Giant Crane Heads to Baltimore to Aid Recovery

The inspection, conducted at the port of San Antonio in Chile on June 27, found that the vessel had a deficiency related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery.” It also specified that the problem concerned gauges and thermometers, according to entries in a database for the international port inspection regime to which Chile belongs.

International maritime regulators try to highlight ships that regularly show deficiencies during inspections and the countries that register them. The Dali sails under a Singapore flag, meaning it is registered in the country. Vessels with a Singapore flag score very well on a ranking that evaluates inspections, coming near the top of a “white list” of countries whose ships show little cause for concern.

The Dali was inspected again in September in New York by the U.S. Coast Guard, which found no deficiencies. The Coast Guard did not respond to questions on the inspection.

“It’s my sincere hope that today, opening day, will be a moment where we can all come together and have a moment of joy in a dark week,” Mike Arougheti, who is part of the ownership group, said at a news conference before the game that was broadcast on MASN, a regional sports network in Baltimore and Washington.

An expected sellout crowd bundled up in Orioles black and orange under gray skies and low 50-degree weather. A lengthy pregame ceremony concluded with a moment of silence for the victims of the collapse, and the Morgan State University Choir gave a rousing rendition of the national anthem, which was written by Key.

A few minutes later, the Orioles’ new ace pitcher, Corbin Burnes, fired a fastball for a called strike, and the season was underway.

During the middle of the third inning, three police officers were identified and hailed for saving lives by shutting down the bridge in the moments before it was struck: Sgt. Paul Pastorek, Cpl. Jeremy Herbert and Officer Garry Kirts, all with the Maryland Transportation Authority Police.

In a statement, Gov. Wes Moore called them Maryland heroes. “Their courage, bravery, and quick thinking saved lives,” he said. “When duty called, they answered.”

Even so, Mr. Baltus said it will be inconvenient — and possibly costly — to reroute shipments of seafood, including the more than five truckloads a day of blue crab that are flown or driven in from other states for restaurants to serve during Maryland’s off-season.

“This is a crab-eating state,” he said.

Maryland’s blue crab season opens Monday and runs through Dec. 15. Summer is the peak time for locals to enjoy the crab, the official state crustacean, whether steamed by the bushel or shaped into crab cakes. Supplies of blue crab experienced a shortage in 2021, as more people began eating at restaurants after the initial shock of the coronavirus pandemic and prices rose substantially.

Kim Gardner, the general manager of L.P. Steamers in Baltimore’s Locust Point neighborhood, upriver from the crash site, said that much of the restaurant’s blue crab is flown in from Louisiana or Texas during the off-season. Even though Maryland’s crab season begins in a few days, she said, locally caught crabs “aren’t that great until the weather warms up.”

The job of clearing the wreckage in Baltimore, however, is more complicated than the one he faced — mainly because the Dali, the 95,000-ton container ship that crashed Tuesday, remains stuck in place near the former bridge’s center span.

The complex operation, Captain Shultz said, will have to take into account the desires of various interest groups that may be in competition with one another for recovering the remains of people killed at the site; preserving evidence that might be needed for law enforcement; freeing the ship; and clearing enough debris to allow cargo vessels to once again move in and out of Baltimore’s port.

Throughout the entire operation, inclement weather, like storms causing tidal surges, could also scramble plans.

In terms of scale, the 1,900-foot-long bridge in Minnesota is dwarfed by the 1.6-mile-long span in Baltimore. Both incidents sent large slabs of concrete into the water, which posed deadly hazards to any divers who approach looking for the remains of victims. While divers might be able to squeeze themselves between some pieces of concrete as they push deeper into the wreckage, Captain Shultz said, moving currents can cause them to shift — potentially closing avenues of escape.

On Tuesday evening, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it began providing remotely controlled underwater vehicles to survey the wreckage along with structural engineers who can help interpret the data the small underwater robots collect.

A Navy official said Thursday that some of its most senior diving and salvage experts were already dispatched to Baltimore.

The job of freeing a 985-foot-long ship pinned down by parts of the bridge, Captain Shultz said, will likely require some brute force.

“Whether they cut it, or just literally pull that ship out from underneath that ribbon of metal — is it going to damage the ship? You bet. There is no softly-softly approach to dealing with a bridge that collapsed,” he said. “It just doesn’t exist.”

The military divers he worked with are trained to use hydraulic cutting equipment and torches to cut sections of the wreckage into smaller pieces that cranes can lift out of the water or simply move away from the channel. They could also use special explosive charges that can cut through multiple steel girders simultaneously.

“You can remove or flatten the wreckage enough to open even a single lane of traffic for ships in the channel, as long as someone tells the team how much water they need to maneuver in,” Captain Shultz said. In that kind of situation, the Coast Guard could reopen the port for commercial traffic while salvage operations continue.

