Another American bridge has been struck by a vessel, this time in Texas.
A barge owned by Martin Petroleum slammed into a bridge pillar in Galveston yesterday, spilling oil into waters and closing the only road to a small neighbouring island.
A tugboat operator pushing two barges lost control of them in a high tide with strong currents, according to the Galveston County Navigation District.
The impact sent pieces of the bridge, which connects Galveston to Pelican Island, tumbling on top of the barge and shut down a stretch of waterway so crews could clean up the spill.
Pelican Island is home to Texas A&M University at Galveston, a shipyard and industrial facilities. The university said yesterday it would keep the campus closed through to Sunday, citing an “extended outage of the bridge through the weekend”.
Aerial images showed that a section of a rail line alongside the bridge appeared to have collapsed, with slabs of concrete piled on the barge.
The accident came seven weeks after the Dali containership crashed into a support column of the Francis Key Bridge in Baltimore on March 26, killing six construction workers, and sending the bridge crashing down into the Patapsco River below. Authorities in the clean-up operation at Baltimore said plans to move the Dali this week have been postponed to next Monday.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report into the Dali accident this week in which the federal body revealed it is working with parties across the US to assess bridges and whether pier protection needs improving.
Data analysis carried by USA Today shows there have been at least 2,600 bridge strikes occurring in US waters since 2002, the earliest year for which such data is available. Three of these allisions were fatal, claiming 16 lives in all. The majority, however, were minor – a ship’s antenna or mast hitting a bridge, or a barge clipping a bridge’s protective fender.
