Local media outlet Capital Gazette said a “possible chemical agent” and fireworks were released during the Baltimore Pride parade around 830 pm local time.

Baltimore Police has yet to confirm the type of chemical agent that was released. The combination of the chemical agent and fireworks caused the large crowd to panic, scattering in different directions and resulting in several injuries.

“Our officers are diligently reviewing the surveillance video to gather all the necessary information and determine the sequence of events,” said a Baltimore Police public information officer, Freddie Talbert.

Here’s a video of the chaos.

The release of a chemical agent at Baltimore Pride caused a stampede. Several people are injured. pic.twitter.com/hKzZZz7Kj4

— Catch Up Bites (@catchupbites) June 16, 2024

In mid-May, the State Department renewed a global security warning for Americans overseas, adding LGBTQ folks face an “increased potential for foreign terrorist organization-inspired violence.”

Domestically, FBI Director Chris Wray warned of the threat of a ‘coordinated attack’ in the US thanks to President Biden’s disastrous open southern borders.

The Baltimore Bridge was struck by a container ship navigating the Patapsco River out of the Port of Baltimore in late March, sending several cars and workers into the water and rendering the passageway unusable. It is unknown exactly how long the bridge could take to rebuild, as officials could expedite the process, but experts warned the DCNF that government red tape, such as environmental reviews filed by government entities or environmental activists, could slow down its construction after debris is cleared from the site and new plans for a replacement bridge are drawn up. +

“If the bridge gets special regulatory treatment, then five years is a reasonable timeline,” Ryan Young, senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “There is some hope for this, based on last year’s collapse of a stretch of I-95 near Philadelphia. It reopened in 12 days, mostly thanks to red tape being waived. It would have taken months otherwise. Of course, that was a much smaller project.”

Following the disaster, the Biden administration announced that it would be sending $60 million to the city of Baltimore to assist in the clean-up and rebuilding, far from the sum needed to rebuild the project fully. President Joe Biden has also pledged to completely cover the cost of reconstructing the bridge, pending Congressional approval, according to Reuters.

An official cost of a new bridge has yet to be announced, but some estimates are around $500 million up to $1 billion, depending on the size and design of the project, according to the AP. The original bridge cost just $60.3 million to build, according to CNN.

“The Key Bridge recovery can take multiple paths, but the two we need to be keeping an eye on are first, where is the red tape around environmental historical preservation bogging down the efforts to help this community recover, and second, what coordination is occurring at the federal level to effect a more resilient recovery for the community, who’s looking at what the vision is, long term,” Brian Cavanaugh, visiting fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF.

A similar bridge disaster occurred in 1980, when a freighter struck the Sunshine Skyway in Tampa Bay, Florida, according to The Associated Press. Construction on a new bridge finished 7 years later, in 1987, 19 months later than it was originally projected to be complete and $20 million over budget.

“Federal and state regulations, including in Maryland, give NIMBYs and environmentalists a lot of ways to block projects,” Young told the DCNF. “Hopefully the Key Bridge’s high visibility will help them restrain their worst anti-development impulses, but that is no guarantee.”

Many large infrastructure projects are often bogged down by environmental reviews, such as California’s high-speed rail project, which has spent more than $600 million on environmental reviews since it was approved by voters more than 15 years ago.

“My fear here is that people can generate environmental reviews that they flag concerns for, say the oyster population or if there’s a bird that breeds in the Patapsco River or water quality,” Cavanaugh told the DCNF. “All these things could easily be triggered through a federal review process and would drag on. Those reviews are not always efficient. The efficacy of those is to be determined by others, but they’re certainly not expedited.”

The Biden administration has expanded the national environmental review framework, rolling back changes that the Trump administration made to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to review the environmental impacts of projects before approval. If the federal government remains involved in the project, environmental reviews may bog down the process, as the average NEPA environmental impact statement between 2010 and 2018 took 4.5 years to complete, halting construction completely, according to the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality.

“The rebuilding cost will almost certainly be higher than the original bridge, for several reasons, though I have no idea by how much,” Young told the DCNF. “A good rule of thumb is Edwards’ law—costs are usually at least double what officials first propose.”

Some analysts say that after cleaning up the site, creating new plans and building the bridge, the whole process could take up to a decade, according to WYPR, an outlet local to Baltimore. It took six years to build the Transcontinental Railroad.

“I fear that the cost of regulations is going to be more impactful than people are giving it credit for,” Cavanaugh told the DCNF. “Depending on what design they go with, like what birds fly in the area or what fish are in the Patapsco River, the cost of studying that and mitigating the negative impacts would be a problem. The mitigation measures to make the bridge more resilient and safe are going to be an added cost. But that’s an added cost not captured by inflation for any bridge built today.”

The Maryland Governor’s Office deferred the DCNF to statements made in previous press conferences. The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

Hopefully that is true.  But no matter how it was caused, this tragedy is going to have an enormous impact on U.S. supply chains.  And of course this comes at a really bad time, because Houthi missile strikes in the Red Sea and low water levels in the Panama Canal have been putting a tremendous amount of strain on global supply chains recently.

According to Bloomberg, it appears that the Port of Baltimore will be “out of commission indefinitely”…

The Port of Baltimore — the biggest handler of US imports and exports of cars and light trucks — looks to be out of commission indefinitely. The resulting bottleneck could accelerate a shift of goods through West Coast ports. Another crucial question: Which other ports have spare capacity to handle the Ro-Ro vessels that carry automobiles if Baltimore is closed for an extended period.

This is a really big deal, because over 750,000 vehicles came through that port last year alone…

The port is the busiest in the U.S. for car shipments, handling more than 750,000 vehicles in 2023, according to data from the Maryland Port Administration. It is also the largest U.S. port by volume for handling farm and construction machinery, as well as agricultural products.

