A misplaced wire label caused a power outage on a massive container ship, sending it crashing into a bridge, the NTSB finds

By Alexandra Skores, CNN

(CNN) — A small label installed on a wire when a giant cargo ship was built may have triggered a chain of events nearly a decade later causing the ship to slam into a bridge and collapse into the water.

The National Transportation Safety Board is holding a public meeting Tuesday to determine the probable cause of the container ship Dali crashing into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and its subsequent collapse, killing six people.

On March 26, 2024, the 213-million-pound cargo vessel Dali lost engine and electrical power as it was leaving the Port of Baltimore and struck a pillar of the Key Bridge.

“The fact is, none of us should be here today,” said Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the NTSB, in her opening remarks. “This tragedy should have never occurred. Lives should have never been lost, as with all accidents that we investigate, this was preventable.”

The NTSB said Tuesday it believes a label was put in the wrong place on a signal wire when the ship was built. That sticker, identifying the line, kept the wire from getting a good connection in a circuit breaker – which in turn ultimately caused the first blackout.

As a result, according to Marcel Muse, the NTSB’s investigator in charge, the vessel lost steering, the ability to operate the bow thruster, key water pumps, and most of the vessel’s lighting and equipment essential for operations. That first outage lasted 58 seconds.

The crew onboard the Dali quickly found the tripped breaker, the NTSB said. Power came back within 58 seconds, but restarting a key pump that would have provided fuel to generators had to be done manually, and that didn’t happen. When the generators ran out of gas in their lines, the result was a second blackout.

At that time, the Dali was just three ships’ lengths from the bridge and despite the pilots reacting properly, they couldn’t regain control in time to avoid hitting it, the NTSB said.

About 10 hours earlier, while the ship was still moored, it experienced two onboard blackouts, one caused by a crew error, according to the NTSB.

At the conclusion of Tuesday’s meeting, the board will vote to determine the probable cause of the crash and approve a final report.

The Key Bridge had nearly 30 times the acceptable level of risk for critical bridges of collapse if it were hit, based on guidance established by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, NTSB officials said. But no one knew that before the collapse, because the owner of the bridge, the Maryland Transportation Authority, never evaluated that risk.

Earlier this year, the NTSB also identified 68 other bridges in 19 states spanning waterways frequented by cargo ships that, like the Key Bridge, were built before 1991 and do not have a current vulnerability assessment.

Among those on the list are the Golden Gate Bridge in California; Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, George Washington and Verrazzano-Narrows bridges in New York City; the Walt Whitman and Benjamin Franklin bridges in Pennsylvania; the Sunshine Skyway in Florida and the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan.

The Maryland Transportation Authority on Monday said in a release the updated cost estimate to replace the Key Bridge is now projected to be $4.3 billion to $5.2 billion, with an expected opening in late 2030 – a two-year delay from the earlier estimate.

That price tag is more than double the previous expected cost of $1.7 billion to $1.9 billion, which the Maryland Department of Transportation previously confirmed to CNN.

CNN’s Michelle Watson contributed to this report.

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