(Above is what stood last week at the entrance to the inner harbor in Baltimore. The security cameras would have reflected the 1.6-mile tursses of the bridge before the massive container ship began to experience outages on power and navigation systems. The span is considered a vital portion of the East Coast north-south traffic corridor. It is considered a dramatic demonstration of the weakness of the American infrastructure. Was it a terrorist act or a simple reflection of maintenance failure? The 73,000 ton ship was drifting at 8 knots Speed of Advance (SOA) as it bore down on one of the two load-bearing pillars that supported the three spans of the structure.
If you do not reside on this densely packed and traveled section of trasnportation linking the major cities of the Left Coast. Taken in the context of four deranged young men who shot up the concert hall in Moscow, killing more than a hundred music-lovers.
Add in the particular horror of the 07 October attack on Israel, it is natural that the hundreds of thousands of illegals who have been permitted to cross our open Southern Border and you can see we have constructed a vulnerable network that literally millions of uninvited guests travel at will).
We don’t know if you saw the video of the bridge yesterday. It took a while for it to “virulize” and spread the horror they must have felt. That includes the ship’s skipper and crew and the ones in motor vehicles on the span itself at the moment of truth. The incident occurred in the not quite smallest hours of a new day- half past one in the morning, dark and clear. There would have been visible stars above the four transit lanes of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. They were not bright enough to be seen abover the chaos at the wnaterline of the river.
For those driving upon the spans t that moment it must have been spectacular. Far below, the gigantic ship’s lights flashed a couple times in futility before the hull plowed into one of the two primary buttresses that carried the load.
We are fortunate to have a selection of technical skills represented in the Writer’ Section at Socotra House. The aviation-related training has inclined many of us to be familiar with things like catapult launches of aircraft from even larger ships than the one that took out the bridge.
Aircraft carriers are complicated machines designed to operate on the world ocean. As noted, we didn’t know much about how the things actually worked, except for the distant and yet immediate call from the One Em Cee (1MC) loudspeaker system, the one that shouted things like “Now Set the Sea & Anchor Detail!”
We were normally worried more about what happened after the ship put her nose into the prevailing Westerlies. What happened after that was what we considered normal and routine- the jets would be attached to the catapults forward and amidships and be blasted into the breeze for missions of precisely two hours and forty minutes duration.
We are fortunate to have a couple Salts from the Surface Warfare Community in the group. It is a relatively harmonious group in the aggregate, with the assumption that the ships would operate safely far from the sight of land, and filled with the roar of spinning turbines. This morning contained an eye opener from our ship-drivers. There are ways this might have been prevented, or at least mitigated. No terrorist acts involved.
“Lieutenant General Mike one of the experts consulted on the event. His credentials are well established, since as the National Security Advisor to a former President, he had been subject to a government campaign designed to bankrupt and destroy him. He had also been Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency when we knew him on active duty. Being an Army General Officer, his primary strength was a ground based one that does not include any special details for entering or departing port.
Since everything is political in an election year, this will doubtless be raised several times in the remaining year. If there was a connection to a malevolent act, we will probably hear about it, though the position will doubtlees be festooned with outre aluminum foil chapeauxes. We will not travel down that rabbit hole this morning out of respect for those who were lost..
One of the real Sailor Salts gave us a short tutorial on how things worked on a Navy ship, both entering and leaving. After steering was manned, of course, as was a section of rated sailors armed with mallets to knock the holding links out of the anchor chains and drop the hook to drag across the mud at the bottom of the channel and bring the ship to a halt before disaster.
We are withholding judgement on that, though, since we are now susupicious of any government pronouncement from the other side of the Big River here in the National Capital Region..
We hear this morning that it is going to take four or five years to fix and billions of dollars. The Big Ship is hard aground, the massive stacks of containers stuck aboard. The conversation starts from two dramatic and opposing views. Some experts claim that the “attackers “knew that hitting either one one of the pillars would be a fatal wound to the integrity of the bridge.”
Others say it was obviously deficient skills by the Captain and crew on a foreign-registered vessel. We issued a story about the ubiquity of an American law called “The Jones Act.” Our Old Salt Boats, a certified Coast Guard Master Chief Bos’un, always used it as part of a phrase that signified something was inherently mis-rigged for some partisan purpose.
We will see how this turns out. It may take a while, and if anyone is under the impression that all those young men without families who have been streaming north across the border are just tourists. “Undocumented Newcomers” is the term we are supposed to use these days, rather than the shorter and more definitive one that implies that their willingness to disregard our laws implies they might be criminals under the terms of their arrival.
General Flynn says this might be a Black Swan event. That is normally used as a term to describe unforeseen financial and disruptive fiscal events. This one is certainly going to be that, in terms of interrupted supply chains and inconvenience for those who live or work on the wrong side of the stream.
That can happen to anyone, of course. We are just glad our cars weigh a little less than
several dozen tons, and our vehicles can move a little faster in case there is something we need to dodge. We only need to outrun a Black swan, you know?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
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