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- Dali, the 984-foot-long cargo ship that collided with the Baltimore Key Bridge, is considered a standard size.
- Container ships have grown 1,500% in size over the last 50 years.
- Even though cargo shipping safety has improved, any rare accident could be catastrophic and complicated.
Dali — the cargo ship that collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday measures 984 feet in length.
It sounds massive, but that's just the regular size for such vessels these days, a veteran ship's officer told The Conversation on Tuesday.
"That's about standard size these days," Allan Post, who is now the deputy superintendent at Texas A&M University's maritime academy, told the nonprofit media outlet.
"Ship sizes have absolutely grown monstrous over the years. But 1,000 feet is just about normal," he added.
Containerships — which are typically used to transport consumer and packaged goods — have "grown up in size by as much as 1,500% in the last 50 years," Captain Rahul Khanna, the global head of marine risk consulting for Allianz, told Business Insider's Geoff Weiss on Tuesday.
Containerships have gotten so big because global trade — 90% of which is transported via ocean freight — has ballooned on the back of massive consumer demand growth for all types of goods, from electronics to toys and food. According to the World Trade Organization, world trade volume in 2022 was 45 times bigger than it was in 1950.
Cargo shipping has been getting safer, with incidents of lost ships falling by 65% over the past decade. But the fallout from any rare accident could be catastrophic and complicated, said Khanna.
In the case of the Baltimore bridge, the infrastructure did not stand any chance against the huge ship, experts told BI's Marianne Guenot.
And even though the 984-foot-long Dali is big, it definitely isn't the largest containership out there.
The Ever Given containership, which ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, was even larger, at 1,312 feet long. That incident delayed about 16 million tons of cargo on hundreds of container ships, stressing the global shipping system amid the pandemic.
Shipments in and out of the Port of Baltimore have been similarly disrupted. The port is now closed to vessels until further notice.
Industry experts told BI that it could take months for the port — which generates $15 million in daily economic activity — to reopen.