So cars these days have anti-collision systems. One would think a million dollar boat, with millions of dollars in cargo, approaching a multimillion dollar bridge would have some sort of active sensing system to prevent a collision. That video shows the Dali strolling right into the support. It wasn't a glancing blow, rather it was a direct hit. Either somebody f'd up big time, or major act of sabotage on US territory.

Apparently, the Dali lost all power. Anti collision kind of needs power to work, so having it would not matter regardless

As an electrical engineer I will say there are giant thick sections of code for backup power regarding life safety systems. Generally a backup generator will keep running even if on fire and breaking just to keep power on… backup batteries on even more sensitive equipment provides even more redundancy. Power failure leading to a disaster is a engineering failure.

Yeah, still an utterly disastrous fuck up. Just wanted to point out that collision systems wouldn't matter in this case

But you’d think for a major port they’d have other types of backups not ship supported but based on maintaining the safety of the port. Like if a major ship goes dead and starts free floating in the port, isn’t there safety protocols or systems in place to deal with that? Tug boats, anchoring, emergency power, support ships or something … even if it cost millions, it’s better than spending millions in recovering from a destroyed bridge and lives lost.

Ships accidentally running into bridges is a fairly common event. Most of the newer bridges have a diamond of protective rubber barriers surrounding the supports. And all ports will typically have tug boats to guide them past a certain point.

However, those are typically kept in or near the actual port, and probably take a while to get anywhere far from shore. This is probably at some level a fault of the ship and their crew. It could be a failure to keep their equipment in working order, but the majority of near port collisions are due to ships not following or knowing the ports guidelines on speed or navigation.

I find it a bit odd that they would blame it on losing power, but they still managed to hit it head on with enough speed to knock it over.