These 6 Bay Area Bridges Could Be Vulnerable to Collapse If Hit By Large Ship, Report Finds

Federal transportation safety officials named six major Bay Area bridges that could be vulnerable to collapse if hit by a large container ship.

The Golden Gate, Richmond-San Rafael, Carquinez, Benicia-Martinez, Antioch and San Mateo-Hayward bridges are among a list of 68 older spans in 19 states that “have an unknown level of risk of collapse from a vessel collision,” according to a new report from the National Transportation Safety Board.

The agency’s findings are part of an investigation into the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last year after a malfunctioning cargo ship slammed into the bridge’s support column. The collision killed six construction workers.

In the report, NTSB investigators blamed Maryland transportation officials for failing to complete a recommended vulnerability assessment that would have shown the bridge was at significant risk of collapse from a ship strike.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters on Thursday that the disaster “could have been prevented.”

Had they done the assessment, they “would have been able to proactively identify strategies to reduce the risk of a collapse and loss of lives associated with a vessel collision with the bridge,” she said. “There’s no excuse.”

In light of the findings, the agency is urging state and local authorities overseeing the 68 named bridges to “develop and implement a comprehensive risk reduction plan.”

The NTSB’s report targets large bridges constructed before 1991, when the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials developed a vulnerability assessment calculation for new bridges. The agency, however, emphasized that it was not suggesting the bridges “are certain to collapse.”

However, Homendy emphasized that standard container ships today are substantially larger than they were when many of these bridges were built.

“These bridge owners need to be looking at recent vessel traffic,” she said. “Vessels have gotten bigger, heavier. At one point in the 1950s, we had vessels that had just 800 containers on them. Now we’re talking 24,000 containers.”

Caltrans said it is reviewing the NTSB’s safety recommendations but noted that all state-owned bridges — including five of the Bay Area spans listed in the report — are regularly inspected and have been seismically retrofitted “to the highest national standards.”

“California’s bridges are safe for travel, and Caltrans has installed fender systems on all major bridges, further protecting bridge piers from the unlikely and rare event of being struck by marine traffic,” the agency said in a statement on Friday.

The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which owns the Golden Gate Bridge, responded similarly to NTSB’s recommendations, saying it was in full compliance with all state and federal regulations.

“The Golden Gate Bridge has one of the most robust ship collision protection systems of any bridge on the West Coast,” the district said in a statement. But “in light of the tragic Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse,” the district recently commissioned an assessment of the bridge’s south tower fender system’s capacity to withstand a ship collision.

Absent from the NTSB’s report is the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which survived two major ship collisions, in 2007 and 2013, but was protected in part by its fenders.

“The real key, as I see it, is assessing probabilities of risk,” said John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees the Bay Area’s toll authority.

California, and the Bay Area in particular, has a lot of old bridges, Goodwin added, noting that Caltrans and local districts are conducting a multi-billion dollar, 10-year campaign “to keep every one of those structures in tip-top shape for decades to come.”

“This is a comprehensive assessment of what is needed to keep these bridges going really in perpetuity.”

KQED’s Juan Carlos Lara contributed reporting to this story.