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Tag Archives: shipping
Article share: on the collapse of a bridge in Baltimore
The recent incident of a container ship colliding with the bridge in Baltimore in the US has been trending and gone viral. There are also many articles now putting out their assessments of what happened, how the bridge collapsed, what troubled the ship, etc. There are also now articles discussing the implications or the impacts of this incident on logistics considering the collapsed bridge lies along a busy maritime route in the US. Here is an article that focuses on the former, providing analysis on how the ship caused the collapse of a major bridge.
Laris, M. Hassan, J. and Achenbach, J. (March 26, 2024) “How a cargo ship took down Baltimore’s Key Bridge,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/how-key-bridge-collapsed-baltimore/ [Last accessed: 3/27/2024]
What also came to mind as I read reports about this incident is something similar that could happen to the CCLEX bridge connecting Cebu and Mactan Islands. Apparently, something similar already happened decades ago when a bulk carrier, Sanko Elegance, collided with the pier of the first Mactan Bridge. While the bridge did not collapse, it sustained damage that required it to be repaired and severely affected traffic between the two islands considering it was the only bridge at the time. It is important to note that the airport was on Mactan Island so it affected both passenger and freight flow for the province and others that connect and trade with it. While a former student who was much involved in the construction of the CCLEX bridge assured us in a briefing before that the bridge pier can withstand the collision of large vessels (perhaps the largest currently calling on Cebu ports), there may be larger and heavier ships in the future. The Key Bridge, after all, was hit by a container carrier that was larger than the ships transiting in the area when the bridge was designed and constructed.
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Article share: On the busiest shipping routes
Here is an article on maritime transportation. I don’t get to feature similar topics here as mostly I have written about land and air transport. I thought this article is interesting because it describes maritime transport traffic volume. Statistics like these appear to be trivial but are important especially from the perspective of logistics as well as, if you delve in to it, maritime security.
Piper, G. (July 11, 2023) “The busiest shipping routes in the world by the numbers,” Medium, https://grantpiperwriting.medium.com/the-busiest-shipping-routes-in-the-world-by-the-numbers-c09571ad5af6 [Last accessed: 8/2/2023]
To quote from the article:
“The vast majority of world trade sees Asia as the focal point. Both Europe and North America do heavy volumes of trade with Asia, mostly imports. But three of the five busiest shipping routes in the world are all internal routes. Europe-Europe, North America-North America, and Asia-Asia. That means that vast amounts of global trade are still relatively local.
Large importers like the United States and England drive massive amounts of trade. Large exporters, like China, Korea, and Japan, also drive massive amounts of trade. The areas where these terminuses link up are the busiest hotspots for global trade.”
A while back in 2004-2005, I was involved in an inter-regional passenger and freight flow study in the Philippines. We gathered data on maritime transport and were able to derive the OD tables for inter-regional and inter-island passenger and freight flow. Unfortunately, those studies and surveys had no follow-up or updating afterwards. There is a saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This applies to transport as well so perhaps there are data somewhere and someone’s using them. We hope government agencies are able to collect the data required to analyze and improve maritime transport in the country.
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Caught (up) in traffic 