A PNW civil engineering professor says the bridge’s collapse was a major blow to Baltimore’s economy and took the lives of six construction workers working on the bridge at the time of the incident. “The bridge was very well designed … it is one of the world’s longest bridges and it is very heavily used,” said Chandramouli Viswanathan Chandramouli, the sitting chair of the Department of Construction Science and Organizational Leadership.

He said incidents like this are likely to recur because most bridges lack adequate protection.

“When we design bridges we don’t design a bridge for this kind of impact,” he said. “Say a ship which rammed into the piers is about 200 feet wide and around 950 feet long and it was [carrying] about 100,000 tons. No bridge is designed for such an impact.”

What is needed is improved pier protection, he said. The National Bridge Inventory identifies 4,207 bridges in the U.S. that allow ships to safely pass under them. Of those bridges only 36% are equipped with what the NBI deems functional pier protection.

For, the news of the collapse was an avoidable tragedy.

Chandramouli said he is optimistic that more preventative measures will be added to bridge piers in the future, but he worries that the cost of such measures will be extremely high.

“We make sure to put our past experiences … into the specs and we improve it every year,” he said. “Because of that the cost goes up.

“Every bridge will have huge costs when you make more and more restrictions in the design code,” said Chandramouli. “If you want to design a bridge to be completely safe… it’s going to be very expensive.