You can also look at the problem from the perspective of the bridge. Why was it possible that a ship took it down? Motors can fail ...
> The NTSB found that the Key Bridge, which collapsed after being struck by the containership Dali on March 26, 2024, was almost 30 times above the acceptable risk threshold for critical or essential bridges, according to guidance established by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, or AASHTO.
> Over the last year, the NTSB identified 68 bridges that were designed before the AASHTO guidance was established — like the Key Bridge — that do not have a current vulnerability assessment. The recommendations are issued to bridge owners to calculate the annual frequency of collapse for their bridges using AASHTO’s Method II calculation.
Letters to the 30 bridge owners and their responses https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-main-public/sr-details/H-25-003
Stopping a car normally vs crashing a car. Skydiving with a parachute vs skydiving without a parachute.
For something like ship vs bridge you have to account for the crunch factor. USS Iowa going the same speed probably would've hit way harder despite having ~1/3 the tonnage.
Plan the bridge so any ship big enough to hurt it grounds before it gets that close. Don't put pilings in the channel. It's just money. But it's a lot of money so sometimes it's better to just have shipping not suck.
Alternatively, the Chunnel will almost certainly never get hit with a ship.
Have a look at the trajectory chart that I posted upthread and tell me how in this particular case you would have arranged that.
This ship wasn't towed by a tug, it was underway under its own power and in order for the ship to have any control authority at all it needs water flowing over the rudder.
Without that forward speed you're next to helpless and these things don't exactly turn on a dime. So even if there had been a place where it could have run aground it would never have been able to reach it because it was still in the water directly in front of the passage way under the bridge.
100,000 tonnes doing 7 Kph is a tremendous amount of kinetic energy.
The exact moment the systems aboard the Dali failed could not have come at a worse time, it had - as far as I'm aware of the whole saga - just made a slight course correction to better line up with the bridge and the helm had not yet been brought back to neutral. After that it was just Newton taking over, without control I don't think there is much that would have stopped it.
This is a good plot of the trajectory of the vessel from the moment it went under way until the moment it impacted the bridge:
https://www.pilotonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/5HVqi...
You can clearly see the kink in the trajectory a few hundred meters before it hit the bridge.
Better to spend the effort in fleet education
The question is simple: who will pay for it? Apparently we are ok with this kind of risk, if we weren't we would not be doing this at all.
There is a similar thing going on in my country with respect to railway crossings. Every year people die on railway crossings. But it took for a carriage full of toddlers to be hit by a train before the sentiment switched from 'well, they had it coming' to 'hm, maybe we should do something about this'. People don't like to pay for risks they see as small or that they perceive as that they're never going to affect them.
This never was about technology, it always was about financing. Financing for proper regulatory tech oversight (which is vastly understaffed) on the merchant marine fleet, funding for better infrastructure, funding for (mandatory) tug assistance for vessels of this size near sensitive structures, funding for better educated and more capable crew and so on. The loose wire is just a consequence of a whole raft of failures that have nothing to do with a label shroud preventing a wire from making proper contact.
The 'root cause' here isn't really the true root cause, it is just the point at which technology begins and administration ends.