Right now, we are dealing with the horror of the lives lost when a huge ship crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, destroying it. But a secondary and lingering problem will be the disruption to shipping and travel on the East Coast.

The bridge, which is part of the Baltimore Beltway, spanned the Patapsco River, which is the entry point to the Baltimore Harbor. Thus, the harbor is closed, blocked by a collapsed bridge and sunken ship.

When will ships be allowed to enter and exit the harbor again? When will the bridge be rebuilt?

The biggest determinant here is how much the Biden administration and the administration of first-term Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), a neophyte to government, are willing to dodge and bulldoze over the countless regulatory delays that normally slow down things like building a bridge.

Labor and environmental rules famously make building anything super expensive and time-consuming in the United States.

Federal law requires an Environmental Impact Statement before construction can begin, and back in 2012, Brad Plumer of Wonkblog wrote “it takes more than eight” years just to complete the impact statement for large projects.

Now sometimes government agencies can act quickly. When the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed in 2007, it was rebuilt in a little over a year. A Democratic Congress voted that week to fund the rebuilding, and the George W. Bush administration and Minnesota officials all prioritized it.

Building the Key Bridge in the 1970s wasn’t easy. It opened 15 months behind schedule. The Baltimore Evening Sun cursed the bridge’s “inexplicable construction delates, mammoth cost overruns and financial intrigue, all reaching, typically, deep into the heart of the state’s rotten political core.”

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How rotten is our current government? How competent?

A final note, from a 1976 story about the bridge: The piers were protected by large bumpers called “dolphins.” Prior to opening the bridge, the Baltimore Sun reported: “If a ship wandered from the channel it would hit the dolphins before hitting the bridge piers and, it is hoped, bounce back into the channel in a manner of a pinball.”