This article by Noi Mahoney at FreightWaves provides more insight into the economic impact of the collapse of the bridge in Baltimore:

The port is the deepest harbor in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, with five public and 12 private terminals. It handled over $80 billion worth of cargo in 2023. It serves more than 50 ocean carriers making nearly 1,800 annual port calls.

The port generated nearly $3.3 billion in total personal income and supports 15,330 direct jobs and 139,180 jobs connected to the port, according to state data.

and

According to recent data from Implan, the port’s 15,000-plus direct employees could lose an estimated $275 million in labor income if container operations are down for a month.

Implan is a Huntersville, North Carolina-based economic software and analysis firm.

“Before we even performed the analysis, we knew this event would have a negligible loss to the U.S. gross domestic product,” Candi Clouse, Implan’s vice president of customer success and education services, told FreightWaves. “The logistics and shipping will just shift to another U.S. port temporarily. However, the potential impact to Maryland is something to keep an eye on. Even if the port is only closed for 30 days, Maryland would be at risk for losing $550 million to its gross domestic product and $1 billion loss in total value of goods and services.”

So, although the port is characterized as one of Baltimore’s primary economic drivers (after Johns Hopkins), the collapse of the bridge, while serious to Maryland, is unlikely to have major national impact. That further raises the question of why other than politics the federal government should bear the entire cost of rebuilding the bridge as President Biden has pledged.

The lawsuits are lining up in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. There will not only be suits brought for the damage to the bridge itself but no doubt by the people injured in the incident and the families of those killed.

The ability of claimants to recover will be limited by the Limitation of Liability Act. The act limits the liability of the owner of the vessel to the value of the vessel plus the value of its cargo as long as the owner lacked knowledge of the problem beforehand.

It seems to me that will be the critical issue. The value of the Dali, the container ship that struck the bridge, is probably in the tens of millions of dollars. It’s hard to guess at the value of the cargo.

Regardless, unless negligence known of by the owner can be proven which I doubt, the liability will be far less than the damages caused.

Update

Jeanne Eaglesham reports at the Wall Street Journal:

While the lawyers fight, most claims will likely get paid by the insurers, including money for the bridge’s reconstruction. Then they will duke it out among themselves. Other claims might take longer, including those by the families of the people killed in the crash.

Other big sources of claims include the loss of revenue for the port, for the vessels now stuck inside it, and for businesses affected by the resulting supply-chain snarl-ups.

The bridge part of this web of claims may be the simplest to resolve. The structure cost some $60 million to build in 1977, which is around $300 million today when adjusted for inflation.

The bridge is covered by the state of Maryland’s insurance. The policy, covering property damage and business interruption for bridges and tunnels, pays up to $350 million, documents show.

This incident is significant enough that it will be a serious blow to the insurance industry, particularly maritime insurance.

Here’s a blogger I haven’t linked to in a while. Laughing Wolf speculates on what the disaster that took out a span of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore might have:

Baltimore is about the 12th or 13th busiest port in the United States. For all intents and purposes, consider it offline for at least a year. For the next few months, the ships that are there are likely to stay there, and no new ships will arrive. This is going to have several major impacts.

First, goods that would normally arrive there and be distributed will not. This is going to impact logistics and supplies in the mid-Atlantic region rather significantly. Second, Baltimore is on the ropes financially and otherwise. Right now, I sure don’t have a clue how bad the impact will be to a city already teetering on the brink, other than to say it’s going to be very, very bad. Third, how bad it will hit our national economy is something I don’t really want to think about right now. It’s not going to be good, but I can see scenarios where the level of suck could truly sucketh mightier than a Hoover. Fourth, don’t forget that the bridge is part of a major interstate, and a good stretch of 465 is now offline. That will impact not only interstate transportation, but will hamstring a significant segment of local regular traffic as well.

Read the whole thing.

I suspect he might be surprised at how quickly the port could be reopened. That doesn’t require a full repair—just the clearing of the fallen bridge blocking the waterway.

Still, the port is likely to be inaccessible for weeks or longer. We’ll need to wait to see what will actually happen.

The president has made some pledges related to the disaster. ABC News reports:

President Joe Biden gave remarks Tuesday on the Baltimore bridge collapse, telling residents “we’re going to stay with you as long as it takes.”

“It’s my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstruction in that bridge. I expect the Congress to support my effort,” Biden said from the White House.

“This is going to take some time,” the president said, adding, “We’re not leaving until this job gets done.”

