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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully the lesson from this will be received by operators: it's way cheaper to invest in personnel, training, and maintenance than to let the shit hit the fan.

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Why? It's cost them 100M (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/us-reaches-settlemen...) but rebuilding the bridge is going to be 5.2Billion so if gundecking all this maintenance for 20+ years has saved more then 100M, they will do it again.

From your article - this answered a question I had:

> The settlement does not include any damages for the reconstruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The State of Maryland built, owned, maintained, and operated the bridge, and attorneys on the state’s behalf filed their own claim for those damages. Pursuant to the governing regulation, funds recovered by the State of Maryland for reconstruction of the bridge will be used to reduce the project costs paid for in the first instance by federal tax dollars.

So was the bridge self-insured?

Actually, to be even more cynical….

If everyone saved $100M by doing this and it only cost one shipper $100M, then of course everyone else would do it and just hope they aren’t the one who has bad enough luck to hit the bridge.

And statistically, almost all of them will be okay!

This is the calculus that shows why our current civilization is unlikely to pass the filter.

Making the calculus apparent is why we might have a chance.

Because then anyone who owns a bridge/needs to pay for said bridge damage goes, ‘well clearly the costs of running into a bridge on the runs-into-bridges-due-to-negligence-group isn’t high enough, so we need to either create more rules and inspections, or increase the penalties, or find a way to stop these folks from breaking our bridges, or the like - and actually enforce them’.

It’s why airplanes are so safe to fly on, despite all the same financial incentives. If you don’t comply with regulators, you’ll be fined all to hell or flat out forbidden from doing business. And that is enforced.

And the regulators take it all very seriously.

Ships are mostly given a free pass (except passenger liners, ferries, and hazmat carrying ships) because the typical situation if the owner screws up is ‘loses their asset and the assets of anyone who trusted them’, which is a more socially acceptable self correcting problem than ‘kills hundreds of innocent people who were voters and will have families crying, gnashing their teeth, and pointing fingers on live TV about all this’.

Isn't there a big liability insurance payout on this towards the 5.2 Billion, and if so won't the insurer be more motivated to mandate compliance?

Yes the insurer will likely be able to charge more.

The vessel owner may possibly be able to recover some of that from the manufacturer, as the wiring was almost certainly a manufacturing error, and maybe some of the configurations that continued the blackout were manufacturer choices as well.

At the end of the day we all just pay for it in terms of insurance costs priced into our goods.

But it's important to "punish" (via punitive fines) the right people, so that they will put some effort into not making that mistake again.

What would be a better solution?

Well the current way involves paying for a bunch of non-value producing busy work by insurers, lawyers and a ton of expert parties relevant to the litigation process.

There's probably some combination of "everyone just posts up a bond into a fund to cover this stuff" plus a really high deductible on payout that basically deletes all those expensive man hours without causing any increased incentive for carnage.

Events like these are a VERY rare exception compared to all the shipping activities that go on in an uneventful manner. Doesn't take a genius to do the napkin math here. Whatever the solution is probably ought to try to avoid expending resources in the base case where everything is fine.

Regulations to require work is done correctly the first time. Also inspections.

I like a government that pays workers to look out for my safety.

A punishment that was felt by decision makers but was unable to be offloaded as a cost to the public, except maybe in the form of rent. Prison :)

Informed consumers who actually walk, ever.

I imagine every vessel has its own corporation that owns it which would declare insolvency if this kind of thing happens

Harbor authorities might ban such uninsured ships from their jurisdictions.

That seems like a legal issue. Liability should flow upwards to the owners.

It’s not thought. These situations are extremely rare. When they happen it just close the company and shed liability.

Yup, nobody wants to admit that regulations and inspections are a reasonable solution

Would any inspection regime be able to inspect both ends of every single wire on every ship that ever enters our territorial waters? Every wire? And how often do they need to redo that inspection, as one could be pulled out?

As proposed this is a strawman standard.

Not sure I understand. If they’re proposing a less exhaustive inspection standard it wouldn’t have done anything to avert this incident or similar ones.

On the contrary, perhaps the cause was down to a single failed wire, but multiple other safety layers were bypassed in this overall failure. A regulatory scheme that would have enforced and caught a single one of those layers would have prevented this event. It's why the term swiss cheese model of safety is discussed. Only when the events line up holes though multiple layers of swiss cheese should an actual catastrophe occur.

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