After a cargo ship took out the Key Bridge, it wasn’t long before Johns Hopkins engineering professor Michael Shields and his colleagues started crunching numbers. “A colleague of mine, Ben Schafer, a co-investigator on this project, sent me an email and said, ‘What do you think the actual probability of an event like this happening was?” Shields, an associate professor of civil & systems engineering, recalled. “And I did a quick, back of the envelope calculation and I came to the conclusion that it was probably a higher-probability event than we would’ve hoped for.” How much higher? Shields explains that the “target risk” set by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials is “exceptionally low,’ - once every 10,000 years. “So when we say it’s higher risk, we say it’s not ‘exceptionally low.’ It’s still low; the probability of any given bridge collapsing on a given day is still very low. It’s just not as low as we want it to be.” Click the link in our bio...