Vancouver rail bridge malfunction traps 13 cargo vessels
Second Narrows lift span failure halts marine transits in Burrard Inlet, A single mechanism stalls a port network
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globalnews.ca
globalnews.ca
globalnews.ca
An ageing rail bridge in Metro Vancouver malfunctioned over the weekend, preventing its centre span from lifting and trapping 13 deep-sea cargo vessels in Burrard Inlet. Global News reported that the Second Narrows Rail Bridge normally opens several times a day to let tankers and other commercial ships reach terminals including Parkland, the Trans Mountain Westridge Marine Terminal and the Pacific Coast Terminal in Port Moody. The Port of Vancouver said Canadian National Railway was repairing the bridge, with work expected to finish on Wednesday.
The episode shows how “critical infrastructure” often reduces to a single moving part with outsized economic leverage. A lift span is not a distributed system: when it fails, the alternative is waiting. For marine traffic, that means vessels that cannot transit; for terminals, it means delayed loading and unloading windows; and for downstream supply chains, it means schedule knock-on effects that are hard to price until they hit inventories. Ports can add cranes and yard capacity, but they cannot route around a stuck chokepoint without another navigable passage.
Global News said rail service to the North Shore was largely unaffected, but the bridge’s dual role—rail crossing plus marine gate—creates a split set of priorities. A repair that keeps trains moving may still leave the lift mechanism offline, because the lift is a specialised subsystem with its own maintenance needs and failure modes. That is a familiar pattern in infrastructure networks: the part that breaks is often the part used intermittently, inspected less often, and funded last because it is not the daily bottleneck—until it becomes one.
The Port of Vancouver statement also underscores the governance reality: the port manages marine coordination, but the bridge is operated and repaired by a railway. When the asset fails, accountability is contractual and operational rather than unified, and users—shipping lines and terminal operators—have limited direct control over repair speed.
The port said vessels requiring a bridge lift could not transit until lifting operations resumed. CN was carrying out repairs and expected to complete work by Wednesday.