Leaders in the Columbia River shipping industry say there’s a growing risk that the 95-year-old Lewis and Clark Bridge will be struck by a large ship and collapse. Ships have doubled in size since the shipping channel was first put into use. Without modern sensor technology, it’s increasingly difficult for pilots to calculate clearance margins when passing through the channel. In the event of a collapse, it would be similar to the magnitude of the 2024 Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster in Baltimore.
Henry Brannan, a reporter at The Columbian newspaper and The Daily News in Southwest Washington, joins us to discuss efforts to prevent the bridge’s collapse, like realigning the channel on the Columbia river and retrofitting the bridge with modern sensors.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross in for Dave Miller. Two years ago this week, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after a container ship lost power and rammed into one of its piers. Six people were killed and shipping traffic to the port of Baltimore was blocked for nearly three months. People who drive big ships on the Columbia River say it’s becoming increasingly likely the same thing could happen here. The Lewis and Clark Bridge between Rainier, Oregon and Longview, Washington is in danger of a similar catastrophe. Henry Brannan wrote about this for The Colombian and The Daily News, and he joins us now. Henry, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Henry Brannan: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Norcross: There are a lot of bridges on the lower Columbia, and I wanna ask you about this one, and I know that the answer is multi-part, but boil it down for us. Why is this particular bridge so vulnerable?
Brannan: I think it’s a perfect storm of factors. For starters, the channel, when it was built, cost was an issue. It follows the run of the river, and the river bends right there, which means the deepest part of the river is close to the Washington side. And what that means, in short, is just that ships come within about eighty feet of the east support pier, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re talking about 1,200-foot-long ships, that’s pretty close.
Also, because the bridge has a bit of an arc, an arch, that also means that some of these taller ships are getting close to the underside of it. I should also say when the bridge was built, the channel was about 500 feet wide. Today it’s about 600 feet wide, which I guess brings me to the second factor, which is that ships have basically doubled in size since then.
Like I mentioned, ships are now about 1,200 feet long at times, some of the longest ones in the river at least. And then the bridge itself, it’s old, it doesn’t have any of the concrete protectors around the piers – those are known as dolphins – and it also sags in the cold by a couple feet. It also doesn’t have sensors on it, known as air gap sensors, which means that the pilots have to basically do math about 3,000 times a year. So yeah, like I said, it’s basically just the perfect storm of factors it faces.
Norcross: OK, so to summarize, the ships are much bigger, the channel runs too close to the Washington side, and therefore the pier on that side, and the bridge is old, it sags, and there are no sensors under the bridge. Is that basically it?
Brannan: Yeah, that’s exactly it.
Norcross: You point out in your reporting that there have been some close calls. Can you describe one?
Brannan: Back in 2022 is one that really grabbed me. There’s this ship, it’s a cruise ship known as the Celebrity Eclipse, and while ships like that don’t generally go in the Columbia River, Portland has an important dry dock that some of these larger ships are fixed at. So when it was leaving, the pilots told me – Columbia River pilots, I should say – told me it was about four feet from the underside of the bridge, which alone is pretty close.
Then in meetings with Oregon and Washington years later, they actually found out that the bridge does indeed sag, and then of course the water level sensors just add another thing in the river. Around Longview they found it can vary by about a foot, so in theory that clearance could have been as little as about 13.2 inches.
Norcross: Oh my God.
Brannan: And I suppose I should also mention…
Norcross: So, more than a foot.
Brannan: … yeah, in some ships they’d also found had underreported their height. I should note here that, importantly, that these pilots are some of the most highly trained in the world. I talked to a handful of shipping industry experts who said these are among the best in the world, they have years and years of training, they have decades of experience before that. They do know quite literally every bend, every buoy in the river. But still it’s a big issue.
Norcross: Yeah, these Columbia River pilots are brought on board to navigate the river. The captains of the ships are not asked to do that. So these are the people who are sounding the alarm about this bridge?
Brannan: Yeah, they’re very stoic people. They certainly didn’t seek me out to talk about this, but when I called them about it, they did tell me. And you know, the shipping industry at large, from talking to folks up and down the river, basically spent a decade trying to get this problem solved behind the scenes through advocacy that until very recently has mostly fallen… policymakers have not necessarily been receptive, I would say.
