The early Tuesday morning incident involving a container ship striking a support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River in Baltimore Harbor resulting in the collapse of the bridge reminds us that even in our carefully controlled modern world, accidents continue to happen.

Much of our current news cycle consists of meaningless political bickering designed to fill the 24/7 news cycle established by CNN during the 1980s. However, the occasional newsworthy event presents itself to capture the attention of the public that long ago tuned out the fluff of political bickering. Tuesday morning’s collapse of the Key Bridge was such an event.

Unfortunately, such events also inspire those on the fringe to gin up conspiracy theories to explain these events we once took for granted as being tragic accidents. After all, in our perfectly controlled world, such events don’t just happen by circumstance. There must be some sinister explanation behind such a calamity.

Well, they don’t just happen by circumstance, but it’s not because some sinister force has enacted their nefarious plan to cause such a calamity. Accidents of this magnitude are most often the culmination of multiple systemic failures the sum of which aggregate into a disaster that becomes a newsworthy item.

The conspiracy theorists swung into action on Tuesday just hours after the incident to concoct all manner of nefarious explanations including Chinese ability to hack ships and shut down their power. Even the fact that the ship’s crew visited a local Walmart is being thrown into the conspiracy theory mix to suggest that a crew who had been at sea for weeks and wanted to shop for personal items before heading back out to sea might have nefarious undertones. Please, let us vector back to sanity here.

The container ship Dali is registered as a Singapore vessel owned by Grace Ocean Private Limited, operated by Maersk Lines, and managed by Synergy Marine PTE Limited. It has been routinely inspected numerous times in ports across the globe. While in Baltimore Harbor, Dali suffered a severe electrical failure stemming from refrigerated boxes tripping electrical breakers several times with each resulting in a total power failure according to Julie Mitchell, co-administrator of Container Royalty which is a company that tracks cargo.

The facts that are known for certain are that the Dali container ship had been previously inspected multiple times with no major problems being reported. The Dali was involved in a separate incident at the port of Antwerp, Belgium when it struck a stone wall that damaged its hull, but blame for this incident was attributed to the ship’s master and pilot on board and did not involve mechanical or electrical issues. The Dali presented electrical issues while docked in Baltimore Harbor that resulted in a total loss of power to the ship, but these were thought to have been resolved prior to the ship getting underway. The Dali was piloted by experienced Baltimore Harbor pilots with spotless records. Video of the Dali leaving port showed multiple ship power losses causing the ship to drift off course with the current prior to striking the Key Bridge support pier. Prior to striking the Key Bridge support pier, the harbor pilots issued a mayday call alerting local authorities of the impending disaster giving them just enough time to halt traffic across the bridge and save lives. All indications are that the harbor pilots and ship’s captain acted in a professional manner taking the only actions available to them which were not enough to avert this disaster.

In this case, a series of systemic failures in conjunction with natural forces culminated in the Dali striking a support pier structure of the Key Bridge resulting in its collapse. These include the power failures from the refrigerated boxes tripping ship circuit breakers that were thought to have been resolved, the timing of the power failures while the Dali was attempting to cross under the Key Bridge preventing control of the ship’s engine and rudder, the current acting to push the Dali in the direction of the Key Bridge support, and the Key Bridge steel arch continuous through truss design meaning that the loss of a support pier would cause the collapse of the entire bridge due to features inherent in its design that prevent the redistribution of loads with the loss of a support pier. The Key Bridge was designed in the 1970s when cargo ships were much smaller than the behemoths now roaming the oceans, and it was not designed to withstand the forces involved in a collision with such a massive modern vessel. The Dali managed to avoid the dolphin structure of the support pier designed to absorb an impact and directly strike the support pier fender with the full impact of its mass which was far greater than the support pier fender could absorb.

Accidents can and still do happen despite our best efforts to mitigate them. It is difficult for some to accept this fact believing as they do that such incidents should have been relegated to the past given the current state of modern technology and engineering. They don’t consider the possibility that technology can break down and result in an overwhelming of the engineering designed to protect the infrastructure of the modern world. A much more productive endeavor will be the investigation of this incident revealing the failures and systemic design flaws responsible as the cause of this incident that will lead to enhanced regulations that hopefully make the underlying systems more resilient in the future. Conspiracy theories may be fun, but they are not productive to understanding why accidents happen as they merely muddy the waters and distract from serious inquiry into their origins.