A steady stream of ships — from bulk carriers to towering container and cruise ships — navigate the Lower Columbia River from Portland, Oregon, to the Pacific Ocean, past rail yards and port facilities loading grain, potash, logs and cars.
I boarded a small launch that shuttles around pilots, crew, and the occasional journalist. The ride's a little rough as Capt. Tyson Hill motors us toward the Lewis and Clark Bridge in Longview, Washington.
After the 2024 fatal
collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, the National Transportation Safety Board conducted a
national survey to find other bridges that could face a similar risk. Of the 68 found, 34 were identified as “critical” to the U.S. transportation network, including the Lewis and Clark Bridge.
“You can see the channel right here,” Hill said. “It definitely gets close to the Washington side. I hadn’t noticed that before.”
The channel for ocean-going vessels — which Tyson can see on a screen from his pilot’s chair — makes a tricky turn, then passes close to one of the bridge’s spindly support towers. The towers have no protective bumpers, called “fenders,” to defend against a wayward ship.
“It’s a single-point failure bridge, much like the Francis Scott Key Bridge,” explained Capt. Jeremy Nielsen, president of the Columbia River Pilots, onboard guides for every large ship navigating the river. “So if you hit that support tower, if the top of the ship hits the underside of the bridge, that whole bridge is coming down.”
Nielsen said there have been close calls. The pilots shared a video with me: It shows a huge cruise ship, sounding like a train engine, churning toward the bridge on its way back to sea from a Portland shipyard. There’s no sound from the crew as the ship’s front radar tower passes close under the bridge span, cars and trucks whizzing by overhead. Then the rear tower barely squeaks by, with just 4 feet to spare.
Other heavily laden ships have lost power and barely missed hitting the bridge, Nielsen said. Part of the danger comes from the size of today’s ships.
“The largest vessels that we see — 1,200-foot container ships — until you stand up next to one, it’s tough to grasp how big those really are,” Nielsen said. “So our safety margins have decreased dramatically.”
The problem certainly isn’t limited to the Columbia River. Bridges built before the 1990s didn’t have today’s big ships in mind.
“In the ’70s container ships had 3,000 to 4,000 containers,” said Maria Lehman, a professor at the University at Buffalo and former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “Today it’s 20,000 to 24,000. So that’s five to eight times increase. Their length, their beam, their draft, they have more mass than they did, which means they have much more momentum.”