Norcross: That seems to be changing though, and we’ll get to that in a minute. One thing that jumped out in your reporting. When you spoke to one of the river pilots, they called it a single-point failure bridge, meaning if any part of it gets hit, it’s coming down?
Brannan: That’s right. At one point, as I understand it, there’s some wood protectors, but those are gone, and there’s certainly no concrete ones. So that was a pretty startling thing to be told.
Norcross: The disaster in Baltimore two years ago was caused by a ship losing power. Does that happen on the Columbia too?
Brannan: That was another startling thing to happen. I had no idea, and I don’t really think many people do, but about twice a month ships experience some type of outage on the river, engine failures or rudder failure or something like that. The pilots told me that generally they regain control quickly, it’s reported to the Coast Guard, and I was told point blank, if we have an engine failure, we will steer it into the shore before we hit the bridge, that would be the worst case scenario.
Norcross: If they have time.
Brannan: Yeah, that was the issue. I remember the president of the pilots told me that if the failure in Baltimore had happened a minute earlier, none of this would have happened. And so of course the next question I asked is, well, what happens if the failure happens at the exact moment, then? And that’s when I was told we’d steer it into the bridge, but of course the perfect storm is a perfect storm.
Norcross: OK, what’s being done about all this?
Brannan: The sense I got is, this is a good moment to talk about it because there is a little bit of good news, finally. On a federal level, the Army Corps and the Coast Guard are currently engaged in this effort to realign the channel, so basically, to put it right in the center of the river so the pilots don’t have to navigate that tricky bend and get so close to both the underside and the support pier of the bridge. The Army Corps has already done its part and the Coast Guard now is assessing that.
On the state front, Washington is in charge of this bridge and Oregon is in charge of the Astoria-Megler one, as I understand it. Washington, in this year’s two-year budget, kept in some funding from last year to address the problem – about a million dollars – and that would see sensors installed as well as some other measures. There was talk in the shipping industry that it was going to get cut out. Obviously both states are in difficult budget environments, but last I checked it was indeed in, so that’s good.
And then I reached out to ODOT, and they told me that they plan to continue or keep their half of the funding for the sensors that would basically help pilots not have to do such precise calculations on the fly in terms of water level and bridge level.
Norcross: What kind of timelines are we looking at for getting all these things done?
Brannan: Those were questions I asked and I did not get answers. I think legislators in the area have said we’ve been trying to make this happen for a long time, but Olympia, Salem, they’re not as keyed into issues outside of the big population centers. And at the federal level things happen particularly slowly and obviously in my reporting I found that’s even more true in this current administration. So it’s hard to say.
Norcross: And it seems like part of the problem potentially is that there are a lot of governments involved here, two states and two agencies within the federal government. Does that make it hard for coordination?
Brannan: To an extent. I will say the Columbia River system is an extremely well-oiled machine in terms of shipping and industry. It moves about $31 billion in goods each year, supports tens of thousands of jobs, especially for Southwest Washington and especially Cowlitz County. It’s a really important economic driver, so the people who lead the system are pretty keyed in, and there’s a lot of government relations folks who know how to get stuff done and historically have; which is part of why it was so shocking that this is still a problem, because on so many other things they’ve been very, very successful in bringing home federal money and state money to get it done.
Norcross: What’s different this time?
Brannan: I do not know, and I think the pilots don’t know and the industry doesn’t know. Nobody I talked to really knew, and again, this is a very, very stoic industry. But I think people, the sense I got were pretty frustrated, but they also don’t go out of their way to complain. They’re more like, we’re just going to do what we have to do. But yeah, it’s definitely harder than ever for them.
Norcross: There’s this question about bridges here. We’ve learned a lot about the vulnerability of our bridges, especially in a big earthquake. Given that knowledge, are there any conversations about just replacing the Lewis and Clark Bridge entirely and making it taller and less susceptible to disaster?
