Leave it to a YouTuber to provide the most informed analysis of what happened with the container ship that hit the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore.

YouTube: Dali Lost Power Before Hitting Key Bridge in Baltimore (What's Going on With Shipping?)

Key points:

* ship was fully loaded headed from Baltimore through Panama canal to Singapore
* ship lost power approximately 1500 feet before the pylon
* some power / lights were restored on the ship about 1000 feet away
* after power was restored, ship IMMEDIATELY began belching black smoke
* daytime helicopter views indicate ship dropped its port side anchor trying to stop forward movement
* doing so likely altered the direction of movement, moving the ship out of the main channel towards the pylon
* within 5 seconds of hitting the outer concrete pier supporting the pylon, bridge spans began collapsing

In this harbor, tug boats are NOT normally used to guide ships out of harbor, only to move ships away from the dock and get them moving towards the designated channel.

Other reports indicate construction work WAS underway on this bridge and concrete trucks were traversing the bridge for that work. I don't know what the maintenance health of the bridge was to speculate if this is possibly a situation like the I-35W bridge in Minnesota that collapsed in part due to construction materials being staged ON the bridge while additional heavy trucks traversed the bridge. I tend to think NOT. There is NOTHING that's going to keep a bridge up when a fully loaded container ship hits a key support. The ship was 985 feet long by 157 feet wide and was carrying about 150,000 tons of cargo. The inertia of something that large will take out anything it contacts.

One wonders what types of preventative measures are even possible for these scenarios. A radio alert system so a crew declaring an emergency in harbor triggers warning lights at bridge entrances to stay off the bridge due to a potentially out of control vessel? This video feed was taken from the Baltimore Port Authority's web camera but it isn't clear if it was played slowed down, etc. to understand actual elapsed times. The ship seemed to be going pretty fast given it had just got underway and away from the dock. Was it incompetence or a massive equipment failure on the ship? What do the maintenance records look like on that equipment?

WTH