The impact of Tuesday’s bridge collapse will be felt far beyond Baltimore with the snarling of a major freight transportation center that could lead to higher costs and shortages along the East Coast and Midwest, everything from new cars and other consumer goods to chemicals and coal.
And the hours after the collapse have caused headaches for companies several states away that depend on the Baltimore port to ship chemicals, equipment and other goods.
“This is going to impose a lot of burdens on our supply chain systems,” said Sian Qian, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of CMU’s Mobility Data Analytics Center. “You can anticipate a lot of containers will accumulate at the port and it will have a ripple effect on the roadways, because the trucks won’t be able to unload and unload a lot of containers, and that has implications on the railway network as well.”
How deep and how long an impact will depend on the time it will take to allow ships to come and go at the Port of Baltimore, one of the largest and most critical marine terminals along the East Coast. The container ship that hit and collapsed the Key Bridge had just left the Port of Baltimore, headed to Sri Lanka. It isn’t clear how long it will take for the investigation and eventual clearing of the debris in the harbor to allow shipping traffic to continue.
Last year was a banner one for the Port of Baltimore, which processed a record 52.3 million tons of foreign cargo worth $80 billion alone in 2023, according to the Maryland governor’s office. The port handled 847,158 cars and light trucks in 2023, the most of any port in the United States for 13 years straight. It tallied 1.3 million tons of farm and construction equipment and 1.1 million 20-foot containers. It has direct rail connections for cargo to/from Chicago and the Ohio Valley including Pittsburgh.
