"The majority of the financial fallout is likely to lay primarily with the insurance industry...."

"Industry experts told FT that insurers could pay out losses for bridge damage, port disruption, and any loss of life. The collapse could drive 'one of the largest claims ever to hit the marine (re)insurance market,' John Miklus, president of the American Institute of Marine Underwriters, told Insurance Business.... The Dali is covered by the Britannia Steam Ship Insurance Association Ltd.... Britannia... told FT it was 'working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally.' Britannia is one of 12 mutual insurers included in the International Group of P&I Clubs, which maintains more than $3 billion of reinsurance cover...."

From "Here's who could be responsible for paying for the Baltimore bridge disaster" (Business Insider).

Despite all that insurance, Joe Biden was quick to say — please tell me why — "It is my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect Congress to support my effort."

By the way, isn't it amazing to think of a bridge standing all these years — since 1977 — when a crash into one pier was always capable of bringing the whole structure down? Think of all the ships that passed through without hitting either pier. The bridge was always vulnerable.

At the NYT: "Engineers are raising questions about piers supporting the bridge."

The piers on a bridge act as a kind of leg and are what is known as “nonredundant” parts of a bridge’s structure. If a pier is somehow taken out, there is nothing to compensate for the missing structural support, and a collapse of the bridge is all but inevitable, most of the analysts said.

Yet the collapse in Baltimore on Tuesday might have been avoided, some of the engineers said, if the piers had been better able to block, deflect or withstand such a collision. And some of the engineers questioned whether the bridge’s piers had adequate blocking devices that are known with a self-explanatory name: fenders.

In bridge engineering, fenders can be anything from simple pyramids of rocks piled around the pylons to major concrete rings padded with slats of wood, designed to shield the bridge’s supports from damage by water or collisions.

It was not clear whether any such protection built around the bridge’s piers was sufficient to guard against even a glancing hit from a 95,000-gross-ton container vessel.

And the U.S. secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, expressed doubt on Tuesday that any bridge could have withstood such a serious collision.

“This is a unique circumstance. I do not know of a bridge that has been constructed to withstand a direct impact from a vessel of this size,” he told reporters....

I wonder how much bridge engineering Pete Buttigieg knows. I'm able to see that what the engineers are talking about — the fenders — are ways to avoid a "direct impact." But why is Buttigieg stepping up to cast doubt on whether our existing bridges are all vulnerable to one knock from a big ship? And if the bridge was only vulnerable because it was "a vessel of this size," then why weren't vessels of that size forbidden to pass under that bridge?

It seems as though both Biden and Buttigieg are trying nudge the incident into the "act of God" category. Why? Maybe they ought to be more careful about what they say. The insurers must pay. And I refuse to accept that kind of vulnerability in our bridges. It's ludicrous.

Engineers who reviewed images of the bridge both before and after the collapse said no significant fender structures were visible....

Take note. 

The structure’s apparent vulnerability left some engineers dumbfounded.

“This is a huge shock,” [said Shankar Nair, a structural engineer with over half a century of experience who is a member of the National Academy of Engineering]. “A bridge of that size and importance should not collapse when hit by an errant vessel.”...