US: Rescuers lose hope for more survivors from bridge collapse
The six presumed to have perished included immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador
BALTIMORE: US federal safety investigators recovered the black box from the freight ship that crashed into a Baltimore bridge, the agency chief said on Wednesday as rescuers looked for the remains of six workers missing in the bridge collapse.
A highway team also will be looking at the twisted remains of the Francis Scott Key bridge as they try to determine how and why a container ship smashed into a pillar of the 2.6km span in early morning darkness on Tuesday.
Investigators from the US National Transportation Safety Board recovered the data recorder after boarding the ship late on Tuesday, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said. They will interview the ship’s crew, she said.
The disaster forced the indefinite closure of the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest on the US Eastern Seaboard, and created a traffic quagmire for Baltimore and the surrounding region.
Rescuers pulled two construction workers from the water alive on Tuesday. One was hospitalised. The six presumed to have perished included immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, said the Mexican Consulate in Washington.
Officials said the eight were part of a work crew repairing potholes on the road surface when the Singapore-flagged container vessel Dali, leaving Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka, plowed into a support pylon.
The US Coast Guard said it was looking for their bodies 18 hours after they were thrown from the bridge into the frigid waters at the mouth of the
Patapsco River.
Divers resumed their search in the 50-foot-deep waters surrounding the twisted ruins.
“We do not believe that we’re going to find any of these individuals alive,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath said at a briefing.
Maryland State Police and US Coast Guard officials said diminished visibility and increasingly treacherous currents in the wreckage-strewn channel made continued search efforts on the river too risky to continue overnight.
A trestled section of the bridge almost immediately crumpled into the water, sending vehicles and workers into the river.
The 289m ship had reported a loss of propulsion shortly before impact and dropped anchor to slow the vessel, giving transportation authorities time to halt traffic on the bridge before the crash. That move likely prevented a higher death toll, authorities said.
It was unclear whether authorities also tried to alert the work crew ahead of the impact.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore said at a Tuesday news briefing the bridge was up to code with no known structural issues. There was no evidence of foul play, officials said.
The Baltimore wreck drew attention to the vessel’s safety record. The same ship was involved in an incident in the port of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2016, hitting a quay as it tried to exit the North Sea container terminal.