He found fellow Guatemalans along with Mexicans and others who had left their countries with similar aspirations. He and his wife settled in a house with a porch, his brother Jovani said. The couple had two children, and Jose López often picked them up from school.

About two years ago, he took a new job, working late nights for a contractor repairing roads on Maryland bridges.

He didn’t mind the arduous hours because he viewed his purpose in life as providing food and shelter for his family, Mr. López’s older brother said.

Early Tuesday morning, a friend of both brothers called Jovani López with harrowing news. A ship struck a bridge that Jose López had been working on, causing it to collapse and sending six workers, including Mr. Lopez, into the Patapsco River. Hours later, Jovani López learned that they were dead.

“He was there to work,” Jovani López said on Thursday outside of the family’s home, where relatives embraced and cried. “Who could’ve ever imagined this?”

That question has echoed across Baltimore’s Hispanic community, as it mourns the six workers.

Five of them have been identified by the authorities, relatives or advocacy organizations: Mr. López, who was in his 30s; Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, also of Baltimore; Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Dundalk, Md.; Miguel Luna, who was in his 40s and from El Salvador; and Maynor Yasir Suazo Sandoval, who was in his 30s and from Honduras. The authorities have said there are six victims.

They were men who had gone to work on a bridge late into the night, in cold temperatures, to ensure that thousands of other Marylanders could use the Francis Scott Key Bridge to make it to their own jobs.

“And they never came home,” said Lucía Islas, a community leader and president of Comité Latino de Baltimore, a nonprofit that assists the Hispanic community. Ms. Islas and other Latino community leaders have hosted meetings this week to highlight how immigrants often do the difficult and dangerous jobs that others do not want to do, such as roofing and road maintenance.

Last year, six highway workers, including two brothers from El Salvador and a father and son, were killed on a busy highway outside Baltimore when they were struck by a car that plowed into their work zone.

The dramatic ship crash, collapse of the bridge and the frantic search for survivors have captured the attention of the city and the country, but the disaster has cast a particular pall over the growing Hispanic community in and around Baltimore. From Dominican barbershops and Mexican taquerias to markets stocked with mango and tamarind candy, communities such as Highlandtown, Dundalk and Glen Burnie have been transformed by waves of immigrants from Latin America.

Zeke Cohen, a Baltimore City Council member whose district includes Highlandtown, said that the city had benefited by embracing its immigrants. He credited them for starting businesses, lowering vacancies in the housing market and reversing the blight that had marked some neighborhoods.

“It’s a blessing.”

Even as they are grateful for the support and concern, friends and family members of the victims said they were preoccupied with unanswered questions, none more painful than whether more could have been done to save the men.

Donna Batkis, a clinical social worker in Baltimore who has been helping the victims’ families, said in an interview that they were in shock.

The bodies of Mr. Fuentes and Mr. Cabrera were recovered on Wednesday, the authorities said. But the families of the four men whose bodies have not been recovered have described being in a “purgatory of grief” because they can’t plan a funeral, Ms. Batkis said.

They have repeated two questions in recent days, Ms. Batkis said: “Where’s my loved one? And what’s next?”

“Waiting is a very hard space to be in,” she said. And the family members’ anxiety is compounded by the fact that many of them don’t speak fluent English, and some of them are not legal residents, according to Latino community leaders.

Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland and other top officials have voiced support and concern for the families of the men who were killed. On Wednesday, Tom Perez, a senior adviser to President Biden and a former Maryland labor secretary, met with families, Ms. Batkis said.

“Somos unidos,” Mr. Perez told the families, according to Ms. Batkis. “We are united.”

Over the last couple of days, relatives have consoled each other talking about the loved ones they lost.

Mr. Luna, of El Salvador, was married, had three children and had been living in Maryland for at least 19 years. Mr. Suazo, of Honduras, had immigrated to the United States more than 17 years ago, and he was married with two children. His brother, Carlos, said in a statement that Mr. Suazo was talented at repairing and operating all kinds of machinery, and that he had dreamed of starting his own small business.

As he grieves his brother, Jovani López, who emigrated from Guatemala about seven years ago, said he had mostly kept to himself.

At night, when he has trouble sleeping, he has tried to focus on the good memories: Jose López’s laugh; the hot, humid days back at their childhood home in Guatemala, near the eastern city of Chiquimula, where they played soccer; and the lives they had built in Baltimore.

But when daylight comes, he goes out to see the destroyed Key bridge. For hours on Wednesday night, as rain rippled across the Patapsco, he looked out toward the mangled mountain of steel miles away. He could see the ship. He could see the boats encircling it.

“All I could think was, Where is my brother?”

Miriam Jordan, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.

“While Baltimore is the top port for auto shipments, this is not likely to cause or create a sudden new problem in vehicle supply that will materially impact the market,” Jonathan Smoke, Cox’s chief economist, said in a conference call. “The port is heavy for exports and imports, but there are alternatives.”

