The Key Bridge in Baltimore stood for more than half a century until it collapsed when a massive ship it
was never designed to withstand collided with it. Ship collision design provisions established in 1991, well
after the bridge was built, suggest that the chance of collision was extremely low, estimated to be around
1/100,000. This risk assessment, which ultimately proved to be overly optimistic, likely contributed to a
false sense of security about the bridge’s vulnerability and may have impeded proactive measures to
reinforce the structure. National ship collision provisions have been mostly unchanged since they were
published about 35 years old. The guidelines were derived from 1970s experiments focused on protecting
the reactors of nuclear-powered ships from collision by other ships. The studies utilized 1:10 scale models
and were geared towards ship-to-ship impacts rather than ship-to-bridge collisions. This is urgently
needed to support the extensive, ongoing national efforts dedicated to evaluating and mitigating the risks
of vessel collisions with existing bridge infrastructure. Our objective of the proposed research is to
investigate current state of the ship impacts through the evaluation of current guidelines on ship impact
on bridge piers, identify gaps in the area through the analysis of feedback received during the August 7,
2024, virtual symposium on the protection of bridge pirs from large ship impacts and develop a
computational framework to evaluate vulnerability of bridge piers from large ship impacts.