This Bay Area Bridge May Collapse Within 20 Years, New Johns Hopkins Study Says

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – When the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after a ship strike, it was terrifying to many people who rely on bridges for their daily commute.

If the Key Bridge could be destroyed in an instant, what does that mean for the other bridges in America?

That was a question researchers at Johns Hopkins University immediately asked themselves. They embarked on a study to better understand the risks as they apply to the United States’ most important bridges. That includes several bridges here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Personally, as a JHU alum and somebody who drove over the Francis Scott Key Bridge many times while living in Baltimore—and who now uses the Bay Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge, and more all the time—I was also keenly interested in the results.

A Bridge at Risk

They’re startling, and very concerning.

Firstly, the study looked at the Golden Gate Bridge and concluded that it could be at risk for collapse if a ship were to strike it. The chances of it actually being hit by a ship, though, were considered lower than for any other bridge. Statistically, this was likely to happen once every 481 years.

A different Bay Area bridge landed at the very top of the high-risk category, though.

The Oakland San Francisco Bay Bridge, the study found, was likely to be hit by a ship within the next approximately 20 years (22 to be exact).

That higher incidence reflects the design of the bridge and the unique characteristics of its channels, the shipping traffic that goes through it, the size of ships that could potentially impact it, weather conditions like fog, and more.

For those who have been living in the Bay Area for a long time, tragedy on the Oakland Bay Bridge is sadly nothing new.

A portion of the bridge collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, killing a motorist.

Of course, no study can determine with 100% certainty what will happen in the future, and it’s possible that through luck or good navigation, no ship will ever hit the Bay Bridge. Certainly, the Golden Gate Bridge has stood for almost a century without incident, despite some incredibly large ships passing underneath it.

The study reveals, though, that while the Golden Gate Bridge—with its advanced age and iconic character—immediately stood out in people’s minds as the biggest risk after the Francis Scott Key tragedy, it’s actually the Bay Bridge we should be worried about.

“To keep our bridges safe and operational, we want the chances of a collision strong enough to take down the bridge to be less than one in 10,000 in a given year, not one in a 100. One in 100 is extremely high,” the study’s author Michael Shields said. “If I look at the San Francisco Bay Bridge, we’re likely to see a major collision once every 22 years. That is huge. We want that number to be thousands of years. That’s tens of years.”

The Golden Gate Bridge will likely stand for another half century. The Bay Bridge could be gone in a decade or two.

Thankfully, the study finds that officials can take measures to protect bridges. These include installing protective barriers and changing navigation routes to prevent ship strikes.

Hopefully, officials will take the results of the study into account and enact any changes that are needed to prevent a ship strike and a tragedy like the Baltimore incident from happening here.