In addition, a whole host of prominent retailers are very dependent on the Port of Baltimore…

Retailers like Home Depot, Bob’s Furniture, IKEA, and Amazon are just some of the companies that use the port to import goods. Other top imports include sugar and gypsum.

“This will have an impact for trade all along the East Coast and it will continue until we know how quickly” the port can reopen, said Richard Meade, editor-in-chief of the shipping journal Lloyd’s List.

Vessels were already being diverted to New York and down to Virginia on Tuesday, said Meade. “There will be dozens of diversions in the next week and hundreds in the coming months as long as Baltimore is shut down.”

This isn’t the end of the world, and shipments can certainly be diverted to other ports.

But we are talking about the 11th largest port in the entire nation, and so this will definitely be a serious blow…

More than 52 million tons of foreign cargo, worth some $80 billion were transported out of the port last year, according to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore. The 11th largest port in the nation, Baltimore served an average of 207 calls a month last year, according to the shipping journal Lloyd’s List.

In addition, it is going to take a very long time for the Francis Scott Key Bridge to be rebuilt. As Lara Logan has pointed out, that section of I-695 was the “second busiest strategic roadway in the nation for hazardous material”…

Second busiest strategic roadway in the nation for hazardous material now down for 4-5 years – which is how long they say it will take to recover. Bridge was built specifically to move hazardous material – fuel, diesel, propane gas, nitrogen, highly flammable materials, chemicals and oversized cargo that cannot fit in the tunnels – that supply chain now crippled.

One expert is projecting that it will take more than two years to rebuild the bridge…

While trade is nimble and will reroute, over the long term the bridge will need to be fundamentally engineered and rebuilt, and that will take years.

“It will be in excess of two years,” said Meade, of Lloyd’s List. “There will be significant disruption and cost to this infrastructure project. In 1977, the bridge cost $60 million. Take in inflation and the rapid pace to redesign and build will increase procurement premiums. This will be a very expensive project.”

I would be shocked if it happens that quickly.

We shall see.

In any event, we are talking about a multi-faceted crisis that is going to be affecting U.S. supply chains for the foreseeable future.

At a press conference following the collapse of the bridge, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg openly admitted that we are looking at a “major and protracted impact on supply chains”…

“There is no question this will be a major and protracted impact on supply chains,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said during a Tuesday afternoon press conference in Baltimore.

I think that this is the first time I have ever agreed with Pete Buttigieg on anything.

Sadly, this is just the beginning. In the months ahead, U.S. supply chains will be hit with additional challenges. So if there are things that you are planning to purchase, I would do that now.

Before I end this article, there is one more thing that I wanted to mention. Global supplies of cocoa just keep getting tighter and tighter, and on Tuesday the price of cocoa jumped above $10,000 per metric ton for the first time ever…

Cocoa prices hit a record Tuesday as supply constraints fuel prices higher.

Futures for May delivery were up 3.9% at $10,030 per metric ton, marking the first time the commodity breaks above the $10,000 mark. Cocoa has been on a tear this year, soaring nearly 138%.

Difficult weather conditions and disease have affected production in West Africa, which produces about 70% of the world’s cocoa. The two largest producers, Ivory Coast and Ghana, have been hit by a combination of heavy rain, dry heat and disease recently.

In January, it was less than half that price.

If you love chocolate, stock up on it while you still can. Of course the same thing could be said about countless other things.

Do you remember the supply chain problems that we experienced a couple of years ago? Well, what is eventually coming is going to absolutely dwarf that. Many are using the term “black swan event” to describe the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, but the truth is that we are moving into a time when there will be one “black swan event” after another.

So get prepared while there is still an opportunity to do so, because the months and years ahead of us are going to be extremely chaotic.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

https://twitter.com/rawsalerts/status/1772514786338619487

Here’s another view of the container ship strike.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland which crosses the Patapsco River has reportedly Collapsed within the last few minutes after being Struck by a Large Container Ship; a Mass Casualty Incident has been Declared with over a Dozen Cars and many Individuals said to… pic.twitter.com/SsPMU8Mjph

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 26, 2024

Looks like a warzone.

According to the ship tracking website MarineTraffic, the Singapore-flagged cargo ship “Dali” slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge around 0130 ET.

#MarineTraffic playback showing #Dali, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, colliding with Francis Scott Key Bridge in #Baltimore. En route to Colombo, Sri Lanka, it crashed at 1:30am. Follow rescue efforts on MarineTraffic and find out more about the vessel: https://t.co/5eiDnqpm2w pic.twitter.com/fykx9cWUF3

— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) March 26, 2024

The bridge spans the Patapsco River and carries an estimated 11.5 million vehicles annually. This collapse means a major shipping lane in and out of the Port of Baltimore City has been severed.

Baltimore is the most inland port on the East Coast and is interconnected to the I-95 highway network. With no commercial vessels sailing in and out of port anytime soon, this is catastrophic for port operations and could spark major supply chain snarls in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

The bridge collapse has severed major marine terminals. It’s unknown when operations will be restored.

Last year, according to the Maryland government’s website, the Port of Baltimore managed over 52 million tons of international cargo valued at more than $80 billion, ranking it as the ninth busiest port in the United States.

The port supports 15,330 direct jobs and 139,180 jobs in Maryland, according to the Maryland government’s website.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s office posted on X:

“I’m aware of and en route to the incident at the Key Bridge. I have been in contact with Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace, Gov. Wes Moore (and the county executives of Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties). Emergency personnel are on scene, and efforts are underway.”

*Developing…