After Baltimore bridge tragedy, how safe is commercial shipping? | The Excerpt

On Thursday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY Senior Investigative Reporter Emily Le Coz looks into the safety of container shipping, and whether tugboats could have prevented the Baltimore bridge disaster. The economic impact of the bridge collapse will be severe. USA TODAY Democracy Reporter Erin Mansfield explains a tool to challenge voter registrations. Former senator and vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman is dead at 82. Students used AI to create nude photos of their classmates.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Thursday, March 28th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.

Today looking at the safety of commercial shipping in the wake of this week's Baltimore disaster. Plus, how a Georgia man created a controversial tool to challenge voter rolls. And we remember former Senator Joe Lieberman.

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The bodies of two of the six missing construction workers from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse were recovered yesterday according to Maryland authorities. They were identified as 35-year-old Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and 26-year-old Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera. More and more questions are being asked after the tragedy. One of them, could tugboats have prevented it?

I discussed that and the safety of container shipping in general with USA TODAY senior investigative reporter, Emily Le Coz.

Emily, thanks for hopping on.

Emily Le Coz:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

What do we know about this ship, the Dali and its history of previous wrecks?

Emily Le Coz:

The ship is a pretty standard ship. It only had one accident that we are aware of. In 2016, shortly after it was put into service, it struck a pier as it was exiting a port. Damage was caused to the ship. Damage was caused to the port. There were no injuries. It required minor repair. It was certainly nothing of the scale that we saw in Baltimore this week.

Taylor Wilson:

And just generally, how safe are these types of container ships overall?

Emily Le Coz:

So the experts I spoke to said that the shipping industry is actually incredibly safe if you compare it to other transportation industries, trucking, aviation and the like. Shipping is relatively safe. Not a lot of big accidents of this note. However, there are risks. These container ships have gotten bigger and bigger over the past 20 or 30 years. So back in the late '80s, the biggest could carry about 4,300 containers or TEUs. This is a 20-foot equivalent unit. TEUs is the standard measurement for container ships. But now we've got ships that can carry 24,000 containers. So that just gives you a sense of scale and how much bigger these ships are. If they're involved in an accident, obviously it's a bigger ship, it's more damage.

Taylor Wilson:

Emily, is anything being done to make these ships safer and prevent similar accidents? I know you wrote about tugboats, for instance in your piece.

Emily Le Coz:

Yeah, a lot of experts I spoke to suggested that tugboats could have prevented this accident. And long ago before ships had these thrusters that allowed them to sort of turn and navigate these tight spaces, we used tugboats to help them get through channels. And we still use tugboats to help ships dock and undock. Ships can't really go in reverse, so those tugboats can help pull them out and orient them toward the open sea. But we don't need tugboats really anymore to help the ship get all the way out of the port. These ships are capable of navigating those spaces on their own.

So what you saw on Tuesday, tugboats did help the Dali undock from the terminal at the Port of Baltimore, but they didn't escort them all the way out to the bridge. Experts said, had those tugs escorted them all the way out, they would've been there when the power went out and would've been able to nudge or tow the ship away from the bridge. Obviously that didn't happen. So that is one suggestion on ways to make this industry safer. But of course, we don't currently have all the tugs that we would need to escort every single ship in and out of these ports. Not as easy as it sounds.

Taylor Wilson:

This ship was Singapore flagged and commercial shipping is by definition, Emily, a global affair. I'm curious, what complications does this bring when it comes to safety, having to coordinate between so many different governments?

Emily Le Coz:

I spoke with an expert who's with a maritime union here in the United States, and he said that the United States actually has the safest records, the safest rules and regulations as far as ship and transportation. Other countries maybe don't. I don't know enough about this exact situation to say whether this ship was any less safe than any other ships that are on the open sea, but it certainly was a point that he made that other countries don't have nearly the safety standard as we do.

So you've got this situation where it's a Singapore ship owned by a Greek company, managed by a Danish company. So you've got a lot of different people involved, and I think that just speaks to the global culture that we're in and the difficulty of being able to regulate these things. It definitely is complicated and it's not so easy. It's just saying like, "Well, we're going to require this."

Taylor Wilson:

Emily Le Coz is a senior investigative reporter with USA TODAY. Great insight here as always. Thanks Emily.

Emily Le Coz:

Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

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Taylor Wilson:

The economic impact of the bridge collapse will be steep. The immediate price tag, $2 million in wages a day and 8,000 jobs according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He told reporters at the White House yesterday that rebuilding would not be quick, easy, or cheap.

The area is a critical one for America's economy. The Port of Baltimore is ranked the US' largest vehicle handling port, and it offers the deepest harbor in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. It's also closer to the Midwest than any other East Coast port, and within an overnight drive of one third of the nation's population. Between 100 million and $200 million of cargo pass through the port every day.

Buttigieg warned this week that with added a standstill, many longshore workers could be unemployed. For now, companies are coping with the disaster by rerouting shipments to other East Coast ports. About 4,000 commercial trucks a day use the bridge and detours are expected to increase delivery times and fuel costs according to Oxford Economics.

Officials for now are focused on clearing the massive wreckage left behind. In the coming weeks, responders will need to assess the damage to the ship and then free it from what's left of the bridge so they can safely clear it from the scene. They then need to remove the debris from the bridge so shipping operations can resume. That's according to Steven Frailey, a partner with the West Coast based Pacific Maritime Group that helps with marine salvage and wreck removal. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

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A Georgia man created a tool, EagleAI, that's eagle AI to challenge voter rules. That's setting off alarm bells among experts who say government workers will be inundated with requests they cannot vet quickly enough. I spoke with USA TODAY Democracy reporter, Erin Mansfield to learn more.

