NEW: Barge Hits Texas Bridge; Oil Spill in Progress

A barge slammed into a bridge pillar in Galveston, Texas, on Wednesday, spilling oil into surrounding waters and closing the only road to a smaller and separate island that is home to a university, officials said. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

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The bridge that leads to Pelican Island, north of Galveston, was struck by the barge around 9:50 a.m. when a tugboat backing out of Texas International Terminals, a fuel storage operator located next to the bridge, lost control of two barges it was pushing, said David Flores, a bridge superintendent with the Galveston County Navigation District.

“The current was very bad, and the tide was high. He lost it,” Flores said.

Ed Morrissey

There will be an impulse to connect this to what happened in Maryland, but these are almost certainly unrelated. This also looks more like negligence than malice, and the bridge's condition had already been rated as Poor. 

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