Key Bridge recovery efforts continue; shredded shipping containers look like ‘paper-mache’
BALTIMORE — The Maryland Cruise Terminal is not used to the kind of bustle that’s been happening inside its walls this week.
Wedged between
Interstate 95 and the Patapsco River, the terminal on Friday was two days into serving as the command center for the response to Tuesday’s collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Struck by a container ship nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower, the bridge fell almost instantly, killing six people and unleashing a vigorous emergency response.
By Friday morning, the cruise terminal — shuttered by the clogged river along with the Port of Baltimore — was busy with hundreds of uniformed responders sectioned off by their duties and agencies, coordinating a massive recovery and cleanup effort.
“The Ever Forward was the most challenging and complex thing that I’ve ever been involved with in my Coast Guard career — until Monday night,” said Cmdr. Baxter Smoak, who was running around the terminal in his role as operations section chief.
Smoak, who oversees all marine safety operations in Maryland as the department head for prevention efforts in the Coast Guard Sector Maryland-national Capital Region, was referring to the container ship that got stuck in the bay for five weeks in 2022.
“Stem to stern as we would say, this is that on an exponentially higher scale,” said Smoak, wearing a bright red and yellow vest as he worked the floor.
He said operations remained focused on the recovery of the last four of the six individuals believed to have died when the bridge collapsed, and on clearing the channel. That process will be complicated. A giant crane that arrived earlier Friday was not yet rigged to begin lifting debris, and no timelines have been set for when that might begin, Smoak said.
Gov. Wes Moore, Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, all Democrats, and other officials were briefed on the status of the salvaging efforts Friday morning before boarding boats to view the bridge site from the water.
Returning from viewing the tangled, dangerous mess up close for the second time this week, Moore called the sights of the wreckage “daunting,” with sliced shipping containers looking “like paper-mache.”
“All I’ve ever known is the Key Bridge,” Moore said. “And to go out there and to look up and just to see the sky, when you’re standing in a place that if you would have looked up before you would have seen something that was just iconic for the city, I think that’s one of the moments when it just really hits you.”
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, said in an interview after being on the boat with Moore that the close-up view was “devastating.”
“Out on the water I began to perceive some of the lucky breaks we got even in the midst of this catastrophe,” he said. “Had it been at rush hour, that would have been an unspeakable nightmare. If we had all of this wreckage plus an oil spill, that would have been a compounded nightmare.”
During a news conference later Friday with Raskin, Olszewski, and officials from the Coast Guard, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Maryland State Police, and Maryland Department of Transportation, Moore said two more cranes will arrive Friday evening and Monday to help remove debris from the collision site. Divers will resume their search for the bodies of the four remaining construction workers “when conditions change.”