Mercedes-Benz said it had already found other ways of handling the vehicles it usually imports from Germany through Baltimore.

“Together with our transport partners, we reviewed and successfully adapted our supply routes,” the company said in a statement. “We are confident that our cars can be distributed on time for customers in the U.S. in April.”

The company added that it already uses the ports in Charleston, S.C., and Brunswick, Ga., in addition to Baltimore. Mercedes also said exports of vehicles it makes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and shipments of parts for that factory were unaffected.

Most vehicles sold in the United States are assembled in North America. Even for European automakers that have relied on the Port of Baltimore, the impact is likely to be muted because many of their most popular models are made here.

BMW, for example, makes its sport-utility vehicles in South Carolina. It imports sedans and sports cars from Germany, but they sell in smaller numbers than S.U.V.s. Two exceptions are the BMW 3 and 4 Series sedans. But the auto maker should have enough inventory on dealer lots to keep sales going for some time.

At the end of March, BMW had enough vehicles on dealer lots to last nearly 70 days at the current rate of sales, which is slightly below the industry average, according to Cox Automotive.

In addition, part of the Port of Baltimore’s automotive operations has not been shut down by the bridge collapse. The Tradepoint Atlantic terminal, which is used by Volkswagen, is at the mouth of the harbor, east of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and still accessible to oceangoing vessels.

Automobiles are transported in vessels known as roll-on, roll-off ships. These ships require specialized port and dock facilities. Imported vehicles also must be processed in the port before they can be sent to dealers. Sometimes additional equipment is installed in cars before they are loaded onto trucks or trains.

The Port of Brunswick in Georgia already handles hundreds of thousands of cars, trucks and other vehicles per year. Its automotive facility, the Colonel’s Island Terminal, covers more than 600 acres, and has more than 400 acres available for expansion. Ports in Charleston, Jacksonville, Fla., Newark and Norfolk, Va., can also handle roll-on, roll-off ships.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said there were no drinking water intakes near the crash, “and, therefore, no threat to drinking water safety.”

Federal officials said there were 56 containers of hazardous materials among the 4,700 the ship was carrying when it struck the Key Bridge early Tuesday. Two containers fell into the water and were missing, but neither contained hazardous materials, the Coast Guard said.

The National Transportation Safety Board said the ship was carrying both corrosive and flammable material, and that some kind of “sheen” was spotted near the wreckage on the Patapsco River, which other authorities are following up on.

The Coast Guard’s deputy commandant for operations, Vice Adm. Peter Gautier, said that most of the materials in the damaged shipping containers are mineral oils that, while classified as hazardous, do not pose a threat to the public in this case.

“The Coast Guard has moved aggressively to board the vessel, and we have teams on board,” Admiral Gautier said.

Blue Water Baltimore, a conservation group, said it had been in touch with the state’s environmental agency and asked people to report any smells, discoloration of the water or dead fish near the ship.

The ship’s operator is working on a plan to get the vessel, which is partially pinned under the fallen bridge, moving again, according to Coast Guard officials. Barges are also on their way to the scene to begin pulling pieces of the bridge from the water. That will allow divers to return to the area and search for the four remaining victims; two victims were found dead in a submerged pickup truck on Wednesday.

The ship, owned by the Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd., had just embarked on a 27-day voyage to Singapore when it struck the bridge early Tuesday morning. Darrell Wilson, a spokesman for Synergy Marine, said on Thursday he did not know when crew members would leave the ship.

Josh Messick, a chaplain and the executive director of the Baltimore International Seafarers’ Center, a religious nonprofit that seeks to protect the rights of mariners, said the crew did not have reliable internet access. His organization was working to deliver Wi-Fi access and SIM cards so they could reach family members back home, he said.

Large container ships like the Dali typically have about 20 crew members, a figure that has come down over the years as operators have sought to cut labor costs. Larger shipping companies may recruit workers from countries like India and the Philippines, where looser labor laws enable them to pay cheaper wages.

Crews’ time at sea can vary, but some voyages are now taking longer than usual: Attacks on ships by the Houthi rebel group in Yemen in the Red Sea have caused lengthy detours away from the Suez Canal, disrupting global shipping across the globe.

Typically, a container ship crew includes the captain, an officer in charge of securing the cargo, sailors assigned to the engines and handling the ship's myriad systems, and stewards who handle tasks like cooking and laundry.

John Konrad, a licensed container ship captain and the editor of gCaptain.com, a shipping industry news site, said every container ship is “unique and has its idiosyncrasies.” It’s normal for crew members to stay on damaged ships because the captain is still in command, and crew members must make sure the crashed vessel — and any potentially hazardous goods — does not pose a further danger.

“They’re making sure the ship doesn’t catch on fire,” Mr. Konrad said in an interview, adding that the crew must also remain to comply with the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation.