Erin, thanks for making the time today.

Erin Mansfield:

Thank you for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So let's just start with the basics. What is EagleAI and how did it get started?

Erin Mansfield:

EagleAI is essentially a software program that a doctor in the Augusta area of Georgia started to take massive amounts of public data, compare it to voter rolls, and send challenges to places like secretaries of state's office and county elections offices to tell them, "Hey, I don't think this person should be on the voter rolls." Or, "Hey, there's an error in this data."

Taylor Wilson:

And is this legal? Or what does the law say here?

Erin Mansfield:

It's actually part of federal law that states have to clean their voting rolls. It's a little bit unusual because generally states will have their own programs for looking at voter rolls, but the gentleman who started this kind of compares it to picking up trash on the side of the road and leaving it in an orange bag for the county to pick up. He and his users consider it a civic responsibility. There are folks who are very worried about these types of, I guess you could call them kind of a mom-and-pop movement to try to cleanse the voter rolls, but I have no reason to believe it's illegal.

Election experts told me that the vast majority of states allow someone to challenge someone else's voter registration. And some of them, like the one in Michigan, they're very, very old. They weren't generally designed for these 21st century mass database challenges, but in Georgia specifically, they passed a law after the 2020 election letting people as long as they're in the right jurisdiction send unlimited voter challenges. So that's how you end up with people like a gentleman named Jason Fraser who sent thousands and thousands of voter registration challenges, made headlines over it. And while you and I might not consider that much fun, people do this.

Taylor Wilson:

So Erin, why are some experts concerned about EagleAI?

Erin Mansfield:

So the concern is basically that you're doing surgery with a chainsaw, that you're taking these massive data sets. You don't have very, very personal information like social numbers to compare with. So if you find a John Smith who died in Marietta, Georgia and a John Smith on the rolls registered in Marietta, Georgia, the risk is, even though it's John Smith who was born on let's say February 1st, 1965, you never really know if it's exactly that person because you don't have their social security number, you don't have their driver's license number. So sure, you can get kind of close, but these types of systems have very high rates of error. There was actually an issue almost 20 years ago when Rick Scott, senator from Florida was erroneously listed as dead because someone with his name, the guy's name is Rick Scott, it's not the most uncommon name in the world. He had to vote via provisional ballot because there was a mistake. And those are the kinds of concerns that people have.

The other concern is that because you're able to do this in such a massive amount, even if the challenges don't get through, even if the county or the state says, "Hey, we're not doing anything with this," people who are using it will think that there are all these big problems with our voter rolls and there are, and it might harm people's faith in the election.

Taylor Wilson:

And Erin, you and I talked about the ERIC system recently on the show. Can you just remind us what that is and how EagleAI is being touted by some to replace it?

Erin Mansfield:

So ERIC is basically a consortium of states, about half the states in the country. They come together, they share their data to do basically the same thing. But one of the big, big differences is that states have access to Social Security numbers, driver's license data. So they are able to very securely make sure that John Smith in one place is John Smith in the other, not just because of the name and the birthday, but because of the partial Social Security number, the driver's license number, and they can do it with a very high degree of accuracy. But there are nine Republican states that have left it and a very close Trump ally, Cleta Mitchell, who is an election integrity lawyer, she would like to see secretaries of state take a look at this tool as an alternative at the state level.

When I spoke to secretaries of state, they either hadn't heard of it or say the Secretary of State's Office in Georgia told me they aren't going to use it. It's a different story say at the county level. The gentleman who started this, Dr. Rick Richards, he said he's had a much better response from counties, so he's trying to go through counties.

Taylor Wilson:

Erin Mansfield covers democracy for USA TODAY. Really interesting stuff here. Thanks Erin.

Erin Mansfield:

Thank you Taylor.

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Taylor Wilson:

Former senator Joe Lieberman has died. He was a former Connecticut State Senator and Attorney General who was first elected to the US Senate in 1988. Lieberman developed a reputation for bipartisanship during his years in Washington, and he was the first Jewish American candidate nominated on a major party ticket. The 2000 Democratic nominee for Vice President later became a political independent. He was 82 years old.

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As AI gains a stronger foothold in the American economy and culture, administrators are watching it creep into schools too. In a recent headache for principals, AI generated nude photos. In one incident at an Illinois high school, a 15-year-old found out one of her sophomore classmates was using AI to create nude photos of her. By the time the principal called her mom, she was the 22nd girl on the list.

And there have been similar events around the country. An incident in Florida led to the arrests of two middle school boys in December, a warrant obtained by USA TODAY shows, though consequences in other states and school districts have been less severe. And experts say if administrators want to avoid similar nightmares, now is the time for them to get clear about their rules on AI. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

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And Happy Opening Day. America's pastime is back as many major league baseball teams begin their seasons today. It's often considered one of the unofficial markers of spring, though at least two openers have been postponed with rain expected up and down the East Coast. You can follow along with USA TODAY Sports.

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Be sure to stay tuned to The Excerpt later today when my co-host Dana Taylor speaks with USA TODAY national correspondent Elizabeth Weise about the coming total solar eclipse on April 8th. Why are these celestial events so captivating to humans and animals alike? You can find the episode right here on this feed beginning at 4:00 PM Eastern Time.

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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. Sara Ganim will be in for me tomorrow, and I'll be back Saturday with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.