In the very early hours of Tuesday morning, a cargo ship collided with one of the support columns on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, leading to a truly horrific scene as the bridge itself quite literally snapped into pieces and fell into the water. Sadly, an unknown number of vehicles were on the bridge at the time, prompting officials to focus on searching for survivors as the governor declared a national emergency. It’s a truly tragic occurrence, and one that will have potentially long-lasting ripple effects on not only on the surrounding area, but also, the economy and supply chain in general, given the fact that this Baltimore bridge resides along the Patapsco River and near one of the busiest ports in the U.S. Now, we’re learning that Ford – specifically – plans to reroute its parts shipments in the wake of the Baltimore bridge collapse, according to Bloomberg.
When speaking with the news outlet, Ford CFO John Lawler noted that it’s too early to fully determine what impact this disaster will have on the automaker’s business, but noted that the company dealt with plenty of supply chain disruptions through the pandemic. “We’ll have to find the best solution for those parts that will be impacted,” Lawler added. “It’s a large port with a lot of flow through it, so it’s going to have an impact.”
“It’s just at this point, we’ll have to understand what that means for us specifically. We’ll work on the workarounds. We’ll have to divert parts to other ports along the east coast or elsewhere in the country, and it will probably lengthen the supply chain a bit. So, we’ll continue to work that, and I would say we have experience now in understanding supply chain disruptions, and so, we’ll just put that experience to work and figure out the best solution.”
We’ll have more on the Baltimore bridge collapse and its impact on the automotive industry soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for 24/7 Ford news coverage.
Comments
A very sad accident resulting in loss of life and supply chain disruption. Maybe it is time to implement both pilot and attached tugs to large vessels passing under the reconstructed bridge, as is done in some other North American ports.
Sad, indeed; and very cool of you to comment on it as you did.
Agreed——pilot and tugs.
I worked for a cruise line previously. Going into any ports, we used pilots. That wasn’t even a question of policy or procedure.