In wake of Key Bridge collapse, Maryland explores pier protection for Bay Bridge; initial budget is $145M

After the demise of its northern neighbor at the mighty hands of a massive cargo ship, Maryland’s lengthiest and most-celebrated bridge is expected to receive reinforcement from vessel collision in the coming years.

The Maryland Transportation Authority, which owns the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Annapolis, said in the months after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26 that it was exploring options to protect the two spans of the Bay Bridge. Those plans remain preliminary, but are coming into focus as the authority is likely to decide on “physical” pier protection improvements by the end of the year, Executive Director Bruce Gartner said in an interview Tuesday.

That would allow it to begin a procurement process by the end of the year or early 2025, with a target completion date of the 2027-28 winter. The initial budget for the project is $145 million.

During a quarterly meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Reconstruction Advisory Group on July 10, Melissa Williams, the authority’s director of planning and program development, discussed pier protection as one of several ongoing Bay Bridge capital projects.

“We’re looking into pier protection for the Bay Bridge, looking to, of course, decrease the risk of vessel impact at the Bay Bridge,” she told the group.

The authority is exploring the construction of a Chesapeake Bay crossing in the same area as the dual-span suspension bridge, given its use and its age. The bridges averaged nearly 80,000 vehicles per day in 2019 and are especially busy in the summer and on weekends. The older of the two spans, built in 1951, has about 15 to 20 years of useful life left, Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld said in an interview last month.

“Is there an option to keep maintaining those to some degree?” he said. “But at some point, you’ve got to make decisions. Does it make sense to keep investing in something, in this structure? And clearly we have major congestion issues, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so it’s an opportunity to deal with that, as well.”

A new bay crossing has been studied for years. But the Key Bridge collapse — which killed six men and halted vessel commerce into Baltimore for months — highlighted the need nationally for protection of existing infrastructure.

The Coast Guard launched a probe to “evaluate the risks to critical port infrastructure” at 11 domestic ports, and the National Transportation Safety Board encouraged bridge owners to assess risks to their spans. Similarly, the Federal Highway Administration “assembled a list of bridges that are likely to carry public roads over navigable waterways called on” by seafaring vessels, according to a letter from FHWA. (That included the Bay Bridge, which saw multiple oceangoing vessels sail under it Wednesday, for example.) In that letter, the FHWA sought to collect from bridge owners information on existing pier protection and completed risk analyses.

This summer, Johns Hopkins professors began an “urgent assessment” of vessel collision with the hypothesis that bridges are at a greater risk than previously thought.

When the container ship Ever Forward ran aground in March 2022 after a harbor pilot was distracted by his cellphone , a member of the Bay Bridge Reconstruction Advisory Group, Nicholas Deoudes, asked in an April 2022 meeting whether that span’s piers “can withstand a ship crashing into them,” according to minutes from that time. Scrutiny of the Bay Bridge’s pier protection then increased after the Key Bridge collapse.

During an April 3 meeting this year, Deoudes suggested that “islands” be constructed around the Bay Bridge piers and another member, Jack Broderick, said he had received “numerous questions from his community about a similar occurrence at the Bay Bridge,” according to meeting minutes.

“It was decided very early on after March 26 to pursue this,” Gartner said Tuesday of improvements to the bridge’s pier protection.

Initially, authorities said they were considering all options for protecting the bridge — including nonstructural ones, like requiring tugboats escort ships under the spans — but Wiedefeld said last month that tugboat escorts might be logistically challenging. Gartner confirmed this week that the improvements would likely be physical upgrades, but what exactly they will be is “to be determined,” he said, noting that the authority will consult with harbor pilots and other port stakeholders.

One way to retrofit an existing bridge with pier protection from container ships — which have grown exponentially in size since the Bay Bridge was built — is to add protective islands, known as “dolphins.” The Key Bridge had four small dolphins, and officials are currently adding larger dolphins to the Delaware Memorial Bridge , near Wilmington, as part of a 26-month, $95 million project.

Norma Jean Mattei, a University of New Orleans engineering professor and member of the White House’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council, said dolphins could make sense as an improvement to “ensure that a vessel can’t hit — hopefully.” She added that “some kind of fendering that would nudge the vessel back on course,” if there is an indirect hit, could be a logical addition, too.

The project is expected to be MDTA-funded, Gartner said, “but that doesn’t preclude us from going after federal grants.”