It took just seconds for a ship to collide with the Francis Scott Key Bridge and change the landscape of Baltimore for possibly years to come.
There is plenty of speculation about what went wrong during the wee hours of March 26, but many maritime professionals are concerned it could easily happen again.
One of the concerns about U.S. port safety is the abundance of flags of convenience. There are nations that allow ships to easily register under their flag and often have low taxes, fees and poor enforcement of labor and safety laws.
Maritime experts like Capt. Kelly Sweeney, who holds the highest seafaring qualification and has helmed commercial cargo ships for decades, says those ships could easily be as dangerous as the Dali.
“What happened in Baltimore, that can easily happen again from lack of maintenance any given day in any port,” he said.
Flags of convenience are used often in international shipping, there are 32 countries that require lax standards from ship owners.
Last year, ships flying the flags Liberia, Panama and the Marshall Islands accounted for about half of the shipping cargo that traversed the world.
“It invites a lot of people taking advantage of the deregulation that a lot of the flag states offer to put their vessels under the flag,” said David Heindel is the president of the Seafarers International Union, which represents merchant mariners.
“They basically let the ship owners regulate themselves. Anyone that's in it just for the money is going to take advantage of every opportunity that they have, whether it be lack of environmental standards, lack of operating standards, taking advantage of third world crews. It happens every day.”
That lack of regulation leads to inexperienced crews, longer times between maintenance, less upkeep of important safety tasks, lack of pay for employees and even sometimes boats being abandoned by their owner and leaving crews stranded.
The Dali, which crashed into the FSK Bridge, was flying under a Singaporean flag, which is not considered a flag of convenience.
However, Heindel says the Dali’s crew, like many other foreign flagged vessels, was spread thin and ships are only getting larger in recent years.
“My guess is there are probably around 18 to 21 people on a vessel and that vessel carries 10,000 containers or something along those lines,” he said. “When I started going to sea, you would have probably a third or less than a third of the of the number of containers on board with twice the manpower on board.”
That can easily lead to mistakes.
That’s exactly the case the city of Baltimore is trying to make as it takes legal action against the company that owns the Dali, Grace Ocean.
In its filing, Baltimore is making the case that Grace Ocean provided the ship with an incompetent crew, unseaworthy equipment and failed to maintain the vessel in a reasonable manner.
U.S. ports do have some oversight built in.
The Coast Guard is responsible for inspecting ships, however, the number and massive size have made the job complex.
David Ledoux is a master mariner who served in the Merchant Marines and on commercial ships.
“They do look at certain things like maintenance records, when the last time they'll spot check certain things,” David Ledoux is a master mariner who served in the Merchant Marines and on commercial ships. “But that size vessel, it's impossible to cover everything in a short amount of time.”
The Coast Guard does frequently inspect vessels, though.
“Last year, we had 81,854 port calls,” said Lt. Commander Brian Hall, the chief of port state control at the Coast Guard. “We had those port calls from about 11,000 foreign vessels. So, a number of repeats, of those 11,000 vessels that came, we conducted just under 8,300 inspections in total.”
However, Capt. Kelly Sweeney, the master mariner, says the resources are too thin.
“There are about 1,200 foreign flagged ships that come into our ports every day,” he said. “The Coast Guard inspects about 30 of them for safety problems. They don't have the people or the money to do it. And so it just goes by the wayside.
Sweeney and others say without more resources or more regulations, it’s possible other ports could end up like Baltimore’s.
