A problem with a disaster, like the ship hitting the bridge in Baltimore, is that it upsets supply chains.
Supply chains are the links from sources of resources, through manufacturers, warehouses, and retailers, through to final consumers. These are like trees with many branches: literally thousands of branches for most of the products you buy.
A disruption at any point in that supply chain can have effects both downstream (all the way to consumers) and upstream (all the way to resource extractors).
Recall that during the early part of CoVid/lockdowns that the store shelves were empty? Recall that about 18 months after that (in late 2021) we had additional problems with getting stuff on shelves. Those are the visible effects of supply chain disruptions.
The closing of the port of Baltimore won't create huge disruptions, since it's not a really major port. But it will create some.
Interestingly, the biggest disruption is probably going to be to cars imported from Europe for sale in the northeast. Almost all of those come through Baltimore. Why is that? Because what's called a roll-on-roll-off ship carries about 5,000 cars (for perspective, the SUU campus has about 4,000 parking spots, but they're never all full at the same time). They all arrive at the same time, and the port that they all go to is the one that already has big parking lots built, for the cars to be unloaded into. Then they all get trucked out, to create room for the next ship's cargo. There's really just one of those on the east coast: Baltimore.
The other thing that will be affected is coal mines in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. Students tend not to know this, but most coal burned in the U.S. is hard, and relatively clean, and comes from strip mines in Wyoming. The softer, dirtier coal, from tunnel mines that we all have in our imagination isn't used much anymore. It's mostly found in the Appalachian mountains, and exported to places like India. And most of it goes through ... Baltimore.
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