Divers look for Baltimore bridge collapse victims
RESCUERS were scouring the Baltimore Harbor for bodies after six people missing in Tuesday’s bridge collapse were presumed dead, the coast guard said yesterday.
The disaster has forced the indefinite closure of the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and created a traffic quagmire for Baltimore and the surrounding region.
As the odds of their survival vanished, the search for the missing workers was suspended Tuesday evening, 18 hours after they were thrown from the fallen Francis Scott Key Bridge into the frigid waters at the mouth of the Patapsco River.
“We do not believe that we’re going to find any of these individuals alive,” Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said at a briefing.
Maryland State Police and U.S. Coast Guard officials said diminished visibility and increasingly treacherous currents in the wreckagestrewn channel made continued search efforts on the river too risky to continue overnight.
Rescuers earlier pulled two other workers from the water alive Tuesday, and one of them was hospitalized. The six presumed to have perished included workers from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, according to the Mexican Consulate in Washington.
Officials said all eight were part of a work crew repairing potholes on Key Bridge’s road surface when the Singapore-flagged container vessel Dali, leaving Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka, plowed into a support pylon of the bridge at about 1:30 a.m. (0530 GMT).
A trestled section of the 1.6-mile (2.6 km) span almost immediately crumpled into the water, sending vehicles and workers into the river.
The 289-meter (948 feet) 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.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a Tuesday news briefing that the bridge was up to code with no known structural issues. There was no evidence of foul play, officials said.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority said that the vessel passed two separate foreign-port inspections in June and September 2023. It said a faulty fuel pressure gauge was rectified before the vessel departed the port following its June 2023 inspection.