BALTIMORE — As a ship approaching the Chesapeake Bay Bridge experienced a steering problem last month, audio recently obtained by The Baltimore Sun shows that its pilot urgently requested that the Maryland Transportation Authority halt vehicle traffic on the span to avoid the remote possibility of a tragedy similar to the one that killed six people on the Francis Scott Key Bridge this spring.

The 51-year-old, 946-foot naval vessel named the Denebola was having a problem with its steering pump just north of the Bay Bridge’s two spans — which carry about 80,000 vehicles per day — on the afternoon of Thursday, Aug. 1.

“I need to stop traffic on the Bay Bridge right now,” the pilot can be heard telling a Maryland Transportation Authority Police dispatcher, according to the audio released to The Sun on Thursday in response to a Maryland Public Information Act request. It offers an inside account of the rare bridge closure, which was spurred by the severity of a collision’s potential consequences.

After being quickly transferred to a different dispatcher, the pilot emphasized his request before saying he had to hang up.

“I’m having steering issues. I need traffic stopped on the Bay Bridge immediately,” said the pilot, Capt. John Kinlein.

The dispatcher then can be heard saying: “I have a ship on the phone, saying they’re heading straight toward the Bay Bridge. Traffic needs to be stopped now. Again, traffic needs to be stopped.”

The ship eventually sailed safely under the span. Still, the incident, which came just over four months after the Dali cargo ship decimated Baltimore’s Key Bridge, highlights the tiny, but ever-present risk that vessels present to infrastructure. It also, the pilot said in an interview, serves as evidence of ship-strike protocol working.

According to emails from transportation authority officials obtained through the Public Information Act request, the original call from dispatch came at 1:48 p.m. and traffic was held by transportation authority police at 1:49. The bridge was clear of cars at 1:56 and the ship sailed under the bridge at 1:58. Traffic was then released at 2:05. Later in the day, the traffic delay traveling eastbound was 7.5 miles, according to transportation authority emails.

Contractors had been working on the bridge at that time and “were evacuated prior to the ship passing through,” the correspondence states.

Just before the Key Bridge disaster on March 26, vehicle traffic was stopped, surely saving the lives of many drivers, but six construction workers fixing potholes remained on the span and were killed. In the aftermath, debris blocked the shipping channel into Baltimore for two months and both private and public entities — including the Department of Justice — have filed lawsuits against the owner of the cargo ship.

The dispatch audio from the temporary Bay Bridge closure includes another brief conversation between Kinlein and the dispatcher and, later, Kinlein informing the dispatcher that the ship had safely sailed under the bridge.

“We’re all clear of the Bay Bridge now and you can resume traffic,” Kinlein said, before saying he needed to “clear this line” to make other calls.

Oceangoing vessels make thousands of trips into and out of Baltimore each year, and although there was no damage done during the August incident, it serves as a reminder of the hard-to-imagine consequences of a ship potentially crashing into the Bay Bridge. The 4.3-mile bridge — which carries twice as many cars daily as the Key Bridge did before it was knocked down — is an integral artery connecting the bulk of Maryland to the Eastern Shore.

The incident also illustrates ship-strike protocol — the system by which licensed Maryland pilots communicate with the transportation authority and the Coast Guard during an emergency — at work.

“The protocol worked,” Kinlein, the pilot, told The Baltimore Sun on Thursday. “And, given the situation all over again, I would do exactly the same thing.”

The origin of Denebola’s steering problem that day likely stemmed from its recent lack of use. The old vessel — which was on its final voyage, heading to Beaumont, Texas, to be recycled — had long sat in Baltimore. Kinlein compared it to first using a furnace after the summertime or starting up an old car that’s been in “your garage for a year.”

The vessel reached a normal transit speed of roughly 14 knots as it sailed south through the Chesapeake Bay, but experienced a hydraulic leak in one of two redundant steering pumps. When that happened, crew members switched over to the backup pump, but an apparent error by a crew member during the switch caused there to be a possible problem with the steering. Kinlein never lost the ability to steer, but given the leak and the potential for a loss in steering, he asked for traffic to be stopped, knowing it would take several minutes to clear the bridge of vehicles. Kinlein, at the time, assessed the risk of a collision to be relatively low, he said.

Steamships like the Denebola — built in 1973 as a high-speed container ship for the shipping company Sea-Land but later converted for military use — “handle really poorly” at slow speeds, so slowing them down too much can have adverse effects, Kinlein said. The ship sailed around 9 knots as it headed under the bridge. Rather than try to “diagnose” the problem as the ship approached, Kinlein decided to “not to take any chances at all” and “troubleshoot” on the south side of the bridge, after a safe transit.

The ship then moored south of Annapolis and was inspected that evening by the Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping, a maritime classification society, which cleared it to continue on its voyage. It arrived in Texas on Aug. 6.

The Bay Bridge is occasionally closed for scheduled reasons — such as when tugboats escorted the Dali underneath it this summer — but traffic is rarely, if ever, stopped due to emergency situations by a potential ship strike. Asked whether the Bay Bridge had previously been closed due to the threat of a vessel collision, the transportation authority said in a statement last month that it “has not uncovered any records indicating that Bay Bridge traffic was held temporarily due to the threat of a ship strike.”

It was the first time in Kinlein’s 12-year career as a pilot that he requested a bridge be closed. And “hopefully the only time,” he added.

The Bay Bridge’s spans opened in 1952 and 1973 and the structure, like the Key Bridge, was not built with robust pier protection systems, which fortify bridges and prevent potential vessel collisions. The transportation authority, however, is considering a $145 million pier protection project at the Bay Bridge in an effort to “decrease the risk of vessel impact.”

The Key Bridge collapse aside, a large vessel hitting a bridge in Maryland waters is incredibly rare. However, it was not unthinkable even before the collapse. In a December 2023 meeting of the Port of Baltimore Harbor Safety and Coordination Committee, Kinlein himself had brought up the possibility of revising protocol “used in the event of the loss of steering or propulsion of a ship approaching the Bay Bridge or Key Bridge, due to the unreliability of reaching someone in the current protocol.”

Then, in the next quarterly meeting of the committee — which is a joint industry-government advisory panel — Kinlein updated other stakeholders. The protocol had “been revised,” according to minutes from the March 13 meeting, held 13 days before the Key Bridge collapse.

Local expert pilots, licensed by the state, are required to be aboard any large ship sailing in Maryland waters. As of earlier this year, there were 69 state-licensed pilots.

Did the Key Bridge collapse affect Kinlein’s decision-making at all? Would he have requested that the Bay Bridge be closed if the Key Bridge disaster had never happened?

“That’s a good question. That’s a question I’ve asked myself. I really don’t know because the Key Bridge has changed, I think, everybody’s mindset locally,” he said. “It’s really hard to say.”

“It’s kind of like getting back into the pre-9/11 mindset. It’s kind of hard to remember how you felt before then.”

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