As the spring tide rolled out of Baltimore Harbor just after midnight Tuesday, the hulking silhouettes of a cargo ship nearly three football fields long and full of 1000’s of containers cut through the icy waters toward the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Dali’s ship was half an hour into its 27-day voyage from Baltimore to Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Then the lights on Dali went out. The crew urgently reported to local authorities that that they had lost power and propulsion. The ship crashed onto the bridge.
In a scene captured by a live camera, the ship struck a bridge pillar with such force that the bridge’s massive southern and middle spans collapsed inside seconds.
A highway repair crew was on site, working the night shift and filling potholes. At least eight members of the development crew plunged into the 50-foot-deep Patapsco River below.
Six people were presumed dead as authorities suspended search and rescue operations on Tuesday evening.
“Given the time we have spent on this search, the extensive search effort we have put into it, and the water temperature, we do not believe at this time that we will be able to find any of these people still alive. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said.
Two construction workers were rescued from the water; one was hospitalized and later released.
The shocking collapse of the 2.6-kilometer bridge, remembered by countless people who watched video of the ship crashing into the bridge, was described by officials as an accident.
“We have seen no credible evidence of a terrorist attack,” said Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, who praised the work of quickly acting officials who rushed to stop traffic from entering the doomed bridge, mitigating what could have been far more severe impacts. deadly disaster.
President Biden announced the closure of the Port of Baltimore for an indefinite period. Although it ranked only 17th overall in the country in 2021, it specializes in vehicles – the port ranks first in the United States in the number of passenger cars and light trucks moved – and experts say its closure could impact shipments, including agricultural goods and construction machinery.
Globally, Baltimore was listed as a destination for about 40 ships on Tuesday, including 34 cargo ships, including 10 commercial vessels with anchors dropped in nearby waters, according to MarineTraffic, a maritime data platform that tracks ships.
The Key Bridge, which experts said would take years to replace, was a major north-south artery, and its collapse destroyed the roadway that tens of thousands of people used to travel to and from Baltimore every day. According to the bridge’s data, over 12.4 million commercial and passenger vehicles passed through it in 2023 Maryland State Government Report released last November.
President Biden called the bridge “one of the most important elements” supporting the U.S. economy in the Northeast and expressed hope that the federal government would cover the “entire cost” of repairing the bridge.
Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the agency will lead an investigation into what caused the bridge collapse.
A construction company employee who worked alongside the six men who were pronounced dead said many of his co-workers were migrants working to support their relatives.
“We are low-income families,” said employee Jesus Campos. “Our relatives are waiting for our help in our homelands.”
Divers are expected to return to the water Wednesday morning to attempt to get well the bodies.
The collapse of the bridge, which opened in 1977 and was named after Francis Scott Key, the Maryland-born creator of the U.S. national anthem, has raised questions on what caused the ship to lose power at a critical moment, procedures for diverting bulk ships from the port and whether the bridge’s design increased its susceptibility to collapse.
Late Tuesday, details concerning the moments leading as much as the crash were released.
A port pilot and a trainee were on board when the ship departed the Port of Baltimore, said Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots Association. He said a gaggle of Maryland pilots told him the ship had suffered a “total blackout” minutes before the crash and never regained propulsive power.
Mr. Diamond said the pilot accountable for the ship, who had greater than 10 years of experience, ordered the ship to be turned all of the solution to the left and to drop anchor on the port side, which proved ineffective. efforts to stop the ship from drifting towards the bridge.
Experts debated the navigational details of the ship’s departure. The Dali was leaving port in the course of the spring tide. The moon was still almost full, having reached fullness lower than 24 hours earlier.
Full moons in spring are related to a few of the best tidal changes in local sea levels. And although Baltimore Harbor changes quite little even during spring tides in the course of the full moon, tidal movements of the water could have had an impact on the impact of the bridge.
“The outgoing tide increases the speed of the water towards the sea, which actually has a cumulative effect on the speed of the ship leaving, and any currents in the water can also make navigation difficult,” said Basil M. Karatzas, chief executive of Karatzas Marine Advisors, a ship inspection firm in New York.
According to an announcement by its owner, Grace Ocean Investment, Dali, which sailed under the Singapore flag, had two pilots on board – local specialists who guide ships to and from ports. An announcement issued by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore said no injuries were reported to either the port pilots or the opposite 22 crew members on board.
Before embarking on his journey, Dali returned to the United States from Panama on March 19, stopping in New York. It then arrived in Baltimore on Saturday, where it spent two days in port.
Shipping giant Maersk said in an announcement on Tuesday that it had chartered a vessel carrying Maersk’s cargo.
Dali was in-built 2015 by the South Korean company Hyundai Heavy Industries. The following 12 months the ship was involved in a minor incident when hit a stone wall within the port of Antwerp. Dali then suffered damage, but nobody was injured.
Last 12 months’s Dali inspection at a port in Chile found a fault related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery.” An inspection on June 27 within the port of San Antonio found that the fault involved pressure gauges and thermometers. It is unclear whether the issues have been resolved or whether or not they played any role within the accident.
According to a database maintained by Equasis, Dali has undergone 27 inspections since 2015.
Although the Francis Scott Key collapse was some of the dramatic bridge disasters in U.S. history, it was not the deadliest.
In 1993, a towboat struck a railroad bridge in Alabama on a foggy September morning and knocked the railroad tracks out of alignment on the Big Bayou Canot Bridge. Minutes later, an Amtrak passenger train derailed within the water, killing 47 people.
In May 1980, the Sunshine Skyway near St. Petersburg, Florida was opened hit by a phosphate freighter during a storm, causing a 300-meter-long steel section to collapse and a Greyhound bus, at the least five passenger cars and a pickup truck to fall 54 meters into the water. Thirty-five people died.
Engineers who viewed footage of the bridge collapse on Tuesday wondered whether an entire collapse might have been avoided if the pylons had been equipped with locking devices called bumpers.
They said they weren’t surprised the structure collapsed so quickly.
Sanjay R. Arwade, a civil engineering professor on the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that if the ship had knocked out one in all the bridge’s supporting piers, because it seemed, a collapse would have been almost inevitable.
“For a long-span bridge,” he said, “the complete loss of one of the piers will be catastrophic.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, speaking at a news conference near the scene, called the bridge “one of the cathedrals of American infrastructure.”
He described the autumn as an “exceptional circumstance.”
“I don’t know of a bridge that was built to withstand a direct hit from a ship of this size,” he said.
The report was contributed by, amongst others: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Keith Bradsher, Michael D. Shear, Katie Rogers, Mike Baker, Patricia Mazzei AND Peter Eavis.
