How safe are Metro Vancouver’s bridges?
Posted March 26, 2024 7:14 pm.
The shocking bridge incident in Baltimore has some Metro Vancouver residents wondering how safe the bridges they use on a daily basis really are.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed Monday night after a cargo ship lost power and struck one of the supports. Trevor Heaver, an emeritus professor at UBC who specializes in transport economics and logistics including shipping and ports, says this type of accident would not happen in Vancouver.
When it comes to the Iron Workers bridge, he says oil tankers are the dominant traffic and they travel with tugboats attached.
“They’ve got sufficient pulling power to make sure the alignment of movement and rate of movement, is controlled,” Heaver said. “As far as I’m aware, the container ship did not have tugs attached, so when it lost power, there it was, without any recourse.”
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As for the Lions Gate Bridge, the supports aren’t in the water, so it wouldn’t be possible for a ship to hit them. However, Heaver says that doesn’t mean the bridge is without risk.
“The safety issue with Lions Gate, which we have to plan for, to avoid, is the equivalent of the trucks hitting overpasses,” he said. “They do calculations of how much freeboard the vessel has and what the tide level is, and what that means for the clearance beneath the bridge.”
In a statement, B.C.’s Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure says B.C. has “one of the most comprehensive bridge inspection and safety programs” in Canada. It adds that annual inspections are conducted on each of the ministry’s approximately 3,000 structures.
“When issues are identified, we take appropriate and immediate action,” the ministry stated.
Jonathan Wilkinson, the federal energy and natural resources minister, tells CityNews there’s still a lot of speculation around the Baltimore incident and the details that could inform safety on Vancouver’s bridges are not yet entirely clear.
“The Government of Canada and the Port of Vancouver are obviously very, very, very focused on ensuring the safety of ships that come in and out of the harbour every year and we certainly will be looking to try to understand what happened there and to ensure that we have the appropriate kinds of safeguards in place,” Wilkinson said.
Rules around vessel movement in the Burrard Inlet are set by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority.
In a statement it says, “While we cannot speculate as to what may have happened in this particular incident, we can provide an overview of the stringent safety procedures in place at the Port of Vancouver to support safe ship navigation.”
It says those procedures include establishing traffic control zones, tug support requirements, navigation risk assessments and pilotage requirements.
“All of the international ships in the Port of Vancouver move with pilots, you can’t move an international ship more than a few metres without having a pilot on board,” Heaver said.
Authorities in Halifax and Quebec have also reassured the public about the safety of their bridges.
