The National Transportation Safety Board has put two of the most closely watched marine disasters of the decade into a single annual volume. The Safer Seas Digest 2025, released September 15, 2026, collects lessons from 49 marine investigations the agency completed in 2025, and it gives prominent space to the containership Dali’s strike on Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge and to the implosion of the Titan submersible. A third case, a ship fire at Port Newark, completes the featured set.
The digest is the board’s yearly attempt to turn dozens of separate accident reports into advice a mariner can use without reading any of them.
Three cases at the front of the volume
The NTSB’s press release names the featured investigations: the containership Dali’s contact with the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the hull failure and implosion of the Titan submersible, and the fire aboard the roll-on/roll-off container vessel Grande Costa D’Avorio. NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy wrote the foreword to the digest itself, and Maritime Executive quotes her expressing the hope that others “will apply the knowledge uncovered by” the board’s “world-renowned investigators” to “prevent future marine casualties and save lives.”
The digest introduces the Dali case as “a painful reminder” of the need to proactively safeguard vessel systems and marine infrastructure against risk. Its Titan entry says the 2023 hull failure and implosion, which “claimed the lives of all five people on board,” demonstrates the need to implement proactive safety measures. Both passages come from the digest’s own text. The pairing spans very different vessels: a 984-foot merchant ship in one case and a privately built submersible in the other, both cast by the digest as failures that safeguards were meant to prevent.
What the Key Bridge investigation concluded
The NTSB’s Dali investigation page dates the event to March 26, 2024. The 984-foot containership lost electrical power while leaving Baltimore Harbor, then lost propulsion and steering close to the bridge and struck Pier 17. The bridge collapsed, six highway workers died and one was seriously injured. The board’s stated probable cause is “a loss of electrical power (blackout), due to a loose signal wire connection to a terminal block stemming from the improper installation of wire-label banding, resulting in the vessel’s loss of propulsion and steering close to the bridge.”
The investigation issued 23 safety recommendations, four of them urgent, covering guidance for bridge owners on vessel collision risk, vulnerability assessments for 68 bridges nationwide, warning systems for motorists on threatened bridges and better voyage data recorders. The page lists damage to the vessel of more than $18 million. The contributing factors it names include the short time the crew had to recover propulsion and the absence of bridge vulnerability assessments and collapse countermeasures.
Titan and the Port Newark fire
Coverage in gCaptain says the NTSB found the submersible “failed to meet necessary strength and durability requirements because of shortcomings in the operator’s engineering process” and “was not adequately tested.” The Grande Costa D’Avorio fire in 2023 killed two firefighters and injured six responders, and the board concluded that “land-based firefighters lacked adequate procedures and training for responding to a vessel fire,” which produced 11 recommendations.
The board’s language on the ship fire points at shoreside responders rather than the crew, and the 11 recommendations followed from that finding. A vehicle fire aboard a carrier at a berth becomes a job for local departments, and the same Maritime Executive account says the board emphasized that local first responders need specialized shipboard firefighting training. The article also cites the digest’s mention of lithium-ion battery cargo fires among casualty types, a hazard that surfaces again in the list of priorities as the need for properly securing and monitoring lithium-ion batteries, and one that no single featured case fully captures.
Twelve priorities and the numbers behind them
The digest condenses the year into 12 areas for maritime stakeholders: performing maintenance effectively, effective voyage planning and management, detecting and containing vessel fires, assessing waterfront infrastructure condition, ensuring watertight integrity, accounting for bank effect, combating fatigue and distraction, properly securing lithium-ion batteries, mitigating electrical power loss risks, emergency planning and training, operating in strong currents or heavy weather, and operating equipment as designed.
The digest organizes its 49 cases across nine casualty types, and the counts show where the year’s losses concentrated. Fixed-object strikes, the category that includes the Key Bridge, are the largest group by a clear margin. Of the 49 investigations, 16 involved a vessel striking a fixed object, 11 were fires or explosions, seven were groundings, five were collisions and five were flooding or hull failures, with the remaining five spread among capsizing, machinery damage, cargo damage and other categories. Whether the volume changes how operators handle battery storage or bridge approaches will show up first in the board’s next round of recommendation reviews.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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