I think we might want to reflect on that a bit. How will it work? For example, the way the Interstate Highway System is organized, the federal government pays the bulk of the expense for new construction while state and local governments are responsible for the bulk of upkeep of interstates within their borders.

I can see a role for federal funds in this disaster since it has interstate and, indeed, national implications but IMO pledging the federal government to bear “the entire cost of construction” is excessive. It introduces substantial moral hazard.

I’m starting to see some finger-pointing about the disaster. To the best of my understanding the bridge was recently rated fair not poor. I don’t believe it was prioritized in the infrastructure bill enacted in the early days of the Biden Administration. Major incidents involving ships colliding with pylons don’t appear to be commonplace but they aren’t unheard of, either.

Update

Does anyone know if a civil suit has been filed against the owner or operator of the container ship yet? This incident was no “act of God”. It doesn’t need to have been deliberate to be actionable.

I’m beginning to hear complaints that our infrastructure is not suitable for the transportation needs of today. Does that have things the right way around? Maybe the container ships trying to enter harbors are not suitable to task.

I wanted to call your attention to this op-ed by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in the Wall Street Journal. In the piece he paints a vivid picture of what will happen if “Hamas wins”:

Hamas would declare victory—on the verge of defeat, then the next minute revived. These criminals against humanity would emerge from their tunnels triumphant after playing with the lives not only of the 250 Israelis captured on Oct. 7, but also of their own citizens, whom they transformed into human shields.

The Arab street would view Hamas terrorists as resistance fighters. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—nations that signed the Abraham Accords or were leaning toward doing so—Hamas’s prestige would be enhanced. In the West Bank as in Gaza, Hamas would quickly eclipse the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, whose image would pale next to the twin aura of martyrdom and endurance in which Hamas would cloak itself.

After that, no diplomatic or military strategy would prevail against the iron law of people converted into mobs and mobs into packs. None of the experts’ extravagant plans for an international stabilization force, an interim Arab authority, or a technocratic government presiding over the reconstruction of Gaza would stand long against the blast effect created by the last-minute return of this group of criminals adorned with the most heroic of virtues.

Hamas would be the law in the Palestinian territories. It would set the ideological and political agenda, regardless of the formal structure of the new government. And Israel will never deal with a Palestinian Authority of which Hamas is a part. Goodbye, Palestinian State. Hope for peace harbored by moderates on both sides will be dead.

concluding:

Those who portray themselves as praying for the end of this war and a negotiated peace on “the day after” must recognize there is only one path to that end. First, the release of all hostages. Next, the evacuation of civilians from the zone of imminent combat. When will the world recognize that Israel, having been forced into this war, is doing more than any army ever did to prevent civilian deaths?

And finally, in Rafah, the destruction of what remains of Hamas and its death squads. Without this military victory, the endless wheel of misfortune will begin to spin yet again, though faster. This is the terrible truth.

What he fails to do is describe what will happen if Israel wins. I honestly have no idea but I can speculate.

The elected government of Gaza and much of Gaza itself will have been destroyed. Gaza’s civilian residents would be left without food or medical care and without a functioning economy or even functioning NGOs to provide assistance. Any prospect of a “two-state solution” would be dead.

It’s a bleak picture regardless of who prevails.

A week after the election and the outcome of the race for Cook County States Attorney remains undecided. Most votes should have arrived by this time but some may still be straggling in. Now they’ll start counting “provision” ballots, presumably people who went to the wrong polling place.

When the polls close Judge Burke had 52% of the votes, leading by a few thousand votes, while Mr. Harris, the Cook County Democratic Party’s endorsed candidate garnered 48% of the votes. That had been a consistent result throughout the night both immediately after the polls closed and a few polling places had reported their results and later when the absentee ballots that had been received on time had all been counted. It wasn’t until later that the race narrowed. Now Judge Burke leads by just 1,700 votes and its 50-50.

This is not exactly a confidence builder. Retorting that the ballot counting is being witnessed by pollwatchers of both political parties does not assuage me much. In Chicago for practical purposes there is no such thing as a Republican pollwatcher. Most are “Republicans for a day”. So, what’s going on now? Democratic Party apparatchiks are counting the votes and the endorsed candidate is catching up. Hoodathunkit?

The picture above, “sampled” from the Wall Street Journal, is an illustration of the aftermath of a container ship striking the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Cars and people were thrown into the river; no one on the container ship appears to have been killed.

The collision will have repercussions for weeks or months. Access to the harbor will be impeded. Commuters will need to take alternate routes which may not be easy.

I can’t quite figure out what happened even after reading a half dozen articles on the collision. Apparently, the ship had some sort of malfunction and struck the bridge somehow. I can’t determine whether it struck a support pylon or the bridge itself.

