By State › Maryland

Maryland: Overview

Download all of Maryland as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Maryland exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Maryland go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The Key Bridge collapse: a hazard mechanism new to this site

At 1:25 AM on March 26, 2024, the container ship Dali lost electrical power twice within seconds of each other while leaving Baltimore Harbor, and struck a support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge’s central span collapsed almost immediately, killing 6 construction workers who were on it at the time. This is a genuinely different infrastructure failure than any covered elsewhere on this site, not an internal system failure like Michigan’s dam collapses or Ohio’s derailment, but a catastrophic external strike against critical infrastructure, and a reminder that bridges and similar structures carry a specific collision risk that most household preparedness planning doesn’t normally consider. See the Risks page for the full data.

The Chesapeake Bay: land that’s actually disappearing

Maryland’s other defining risk isn’t a single event, it’s an ongoing loss of land itself. More than 500 islands have already vanished from the Chesapeake Bay, Holland Island’s last standing house collapsed into the water in 2010, and Smith Island has lost roughly 3,300 of its original acres over the past 150 years, with only about 900 acres still habitable. Sea level in the Bay is rising at roughly twice the global average rate. This is a genuinely different framing from the sea-level-rise coverage on Florida’s, Virginia’s, and New York’s pages, those focus on flood-day increases and infrastructure risk; Maryland’s Chesapeake communities are losing the land itself.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Maryland: households near major shipping channels and critical bridges should be aware that infrastructure collapse from a vessel strike, while rare, is a real category of disaster with almost no warning time, and residents of Chesapeake Bay island and shoreline communities face a genuinely different kind of long-term planning question than storm preparedness alone, whether the land itself will still be habitable within a normal planning horizon.

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