Philly's Tacony-Palmyra Bridge shuts down after cargo ship strike

The incident took place at around 1:15 pm on Thursday, when the bridge connecting Burlington County, NJ to Philadelphia was opened for ships to pass through, the Delaware Bay Coast Guard said.

Two lanes of the bridge’s three lanes, one in each direction, were reopened to traffic at around 8:40 pm, while one lane remained closed due to repairs to the pedestrian sidewalk, per CBS Philadelphia.

The pedestrian crossing and one of the lanes remained closed as of Friday morning, per ABC 6. No injuries have been reported, and officials say the cause of the collision is under investigation. Crews remained on site for hours to conduct repairs and mechanical tests to make sure the bridge was safe to reopen.

One man who was fishing at the Frankford boat lauch said he witnessed the incident. “I'm almost positive I seen the back end hit that thing, and then all of a sudden the bridge ain't closing.”

Rebecca Halper said her two-hour commute home to Northeast Philadelphia turned into a five-hour one due to the bridge’s closure. “It was unbelievable. By the time we got there, there were so many cars behind us. It was really a lot of traffic.”

Per ABC News, the Tacony-Palmyra bridge, which opened in 1929, was found to be in “fair” condition in the Federal Highway Administration’s 2026 National Bridge Inventory Federal Highway Administration’s 2026 National Bridge Inventory. The deck of the bridge was rated as being in good condition, and the substructure and superstructure, the latter of which absorbs the live traffic load, as being in fair condition. 2025 estimates showed that the bridge carried as many as 76,200 vehicles per day.

In March of 2024, a cargo ship, the Singaporean-flagged Dali, struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore as it was leaving the harbor. While leaving port, the ship lost power twice, and it struck a support pillar holding up the bridge. a major portion of the bridge collapsed, killing six construction workers.