Early on the morning of March 26, I watched the video of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsing.
I somehow did not anticipate what would follow in the days after the disaster, even though I should know better by now.
If you missed it, early in the morning on March 26, the massive Singaporean container ship MV Dali was leaving the Port of Baltimore, piloted by two local American harbor pilots. At 1:24 a.m., the ship suffered a complete power blackout and began to drift. A backup generator kicked on, and while it could power the ship’s electrical systems, it couldn’t power the ship’s propulsion. At 1:27 a.m., the pilots issued a mayday call and asked the Maryland Transportation Authority Police to stop all bridge traffic as there was a chance of a collision.
As part of its emergency procedures, the ship dropped anchor, but it was unable to find purchase in the silty bottom of the Patapsco River. At 1:28 a.m., the Dali struck the southwest pier of the bridge’s central truss arch span while moving at about eight knots. This caused a massive section of the bridge to simply break apart and collapse. Six people, all part of a maintenance crew, were reported missing; two bodies were recovered and the other four are presumed dead. It’s a terrible tragedy, but given the scope of the disaster, it’s frankly remarkable that more people weren’t killed.
Watching the video, the whole thing seemed pretty straightforward to me. I didn’t know at the time how much momentum a container ship of that size has, but I assumed it was an inconceivable amount (it turns out the ship’s impact force with the pier is currently estimated at between 120 million and 230 million newtons; by comparison, a Saturn V rocket generates 35 million newtons of thrust at launch). I figured that if a very large and heavy thing runs full-force into a bridge, it’s pretty likely the bridge will collapse.
However, I was unaware that social media is filled with people who secretly possess degrees in structural engineering.
Almost immediately, I began seeing conspiracy theories all over the internet regarding the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. This was no accident, they claimed; this was an intentional act of terrorism, and foreigners were probably behind it!
These theories, of course, were brought to us by the same brain geniuses who gave us such hits as “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” and “school shootings are false flag operations” and “COVID was genetically engineered and intentionally released.” These are the people who see conspiracies everywhere they look, and a lack of evidence for their theories only serves to make them more convinced.
I wonder about these people quite a bit. Some of them are harmless kooks, but others become so emboldened by their certainty that they commit terrible acts, like harassing the parents of murdered children because they believe they’re really “crisis actors” working for the government.
What makes people like this? Why do some people see conspiracies everywhere they go?
I have a theory of my own.
Conspiracy theorists are terrified by the idea that there might not be any order to the universe.
It’s frightening to think that you could be driving across a bridge and have it suddenly collapse because a container ship randomly lost power and plowed into it. It’s terrifying to think that you or someone you love could be shot to death because a mentally ill person bought a gun and decided to use it to settle an imagined grievance on a random crowd of people.
It’s more comforting to believe that someone is in charge, that someone has a steady hand on the tiller, even if you believe that hand belongs to a shadowy government organization devoted to perpetrating evil. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak in “The Big Lebowski,” say what you will about the tenets of the sinister shadow government, but at least it’s an ethos.
The truth — which is either chilling or comforting depending on your perspective — is that sometimes terrible things just happen for no apparent reason. Sometimes everything just goes perfectly wrong and it leads to a bridge collapsing. Sometimes we just can’t predict when and where a tragedy will take place. Sometimes Robin Williams gets a terrible disease while Henry Kissinger lives to be 100.
We don’t have to like it when these things happen, but we shouldn’t use tragedy as an excuse to retreat into a world of fantasy.