On Wednesday, Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the N.T.S.B., said the ship’s cooks were working when she boarded the ship. “It smelled very good, and I was very hungry,” she said.

“The tankers and cargo ships of 1950 aren’t the tankers and cargo ships of today,” said James Salmon, a spokesman for the Delaware River and Bay Authority.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after a cargo ship nearly three football fields long crashed into it, claiming the lives of six people, has prompted questions about whether similar disasters could happen elsewhere.

But the work on the Delaware Memorial Bridge reflects the fact that some transportation and maritime experts have been mulling the hazards of new cargo ships squeezing under decades-old bridges for some time. The problem is that there are no easy answers, in part because ships just keep getting bigger.

Michael Rubino, a retired chief harbor pilot for the Port of Los Angeles, said the air drafts — the distance between the water to the highest point on a vessel — of some newer ships have gotten so big that some vessels need to fold down their antennae and masts to squeeze under a bridge.

“People don’t realize how massive these ships are,” he said.

Joseph Ahlstrom, a professor at SUNY Maritime College, a ship captain and a commissioner for the New York State pilot’s board, said that commercial ships have gotten so big in recent years that they are much more likely to do damage to infrastructure such as bridges.

“It’s going to do a number on them,” he said of a modern ship and the hazard it poses to a bridge like the one in Baltimore. “It’s going to bring it down, which it did.”

Many transportation officials say drawing parallels to the Key Bridge is difficult because what happened in Baltimore appeared to be such an unusual event — a confluence of factors at the worst possible time. As the ship, the Dali, hurtled through the harbor without a tugboat connected to it, it experienced a “complete blackout” and lost control, then struck a pier that had small protective barriers.

The situation with the Key Bridge is “unique,” said Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, which represents state transportation departments. “This is not something that we can really draw a comparison to.”

Even so, officials with the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday that they were not only examining the protection system around the Key Bridge, but also seeking records about the protections around other bridges in Maryland.

Stray ships have long been viewed as a risk to bridges, particularly after a freighter slammed into the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa Bay in 1980, killing 35 people.

After that disaster, officials in Maryland acknowledged that the Key Bridge, which opened in 1977, could be knocked down by a direct hit. But they said that the concrete barriers that had been installed in the river were intended to deflect or slow an out-of-control vessel.

The final contact might therefore be just a “glancing blow,” John Snyder, the director of engineering for the state Toll Facilities Administration, told The Baltimore Sun at the time.

As part of the rebuild in Tampa Bay, officials prioritized protection against a future disaster. They built a network of large concrete islands, called dolphins, that could absorb the impact of an out-of-control vessel. Since then, officials around the country have increasingly focused on strategies to enhance shields around bridges.

“Some modern bridges around the world, especially after the 1980 Tampa incident, have been designed with different features to mitigate impacts and protect their piers,” Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. transportation secretary, said on Wednesday. “Right now, I think there’s a lot of debate taking place among the engineering community about whether any of those features could have had any role in a situation like this.”

Efforts to enhance bridges are frequently slowed because of the many state and federal governmental entities involved, the often glacial pace of funding and the construction time required for such large-scale projects. Still, some places have seen results.

In Minnesota, a boat pushing 12 barges rammed into a Union Pacific railroad bridge near St. Paul in 2017, damaging a century-old pier. A protection system was subsequently built around the new pier.

In New York, the Bayonne Bridge was raised by 64 feet — or roughly seven stacked shipping containers — in 2019 to accommodate increasingly larger vessels calling at the container ports in New Jersey and Staten Island.

In Long Beach, Calif., the new Gerald Desmond Bridge was raised by 50 feet in 2020.

And in New Orleans, officials have installed a sophisticated oceanographic system, courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to broadcast the vertical clearance to boats approaching two bridges to avoid collisions. The technology will soon be installed at five more bridges along the Mississippi River, and “we actually got notice of funding availability on Monday morning,” said Matt Gresham, the chief of governmental relations for the Port of New Orleans.

In Delaware, officials wanted the bridge to be able to withstand modern vessels, so they came up with a design that could handle ships even larger than the Dali. It was funded in part by the federal government.

The final product will include eight cylindrical islands, each 80 feet in diameter, strengthened by 540 tons of steel and filled with tens of thousands of cubic yards of sand, stone and boulders. The pilings will be buried 45 feet deep in the river bed.

But even if solutions like the one in Delaware are applied, the work is not over.

Hyun-Joong Kim, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Liberty University who has studied dolphin protection systems around bridges, said the vulnerabilities around bridges need to be reviewed regularly to ensure that protection systems — many of which were installed decades ago — are able to handle modern threats.

“If they see much bigger ships are coming back and forth, maybe they need to revisit the risk assessment,” he said.

Michael Forsythe contributed reporting.