That ship spent 1 (4:30 to 5:30) hour of a presumably 10-20 day voyage in a critical control section. The tugs left the ship right around 5:08 (43 seconds into the video). A much better policy for this case would be to have required the tugs stay with the boat until it passed the main span safely.
There were no doubt maintenance issues that led to this accident, but it is exceedingly rare for these types of failures to cause this type of catastrophic result.
It’s not clear why adding ~$100k to the cost of a billion dollar ship is unreasonable
I don't know enough about the cost and safety tradeoffs made in the design of these ships to comment but your numbers are orders of magnitude off from both directions.
AFAIK the water around the bridge is only like 50 feet deep and the ship itself is about 150 ft high. It wouldn't even really sink, just get stuck on the bottom. A crane ship would come unload it and then tugboats would pull it out.
The worst case scenario though does take a long time if it gets fully grounded and stuck beyond the ability of tug boats to pull it out. A company specializing in marine salvage has to come in to cut it up in place and haul the ship away piece by piece. They use large cutting chains that they pull back and forth to cut through the metal. It's a fascinating process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndr2a7AQ8b4
In this case it seems the ship wasn't full, but it's not hyperbole to estimate it as being worth a billion dollars fully loaded. Cars aren't the cheapest things you can ship in containers, but they're far from the most expensive either, and they're what the Port of Baltimore specialises in.
Second-guessing the marine engineers in this case is like the people post-9/11 who argued that future buildings should be designed to withstand the impact of a wide-body jetliner fully loaded with fuel.
It's basically not a serious argument.
http://martrans.org/documents/2006/safety/The%20_tankership_...
The bridge has been there for nearly 50 years, in a port that handles around 50 million tons of cargo every year.
It seems pretty clear that whatever the cause, it was an extremely rare incident.
If someone made a landscape painting today using the wet-on-wet technique, would you argue that a Bob Ross episode from years ago couldn't possibly tell us anything about it? That's silly. It's precisely applicable. Mr. Ross himself might not describe the specific location of today's trees or clouds, but he can darn sure tell you how the brush strokes add up to make a tree. Actually he's probably one of the world experts on precisely that.
Proclaiming your ignorance of extremely-well-researched expert sources is not a good look.
While it is true that the investigation into the causes of the disaster is just starting and we don't yet have a definite conclusion, user "jordanb" has done a great service in pointing us to a book written by a domain expert which had pointed out fundamental design flaws in the design of Tankers long ago. Design Flaws have no expiry date until they are acknowledged and fixed properly. In an era of disinformation/misinformation and focusing solely on profits it is important that people be shown some factual data by actual engineers/experts who were very much concerned with safety and how all concerns were flouted by concerned companies/authorities.
Just like the Boeing disasters have shone the spotlight on Civilian Aeroplane Safety, this disaster shines a spotlight on Tanker Safety, arguably a far far more important topic since almost all the world trade of goods and oil is dependent on them exclusively.
It may be rare in the lifetime of the bridge, but if there is a variable which has change (or is moving) then that isn't so important a consideration. For example, if container ships have recently become much larger in relation to the design requirements in place at the time of the bridge's construction.
Just browsed the book and immediately found "the smoking gun" in the preface itself!
Mandate twin screw in the form of two fully independent engine rooms. Under the current system, 99.5% of all tankers, however large, are single screw. These ships are always a single failure away from being helplessly adrift. The book presents evidence, never before public, that there are at least ten total loss of power incidents on tankers every day. Twin screw, properly implemented, would reduce this failure rate by more than a factor of one thousand. Twin screw would also drastically improve tanker low speed maneuverability which is implicated in a number of big spills including the Aegean Sea shown on the cover.
Thanks to that, they aren't performing an accurate cost/benefit analysis.
Most ships use flags of convenience, so the regulatory structure is pretty much nothing.
Would you still believe this if it was demonstrated that the system lacking redundancy was - due to factors beyond the scope of this conversation - more safe by an order of magnitude than the steering system that includes redundancy but in a different medium?
Put differently: do you think the Space Shuttle should have had ejection seats? If yes, what about an Airbus A320 flying a normal commercial route?
If you really want chills, think about this: a conscious decision was made with covil aviation that it was more economically feasible to sacrifice the human lives on board, and resolve the rest through lawsuits.
In short: if you know/are critical to the process of murdering extra-natiomals, you warrant a life saving device.
If you're a civillian, you're a line item in a potential series legal judgements.
Do you think it's even feasible to install ejector seats for 10-30 passengers? What do you think will happen if they all fire at once?
What I'm decrying, however, is our practice of letting actuaries and lawyers be the final arbiters of what is desirable to engineer.
Military aircraft are subject to failure from being shot at. Aircraft in combat will fail much, much more often than properly maintained civilian aircraft.
Civilian aircraft don't have election seats because situations where they would be useful are exceedingly rare.
Furthermore, steering could absolutely have an electric backup for the hydraulic pumps that power the main steering gear. As long as there's some forward speed through the water, the rudder should work. But again, backups clearly aren't required or they would've worked here.
Steer-by-wire cars are required to have all sorts of redundancy so they're almost as safe as steering-shaft cars in case of an engine failure. This is a 9,900TEU ship with a 41480 kw powerplant. That a ship with so much more destructive potential is allowed to operate without the same level of redundancy as a $90k Audi, is unconscionable.