Checked in with two friends who live in the Baltimore area. One responded; he lives/works on the other side of the city. No word from the other yet (although she was FB-active about an hour ago).
Reading some commentary online it looks like at least 7 vehicles were dropped from the bridge. Allegedly the ship lost steering or otherwise lost control. There were reports of the ship being on fire, but others say that was smoke from the engines as they attempted to turn, which doesn’t sound healthy but not exactly actively on fire.
My son lives on one side of the bridge, his band mates on the other.
They were woken by the noise
Heard from the other. 
If you want the original source of that video, see https://youtu.be/83a7h3kkgPg before 1:28pm EDT (Youtube livestream with a 12-hour history).
Watching the video, you can see the lights go out on the ship a couple of minutes before the collision, at which point it turned. Lights started to come back on just before the collision. I didn’t see any unusual smoke, aside from the dust when it struck the support.
The ship had lost power and issued a mayday call about a minute before it struck the bridge. There were 20 construction workers on the bridge, repairing potholes. 12 of them managed to get off the bridge in that minute, and they were able to divert a few cars from driving onto the bridge, almost certainly saving the lives (and cars) of those people. 8 construction workers went into the water. 2 were pulled out. 1 had no injuries and the other was seriously injured. 
I’m not sure how many vehicles went into the water, but some. No word on rescuing any of the people in the vehicles.
Am familiar with marine cargo insurance but not familiar with “ship hitting a bridge” insurance but will be interesting to see the role of insurance in the cost of rebuilding the bridge.
“# Marine Mutual Britannia Confirms Insurance Role in Baltimore Bridge Ship Collision
A marine protection and indemnity insurer confirmed it is part of coverage for a container ship that hit a bridge in Baltimore, collapsing the bridge and causing unknown damage at this time”
Oh, and there were two Baltimore pilots on board (standard procedure) but when the ship lost power they were all helpless to prevent the crash. Pilots and crew were all fine.
Ship was built in 2015 and has been involved in another serious crash.
Pretty clearly the fault of the ship’s owners, I would think. I assume they’ll have to pay out policy limits. I’ve heard that the bridge itself was fine before the crash, but no bridge could possibly withstand that level of damage.
But what might have prevented it were barriers around the trusses so that a ship will crash into the barriers rather than a truss.
“…gave proof through the night, that our bridge was still there…”
“Um, Francis, look again.”
Apparently he penned the words to the national anthem about 150’ from where the bridge had stood.
Wow, that IS some coincidence!!
/s
On July 11, 2016 the same ship, Dali, hit a quay while leaving the port of Antwerp.
Probably an electric vehicle…
My interest was more what sort of policy limits such insurance might have? This bridge is going to cost a fortune to rebuild.
Canadian bridges in similar high traffic ship cargo lanes have rock islands built around the bridge supports to prevent collisions. Don’t know if the Baltimore bridge had such barriers or how effective they might have been against this ship.
Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure that out. One thing I’ve read is that some of the older ones might be insufficient to stop today’s container ships… which are much larger than ships of yesteryear.
Technically this would be marine P&I coverage vs any inland marine coverage on the bridge.
I saw a reference that such policies would typically max out at around $500M, but I have almost no experience with blue water ocean marine, so that’s outside my area of expertise.
Rebuilding the bridge will probably be in excess of $2b. I’m not certain whether it would have been insured on an ACV or RCV basis.
Just had a weird thought that selling insurance on a bridge is literally someone having a bridge to sell you
