When the Ship Hit the Span

Hello, Dali!

If you were to list America’s top 10 busiest ports, Baltimore would be on that list. Granted, it’d be near the bottom, but it is a major part of our economic infrastructure. Part of that harbor is the iconic 1.6-mile long Francis Scott Key Bridge.

On March 26, 2024, a cargo ship named the Dali lost power, went off course, and smashed into the Key Bridge. The bridge, which was structurally sound and up to code, collapsed. If you don’t live in Baltimore, (a) congratulations, and (b) you probably forgot about this story already. Six construction workers who were on the bridge that night were killed in the crash, but automobile traffic on the bridge had been shut down right before the collapse. There was considerable loss of life, but the disaster could have been much worse had steps not been taken to get cars off the bridge.

The Dali is a massive ship, over 900 feet long (four Boeing 747s end to end), 17 rows across for containers, 5 levels above the waterline, 6 below. It’s called a “Post-Panamax” ship and weighs over 100,000 tons. It was built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea. It’s not even the largest cargo ship there is, but it’s still one of the big boys. It’s like the Chris Christy of cargo ships.

America prides itself on being technologically advanced and highly logistical. Aren’t we the people who can do whatever we put our minds to? Didn’t we send a man to the moon? (Don’t answer that.) Yet it took us 55 days to get tugboats to pull the cargo ship stuck in the Patapsco River away from the bridge wreckage and drag the ship to the Seagirt Marine Terminal in Baltimore. That happened May 20, 2024. For those 55 days, the Indian crew of the Dali had to live on board ship. Besides the crew, there are also two pilots who drive the ship; well actually, one pilot and one trainee, who is sometimes called a pilot in some of the news reports.

The crew of the Dali all had one-month visas for the United States, which have since expired while they’ve been ship-bound. Now that the ship is in port, they may get to go home. Or maybe in our caprcious system of law enforcement, they’ll be arrested for overstaying their visa. Anyway, the FBI was quick to step in and take all of their cell phones as part of the investigation, which as far as I can see, has never even started.

So these foreign nationals were left on a crippled ship in a foreign port with no way to contact the outside world.

In late June of 2024 (just a few weeks ago), it was announced that some of the crew and pilots would be allowed to go home, but there were no specific plans announced. It seems they are still living on the boat, but the boat is now in a marina instead of stuck in a river under a collapsed bridge. I’m sure these guys are hoping to be allowed to leave soon. However, the City of Baltimore is arguing the men should stay in the United States until all the investigations and litigation are completed. If that is the case, we’ll have to give them permanent residency, since Baltimore and the federal government are not exactly quick in doing things. And as far as I can find in my research, those guys are still on the ship.

The mayor of Baltimore is a guy named Brandon Scott, and he launched an investigation. I am starting to think they do not know what that term means. The FBI is on the job, too, but they may not have full resources, since they are still busy trying to figure out how cocaine got into the White House.

Mayor Scott wants to hold the “wrongdoers” responsible. Tracing who is responsible is like trying to make sense of the Biden network of shell corporations. The ship is owned by Grace Ocean Private Limited, a Singapore company, and it is operated by a Singapore outfit known as the Syngery Group, which has contracted it out to Maersk. The Synergy Group owns the ship itself, and they have asked the courts to cap the limit of their liability to $43.6M. This is somewhat less than the projected costs to rebuild the bridge, which are $1.9B. And considering the rate of inflation and the speed at which work is being done, it will like be $19B soon.

At the time the bridge was knocked out of commission, President Biden said that the US taxpayers would pay for the repair. Here is the Francis Scott Key Bridge the morning after.

Biden couldn’t say taxpayers would foot the bill quickly enough. Without being prompted, without knowing what’s going on, without anyone really asking him to do it, Biden promised that American taxpayers would pay for the repairs immediately—no investigation, no attempts to hold the parent company responsible. Biden just decided we would cough up the money and the Biden administration would take credit for paying the bill. Makes me wonder if Biden wanted to make sure nobody got too involved in figuring out what happened.

If Synergy were held liable, they might come up with some facts that disrupted the narrative, which, as far as I can see, is that this was just a weird random disaster.

Here is the timeline, which came out pretty quickly after the bridge collapse. This has not been substantially revised since the event, so it’s likely pretty close to accurate.

• At 1:25 a.m. on March 26, 2024, the cargo ship Dali lost power—but we don’t know why. Power loss was total. The engine went dead, the lights were out, and an emergency generator kicked on. This allowed for the pilot to steer the ship, but it did not restart the engines. The ship was moving as the currents were taking it.

• The pilot issued an order to drop the anchor on the port (left) side, in an attempt to slow the ship’s drift and keep it away from the bridge or at least slow it down. Movement toward starboard (right) would cause it to collide with the bridge and that’s the way the currents were pushing the ship.

• The anchor was dropped, but the pilot could see at this point the ship was going to hit the span and there was nothing he could do to prevent that.

• The ship issues a distress call, warning that a devastating crash was imminent.

• That call caused Baltimore authorities to shut off traffic on the bridge; there were no cars on the bridge when it went down. Sadly, there were construction workers on the bridge.

• Ships have a recorder (“black box”) and authorities have the Dali’s data. This doesn’t mean we’ll ever see it, but it exists.

• It took till June 2024 for them to tug what’s left of the Dali out of the river and to a marina. Now there is some elbow room to start rebuilding. But don’t get in too much of a hurry, they haven’t even got bids yet. (But no worries, Baltimore tends to favor the no-bid contract system.)

