EMERGENCY workers hope to rescue the bodies of four victims in the massive clean-up effort for the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.
Dramatic footage of the 1.6 mile bridge snapping and crumbling into Baltimore waters as it was hit by the container vessel Dali was caught on video around 1:30 am on Tuesday.
Six people who had been working on the bridge were killed in the collapse and four of them were pinned under thousands of tons of concrete and steel.
Now five days after the devastating break, emergency teams have gathered the personnel and equipment necessary to start the Herculean task of clearing the Port of Baltimore and retrieving the remaining bodies.
“At this time, pieces of the bridge trusses have started being cut and removed,” US Coast Guard spokesperson Petty Officer Kimberly Reaves said Sunday.
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“The top part of a northern section of the bridge has been removed.”
The boat weighed 213 million pounds before the collision.
“We have a ship that is nearly the size of the Eiffel Tower that is now stuck within the channel that has the Key Bridge sitting on top of it,” Maryland Governor Wes Moore said on CNN.
But the removal is dangerous for divers and other emergency workers who must make complicated calculations estimating the movement and placement of the giant hulks underwater.
Because of the difficulty of the task, officials cannot put a timeline on when the clean-up will be completed or the port will be back open for business, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said.
A 1,000 ton capacity lift crane and 600-ton capacity crane have been brought in for the job, he added.
“This is going to be a very complex process,” he said.
“There are, even now, forces acting on that steel, so it takes a lot to make sure that it can be dismantled safely, to make sure that the vessel stays where it is supposed to be and doesn’t swing out into the channel."
Clean-up teams are using sonar and other underwater technology to map the placement of the debris and figure out how to lift each piece, one at a time, US Army Corps of Engineers Commander and District Engineer Estee Pinchasin told CNN.
“We are not just looking at how we’re going to engineer this,” he said.
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“We’re scanning to make sure that if we identify any vehicles or any of the fallen, that we are able to react.”
Ideally, he said, the workers will be able to open a small channel for the recovery of the four missing bodies and eventually allow for larger vehicles to enter and begin to remove bigger debris.
A NATIONAL ECONOMIC CRISIS
The Port of Baltimore is one of the top 20 most important ports in the country by tonnage and number of containers handled, according to the US Bureau of Transportation.
In 2023, the Francis Scott Key Bridge transported 12.5 million vehicles, or about 34,000 vehicles, every day.
This is a national economic catastrophe as well.
Wes Moore
Thousands of dockworkers depend on the port along with tens of thousands of other workers in related industries.
“People have to remember this is not a Baltimore catastrophe, not a Maryland catastrophe,” Moore said Sunday.
“This is a national economic catastrophe as well.”
Removing the first debris is just the beginning of what will be a long process, Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath of the US Coast Guard said at a press conference on Saturday
The port “handles more cars and more farm equipment more than any other port inside this country... and at least 8,000 workers on the docks have jobs that have been directly affected” by the collapse, he said.
“If we can open up another (channel) that will help the economy here and move traffic in and out of the port of Baltimore, even if it’s not the deep draft, we wanna take advantage of that opportunity."
“I can tell you the original bridge took about five years to build, but that doesn’t necessarily inform us about the timeline of the reconstruction,” Gilreath added.
“We don’t fully know everything we need to know about the condition of the portions of the bridge that did not collapse.”