Update

I just saw a video of the event. The container ship collided with the bridge’s support.

David Brooks devotes his New York Times column to a critique of the Biden Administration’s Israel policy critics of Israel’s strategy in Gaza in general:

There seems to be a broad consensus atop the Democratic Party about the war in Gaza, structured around two propositions. First, after the attacks of Oct. 7, Israel has the right to defend itself and defeat Hamas. Second, the way Israel is doing this is “over the top,” in President Biden’s words. The vast numbers of dead and starving children are gut wrenching, the devastation is overwhelming, and it’s hard not to see it all as indiscriminate.

Which leads to an obvious question: If the current Israeli military approach is inhumane, what’s the alternative? Is there a better military strategy Israel can use to defeat Hamas without a civilian blood bath?

He summarizes the alternatives he sees:

One alternative strategy is that Israel should conduct a much more limited campaign. Fight Hamas, but with less intensity. To some degree, Israel has already made this adjustment. In January, Israel announced it was shifting to a smaller, more surgical strategy; U.S. officials estimated at the time that Israel had reduced the number of Israeli troops in northern Gaza to fewer than half of the 50,000 who were there in December.

The first problem with going further in this direction is that Israel may not be left with enough force to defeat Hamas. Even by Israel’s figures, most Hamas fighters are still out there. Will surgical operations be enough to defeat an enemy of this size? A similar strategy followed by America in Afghanistan doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

A second problem is that the light footprint approach leaves power vacuums. This allows Hamas units to reconstitute themselves in areas Israel has already taken. As the United States learned in Iraq, if troop levels get too low, the horrors of war turn into the horrors of anarchy.

Another alternative strategy is targeted assassinations. Instead of continuing with a massive invasion, just focus on the Hamas fighters responsible for the Oct. 7 attack, the way Israel took down the terrorists who perpetrated the attack on Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972.

The difference is that the attack on Israelis at Munich was a small-scale terrorist assault. Oct. 7 was a comprehensive invasion by an opposing army. Trying to assassinate perpetrators of that number would not look all that different from the current military approach. As Raphael Cohen, the director of the strategy and doctrine program at the RAND Corporation, notes: “In practical terms, killing or capturing those responsible for Oct. 7 means either thousands or potentially tens of thousands of airstrikes or raids dispersed throughout the Gaza Strip. Raids conducted on that scale are no longer a limited, targeted operation. It’s a full-blown war.”

Furthermore, Hamas’s fighters are hard to find, even the most notorious leaders. It took a decade for the United States to find Osama bin Laden, and Israel hasn’t had great success with eliminating key Hamas figures. In recent years, Israel tried to kill Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, seven times, without success.

The political costs of this kind of strategy might be even worse than the political costs of the current effort. Turkey, a Hamas supporter, has made it especially clear that Israel would pay a very heavy price if it went after Hamas leaders there.

A third alternative is a counterinsurgency strategy, of the kind that the United States used during the surge in Iraq. This is a less intense approach than the kind of massive invasion we’ve seen and would focus on going after insurgent cells and rebuilding the destroyed areas to build trust with the local population. The problem is that this works only after you’ve defeated the old regime and have a new host government you can work with. Israel is still trying to defeat the remaining Hamas battalions in places like Rafah. This kind of counterinsurgency approach would be an amendment to the current Israeli strategy, not a replacement.

Critics of the counterinsurgency approach point out that Gaza is not Iraq. If Israel tried to clear, hold and build new secure communities in classic counterinsurgency fashion, those new communities wouldn’t look like safe zones to the Palestinians. They would look like detention camps. Furthermore, if Israel settles on this strategy, it had better be prepared for a long war. One study of 71 counterinsurgency campaigns found that the median length of those conflicts was 10 years. Finally, the case for a full counterinsurgency approach would be stronger if that strategy had led to American victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, which it did not.

A fourth alternative is that Israel should just stop. It should settle for what it has achieved and not finish the job by invading Rafah and the southern areas of Gaza, or it should send in just small strike teams.

before launching ito a critique of the Biden Administration’s position:

This is now the official Biden position. The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has argued that Israel can destroy Hamas in Gaza without a large invasion but “by other means” (which he did not elaborate on). The United States has asked Israel to send a delegation to Washington to discuss alternative Rafah strategies, which is good. The problem is that, first, there seems to be a budding disagreement over how much of Hamas needs to be destroyed to declare victory and, second, the I.D.F. estimates that there are 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters in Rafah. Defeating an army that size would take thousands of airstrikes and raids. If you try to shrink the incursion, the math just doesn’t add up. As an Israeli war cabinet member, Benny Gantz, reportedly told U.S. officials, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80 percent of a fire.”