Brannan: Yeah, as far as the taller and less susceptible to disaster, I don’t know if the conversation’s got to that point. I talked to the Washington state senator who represents the area, Senator Jeff Wilson, and he basically said, “Ultimately we do need to replace this bridge. It’s old, it’s approaching 100 years old. It certainly doesn’t have up-to-date safety measures.”
But there’s been talk for quite a while. I found newspaper stories about a 1991 study that the legislature in Washington did that said we ought to replace this pretty soon, and here we are, and it’s certainly, I would say not even much of a point of conversation.
Norcross: How important is this bridge for movement between Oregon and Washington? There aren’t a lot of bridges on the Columbia, after all.
Brannan: Absolutely. What the Department of Transportation over in Washington told me was basically that about 20,000 people use it each day. I’d say it’s also particularly important for the region’s economy, given that Longview and Cowlitz County at large are such manufacturing job hubs. There’s a lot of folks in Oregon who commute over. There was a news story back in 2023 in The Daily News about one company paying, I would imagine an exorbitant sum, to ferry their employees over the river with a helicopter to get them to work.
Tons of money, tons of commuters, and of course, the Baltimore disaster. Six people on a maintenance crew died, which is both horrendous and on these major bridges that lots of people use, it’s kind of sick thing to say, but a low amount of people – not to disregard the loss of life that those people’s families had – but when you look at the bridge, there’s certainly more than six cars on it at any time. So yeah, pretty consequential.
Norcross: That 20,000 number jumped out at me. I actually didn’t know that this bridge was that busy. And you think about what might happen if the bridge was taken out for whatever reason. Aside from the loss of life, which of course is horrifying, what do you do if you need to get between the two states? Do you go to Portland? Do you go to Astoria? Can you talk a little bit more about the disruption that that bridge going out might cause the region?
Brannan: I think the whole thing’s pretty unimaginable to people. I’d ask them about that question and I think people didn’t want to answer it, for understandable reasons. There’s no positive takeaways with that. It would be pretty damaging. I mean, you can see previews of that when the Wahkiakum County ferry went out and that put people over in Wahkiakum County, which is in Southwest Washington between Cowlitz and Pacific counties, that put people in a really difficult situation where commuting to work they’d have to drive quite a ways one way or the other.
Norcross: How often do you drive over this bridge, Henry?
Brannan: You know, I actually have some family out there, and partly grew up out there, so a few times a year for pretty much my entire life.
Norcross: What do you think about when you go over it now?
Brannan: Historically, I didn’t really think too deeply about it, but I did drive over it while doing this reporting, and I was kind of in my head about it. I guess I thought about the details that the pilot shared with me, worrying ones about the engine failures in particular, and then reassuring details. I mean, these people train truly an unimaginable amount.
I asked them, do you think about it when you go to sleep at night? And they laugh and they’re like, oh yeah, we all have recurring dreams about this, about steering ships down Main Street and all this type of stuff. But I think, honestly, the thought I landed on, it’s the thought you land on anytime you do a story about a problem where it’s basically a warning. It’s just like, oh God, I hope I’m wrong. I hope it’s not that bad. I hope I’m being dramatic. I hope policymakers will listen. I mean the worst case scenario is vindication.
Norcross: Maybe we should end this conversation on more of an up note. Can you summarize the good news? What’s hopeful about all this?
Brannan: What’s hopeful is, first and foremost, I think, just the pilots. I was really blown away by their professionalism, by their skill, their training. They’re in a business of inches, and they’re the right people for the job. They’re really tremendously talented. So for starters, that. This is not necessarily a new problem even though it is getting worse, so that, first and foremost.
But also, like I said, at a federal level it is actually finally being addressed. The Corps of Engineers has already done its part. The Coast Guard, they didn’t tell me how far along they are but they’re doing it. Federal registered notice is out there. And on the state level, the funding did indeed make it through the budget. So those are some bright sides in time.
Norcross: Thank you for that, Henry, and thank you for this conversation. I enjoyed it.
Brannan: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Norcross: Henry Brannan wrote about the vulnerability of the Lewis and Clark Bridge for The Columbian and The Daily News in Southwest Washington.
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