Bid to clear bridge inches on
As costly work to unsnarl the ruins of the Francis Scott Key Bridge inched forward, Maryland leaders pressed Congress to swiftly advance aid money needed to move toward reopening the Port of Baltimore’s consequential shipping channel.
Meanwhile, officials said they were preparing to open an alternate shipping channel near the collapsed bridge, in what one described as an important first step toward reopening the port.
“By opening this alternate route, we will support the flow of marine traffic into Baltimore,” Coast Guard Captain David O’Connell, the federal on-scene co-ordinator for the bridge response, said in a news release.
Details of when and how the alternate channel would be made ready were not available. O’Connell said it would be for “commercially essential vessels”.
In earlier statements, officials said the task of recovering all that was lost when the 185-foot-high bridge crashed into the water below will be complex, with each phase bringing the risk of fresh peril.
With demolition crews at work cutting portions of the north side of the collapsed bridge truss yesterday, members of the Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the tangle of material jutting into the Patapsco River from a Coast Guard response boat. Sharp shards of steel stretched skyward in perfect triangles, several of which weigh roughly 200 tonnes.
Three dive teams with the unified command surveyed sections of the bridge and the stuck cargo ship known as the Dali that careened into the Key Bridge on Tuesday.
The Dali’s crew members remain aboard.
“We don’t send anybody into the water on a hunch or a guess,” Colonel Estee S Pinchasin, the district commander of the US Army Corps of Engineers, said while describing the painstaking and deliberate work of removing each piece of such a treacherous puzzle. Murky, fast-moving waters littered with debris and downed electrical wires have complicated efforts.
Federal, state and city officials from Maryland sought to maintain a sharp sense of urgency yesterday as they took to morning newscasts to pressure Congress to approve relief funds to reopen the port and rebuild the collapsed bridge, arguing that the ripple effects will hurt people and businesses across the country.
“Don’t support this because you think you’re doing Maryland a favour. We don’t need favours,” governor Wes Moore said on MSNBC.
“Understand what this means to all the workers and all the other small businesses all around the country,” he continued, saying the collapse would affect farm workers in Kentucky who need agricultural equipment, auto dealers in Ohio waiting on new cars and heavy trucks, and restaurant owners in Tennessee waiting on spices and sugars brought through the Port of Baltimore, among others.
An initial US$60 million (NZ$100.3m) in aid for Baltimore arrived from the Federal Highway Administration’s emergency relief fund last week, but by some counts, Maryland could end up requesting more than US$600m and may need more than US$1 billion to erect a new bridge.