Baltimore bridge disaster tests supply chains’ resilience but pandemic lessons ease impact
- Since the pandemic, US East Coast ports have invested in expanded container terminals, adopted new technology for inventory management and made other upgrades
- Ripple effects from the Baltimore port’s closure are expected to extend to Europe, Japan, India, South Korea and Mexico, which have close trade ties to the US
With no work emails or phone calls it’s mostly been “scary quiet” for Theresa Abel since March 26, when a huge container vessel crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, bringing down the span, killing six workers and clogging the main shipping channel that connected the city’s port with the rest of the world.
Abel, a manager at a logistical support and transport services company, described the sudden disruption at the harbour, the ninth largest for international shipments by volume in the US, as “worse than the Covid-19 pandemic”.
From 2020 through 2022, Covid-induced stay-at-home orders, a disproportionate spread of the deadly virus and an unexpected boost in consumer demand for goods led to a global supply chains crisis, high shipping costs and inflation that still persists.
By comparison, Abel said that “during the pandemic the port was still running but on major restrictions. This incident has caused a standstill.”
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Six presumed dead after Singapore-flagged cargo ship topples Baltimore bridge
Last week, salvage crews managed to remove a massive piece of steel from the bridge wreckage but thousands of tons of twisted metal and concrete debris still remain on the ship’s deck since the crash.
As of April 19, some 120 containers had been taken off the vessel, which continues to block access to the port. It was carrying 4,700 containers at the time of the crash, but engineers aim to offload about 178 to refloat it.