At this writing the incident isn’t 48 hours old yet and already there are a number of theories floating about the net, many suggesting incident was intentional and had China’s fingerprints all over it.
One such making it around yesterday:
Now before you start in on me, in all honesty I’m not overly convinced of this scenario, yet.
At the same time it would be foolish not to consider it given the totality of the damage. In one stroke, the following situation they’ve created gives us the following scenario:
- The Port of Baltimore will be crippled for several weeks
- No ships will be moving in and out of that facility for at least that amount of time if not longer.
- Shipping delays and throttling have been created because freight will have to be redirected to other ports. Trouble is, those other ports are already at or near capacity. Container traffic to the east coast will be significantly slowed.
- Hazardous material shipments will end up being redirected. The bridge was specifically constructed so as to allow the shipment of hazardous materials. The Fort McHenry tunnel on interstate 95 and the tunnel on 895 cannot accept hazardous materials.
- The already nightmarish traffic around the Baltimore area will now be significantly worse.
- Shipping costs for many areas of the country will necessarily rise as shortages occur and additional miles need to be covered to go from point A to point B.
- They might get the port open in around a year but some analysts are saying that it’s going to take a decade to get that bridge rebuilt. By the way, that means a year of actual building and 9 years of governmental red tape environmental studies funding etc.
There are other factors which suggest, on the other hand, that this was not an intentional act.
- The ship involved had been written up a few times for insufficient safeguards against loss of control under precisely the circumstances that we witnessed in the video
- A few weeks ago according to reports I’m seeing a sister ship similarly lost power and helm control, while trying to leave a Turkish port, subsequently mowing down a row of cranes which were apparently trying to build a bridge.
- Acts of terrorism are generally not signaled in advance. The ship apparently called the Maryland DOT to explain that they had lost power and control and that a bridge collision was possible. A surprise attack this does not seem to be on that strength alone.
Conclusions? I’m not sure I have any, yet it would be quite helpful indeed if we actually had a vigorous press to investigate things and asking serious questions. However, after what we’ve seen out of them for the last three decades or so, I don’t give them much in the way of credibility.
So it is that we are forced to wait until the other shoe drops as we did with Russia gate, with covid-19 and with the vaccine, and so on. In my estimation it’s going to be a long time indeed before we get any credible answers from any investigative effort mounted by this government.
