in a Maryland Public Information Act request filed in May.
Pier protection is any structural fortification at or around a bridge support designed to prevent or mitigate a collision.
These studies — although heavily redacted — shed light on what state officials knew about the bridge’s potential susceptibility decades before it was decimated on March 26 by a 984-foot container ship named the Dali. The collapse killed six construction workers who had been fixing potholes on Interstate 695 and sent 50,000 tons of debris into the Patapsco River, blocking the shipping channel for months.
“Small-scale pier protection” at five bridges — the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the Thomas J. Hatem…