In this catastrophe, the Dali became what is known as a “dead ship.” It’s a rare occurrence, but ship pilots train for this sort of thing. The Dali’s pilot had 10 years of experience and it seems like what he did complied with protocol. The big unanswered question is why did the Dali suddenly go lights-out?

Digging a little into the ship’s history, the Dali had one other accident. Eight years ago it tore up a quay in Belgium. This was not a dead ship event; the accident occurred during unmooring as the ship was leaving port. No one was injured. This prior accident seems unrelated to the Key Bridge event. More like the maritime equivalent of a fender-bender.

The always-befuddled Mr. Buttigieg, our Secretary of Transportation, said that he could not estimate what the bridge rebuild would cost or when it would be finished. ($1.9B and 2028, Mr. Buttigieg, don’t you read your own reports?)

The perpetually startled Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen remarked that we have insurance and it will be used to cover part of the rebuilding. We have insurance? The United States government has insurance? Most governments are self-insured. And if we have insurance, why did Biden promise taxpayer funds to rebuild the bridge?

This month (July 2024), Maryland finally got around to approving a bid for a company to remove the debris from the accident from the river.  The $50.3M no-bid contract went to a Swedish company (because no American company could possibly remove debris) and was approved by Maryland governor Wes Moore on July 3, 2024. But it gets worse. The debris has already been removed—the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did it. This contract with Skanska is to get rid of other debris in other channels in the harbor that somehow relate to this crash. I would like to repeat that this was a no-bid contract. The state just handed Skanska $50M to do something we had already mostly done or could finish up.

Some of the materials on the Dali were hazardous and may have been dumped into the river. It seems as if no one has noticed.

Although no bids have been received and no work has started, authorities have already said the cost of rebuilding the bridge will be $1.9B. Meanwhile, they have found $37.4M in taxpayer money to pay people who were affected by the bridge collapse, namely Baltimore-area businesses. News releases from the city point out that $6.4M was paid to businesses owned by minorities and/or women.

Expect the new bridge to be finished by 2028. This, like the price tag, is a made-up bit of information, since we do not have a bidder, a company, or official plans. Meanwhile, the Biden regime is praising itself for getting Baltimore back in business so quickly.

When it comes to the Dali and the Key Bridge, one thing interests me more than making fun of Pete Buttigieg. What took out the ship? The prevailing conspiracy theory—and it has been largely forgotten in our hysterical news cycles—is that it was a cyberattack. The other theory, for which we have no evidence but which is curiously NOT considered a conspiracy theory, is that the ship was having electrical problems. There was even a stray report that days before the crash, lights went on and off on the ship. So clearly this is the preferred story since authorities have found some supporting evidence. The third theory blames it on the weather, but stops short of accusing that old villain climate change. The weather the night of the crash was clear. Despite evidence to the contrary, the blame-it-on-the-weather theory is also not considered a conspiracy theory.

Without knowing what happened or having an access to black-box type information, the terrorist theory has some legs and seems more plausible than a ship abruptly losing all power for no reason.

• We have motive: the United States has enemies that might like to attack its infrastructure.

• We have opportunity: technologically, this type of cyberattack is quite possible.

• The FBI and intelligence communities, you know, the people who told us the Steele dossier was true, Trump was a Russian agent, and Hunter’s laptop was fake, have come forward and categorically announced this was NOT an act of terrorism. It’s very hard to prove a counter-factual and considering they haven’t even started to rebuild the bridge yet, how do they know for sure what this attack isn’t?

• Maryland’s Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld said it was too early in the investigation to know what happened. He does not rule out terrorism.

• Despite the FBI deciding this was no terror attack, FBI Director and discredited buffoon Christopher Wray has warned that terrorist attacks on U.S. infrastructure were not just possible but likely. In fact, Wray at one other time said cyberattacks on the United States were not only possible, they were imminent. But this isn’t one.

• General Michael Flynn has said infrastructure attacks would be part of a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy and said this could be a calculated attack. He did not say it was terrorism, just that infrastructure attacks were a good terrorist strategy.

• Alex Jones said, “It looks deliberate.” I guess they’ll sue him for another $1B. (Hide the cat, Alex!)

• And most compelling of all, FactCheck.org wrote, “Baseless Conspiracy Theories Follow Key Bridge Collapse.” They issued this proclamation on March 27, 2024, that is, the very next day. So even though law enforcement moves slowly, FactCheck knows a baseless conspiracy theory in a matter of hours. Maybe the FBI should hire them? And why are liberals always in such a hurry to protect terrorists?

• In fact, all of the usual truth-killers and disinformation sites say that conspiracy theories about terrorists involved in the Key Bridge collapse are “baseless.” When they all use the same word—and it’s a weird word nobody says in real life—you know they all are working off a script. (When is the last time any normal person said the word “baseless” in a normal conversation?)

• If the disinformation sites and the FBI and other intelligence agencies are so positive that this had nothing to do with terrorism… why can’t they even consider terrorism? It’s like investigating the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman but declaring before you get to the crime scene that it would be a conspiracy theory to say that they were murdered.

I have no idea what happened to the Dali. All I know is that it is taking way too long to rebuild this bridge and that infrastructure attacks are things that terrorists might do. I also know there is a lot of money to be skimmed off $1.9B in work, a price tag that came in before plans to rebuild. I think we should investigate pronto and do a thorough, credible job.

And I think we should be thoughtful and judicious in considering possible terrorist motives for this sort of thing. Isn’t it prudent to consider all of the angles? The fact that we are not even allowed to consider nefarious motives for this event seems bizarre, since this is exactly the sort of thing terrorists might do.

Didn’t our government used to tell us, “If you see something, say something!” Well, I see something, and I’m saying something.

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