If this war ends with a large chunk of Hamas in place, it would be a long-term disaster for the region.

I think he’s right to criticize the Biden Administration’s policies with respect to the conflict but IMO his criticism is not on target. The problem with the Biden Administration’s policies (and I use the plural deliberately) is that the administration has been focused strictly on domestic politics. To avoid alienating American Jewish supporters of Israel and their votes and contributions its initial reflex was to support Israel 100%. Now that unequivocal support of Israel risks costing Joe Biden critical swing states, they’re backpedaling. I think that the initial posture was an error and that error has already cost them. Now they’re trying to undo the error and in doing so hurting themselves more.

I have no idea what Israel’s objectives are at this point for reasons that will become clearer. What they have been doing is clearing Gaza of Hamas seriatim, driving the civilian population into the uncleared areas. To what end?

Assuming that Israel’s objective is to eliminate Hamas while minimizing harm to the civilian population of Gaza, there was another alternative at the outset. They could have cleared an area, fortified it, attracted the civilian population into the newly cleared area with food and medical attention, providing that ONLY in the cleared areas, and promoted that widely. They could have searched every civilian coming into the pacified area to prevent civilians from bringing weapons with them. As they expanded their operations against Hamas they could have expanded the civilian encampment they were creating.

I also think I know why they didn’t do that: it’s incredibly painstaking and risky. It reduces the number of troops available for offensive operations and the encampments need to be heavily guarded to prevent them from becoming enemy bases at your rear. But it would have been an alternative.

Now that alternative is gone and Israel has little choice but to stay their present course which I believe they will do regardless of world or U. S. opinion.

I want to call an interview at Politico by Marc Novicoff of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to your attention. In the interview Dr. Haidt blame practically everything, from the election of Donald Trump to rising prevalence of mental illness, particularly among young women, to general societal chaos on social media on smartphones. This passage particularly caught my attention:

A healthy democratic society requires some degree of shared facts and some degree of trust in institutions and some degree of trust in each other. And all of that is declining for many reasons, but one of them is the rise of social media. The social construction of reality turns into a million tiny fragments on social media.

When 9/11 happened, Americans generally came to the conclusion very quickly that al Qaeda had attacked us. But if that happened tomorrow, we would not come to such a conclusion. We’re no longer able to agree on basic facts about what is happening or what happened. Now, none of this is the fault of Gen Z. This is happening to people of all ages. But if you are raised to political consciousness in a fragmented world where you can’t believe anything, where the Russians are messing with us and trying to get us to believe that we can’t believe anything, it’s going to make it tougher to become vibrant, engaged democratic citizens.

How about his own kids?

With your kids, what do you restrict and what do you allow?

I had a firm rule against social media in middle school. And it’s an ongoing negotiation in high school.

In comments a regular commenter remarked:

People succeed on their own, with (IMHO) three attributes: 1) connections, 2) perseverance and 3) a combination of purely intellectual smarts and (intuitive) street smarts. In my own experience (read: me, and so many others I have known. Don’t underestimate that amorphous thing called intuition. Its a highly underrated aspect of intelligence. Perhaps decisive. )

Any connections I might have had died with my dad. As I’ve mentioned before my father died young and unexpectedly. His connections had died when first his father and then his grandfather died when he was just a kid. As sole heir he was able to pay for college and law school, pay his own and his mother’s living expenses through the Depression, and, finally, spend a year in Europe after graduating from college and law school.

Other than show business my mom had no connections. Barely even a family.

I rejected my only connection through my dad shortly after he died. A wealthy woman, a client of my father’s, offered to pay my way through college and law school on the condition that, having graduated from law school, I become her lawyer. I was present when she made that very generous offer to my mom. It was politely rejected.

Perseverance I have. I put myself through college and grad school on the basis of scholarships, loans, and working full time. Smarts I have of both kinds. I gained my “street smarts” literally on the streets. The neighborhood I grew up in was one in which fighting was the regular, expected pastime after school. The challenge my parents faced was in stopping me from fighting. There was a bar and a brothel on the corner a half block from our house and the lady next door ran numbers. A young man down the block sold drugs out of his garage. For me that was just our neighborhood. My siblings were lucky to have little memory of that neighborhood—they grew up in a much nicer place.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as successful. I think I just muddle along. Perhaps if I’d cared more about material success I would have had more of it.