Cargo ship initially lost power due to loose wire before crashing into Key Bridge: NTSB

ABC News ^ | November 19, 2025 | Ayesha Ali, Sam Sweeney, and Meredith Deliso

[Red Badger]

For want of a nail the shoe was lost...................

[Opinionated Blowhard]

One bad wire caused the entire ship to lose power? That boggles the mind.

[Cold Heart]

Same thing happens when a ship lost coffee.

[oil_dude]

How convenient.

[1Old Pro]

A label identifying what the wire powered prevented it from being fully inserted into the breaker, the agency found.

Quality is no longer even considered in manufacturing today. Speed to market and cost savings, it's all about profits and profits only.

[bigbob]

”Look for the union label”

[PGR88]

[ClearCase_guy]

Do I believe the story about the loose wire? I’m a frayed knot.

[montag813]

"Looks good enough....close the box and let's get going or we'll never make Macau by 3:00!"

[Red Badger]

[blackdog]

Advice from an industrial electrician......

When you want to cover up bad troubleshooting or bad operators, the finding offered to the management is always a loose wire. It cannot be refuted. Second place on hiding failures is the various assortment of blown fuses kept in the toolbox, where it is by slight of hand miraculously "discovered", while you fix the real problem.

Most modern controls systems today operate off of 24 volt wiring connected via ethernet signal, to a device specific controller that runs 460 volt AC servo drives, frequency drives, and hard contact motor starter relays. All it takes is an E-Stop bumped, a scan time error, or a button pushed at the wrong time, and it all shuts down.

There are no longer actual directly wired controls anymore. Everything operates with essentially phone calls at super high speeds in scan times. Every device shakes hands with every other related group device several hundred times a second. One hiccup in those handshakes not being sent or received within the prescribed milliseconds, and it all shuts down or pops up with errors which must be cleared with a laptop within the processors.

Not all technology advancements are the best for certain applications, but that's how we are rolling going into the future.

[Magnum44]

[z3n]

Everything operates with essentially phone calls at super high speeds in scan times." IT professionals will be the first ones to scold you not to operate mission critical systems this way. Hard wire everything (with redundancy where possible) and go solid state. Moving parts need maintenance and have unpredictable life spans

[No name given]

Quite.

[No name given]

Sadly.

[TangoLimaSierra]

That twit was the worst part of that movie.

[TexasGator]

“One bad wire caused the entire ship to lose power? That boggles the mind.”

Nope.

[Skwor]

We are supposed to believe that there is no backup. One wire took out every system, manual and backup to steer this ship, not plausible

[3RIVRS]

It absolutely does not. 22 years Navy. It really can and does happen.

[GingisK]

Suppose that one wire provided power to a controller, motor, or helm-to-rudder communications. Rudders are too big and require too much force to be positioned by muscle power..