Channel opens to clear wreckage
The U.S. Coast Guard has opened a temporary, alternate channel for vessels involved in the clearing of debris at the site of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, part of a phased approach to opening the main channel leading to the vital port, officials said Monday.
Crews are undertaking the complicated work of removing steel and concrete at the site of the bridge's deadly collapse into the Patapsco River after a container ship lost power and crashed into a supporting column. On Sunday, dive teams surveyed parts of the bridge and checked the ship, and workers in lifts used torches to cut abovewater parts of the twisted steel superstructure.
Officials said the temporary channel is open primarily to vessels that are helping with the cleanup effort. Some barges and tugs that have been stuck in the Port of Baltimore since the collapse are also scheduled to pass through the channel on their way out of the harbor.
Authorities believe four workers plunged to their deaths in the collapse.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a Monday afternoon news conference that his top priority is recovering the four bodies, followed by reopening shipping channels to the port. He said he understands the urgency but that the risks are significant. He said crews have described the mangled steel of the fallen bridge as “chaotic wreckage.”
“We have to move fast, but we cannot be careless,” he said.
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath said divers examining the steel girders beneath the surface found them tangled and intertwined, making it difficult to figure out how to cut and lift them out of the water.
“What we're finding is it is more complicated than we hoped for initially,” Gilreath said.
Moore said crews used a large crane to lift a 200-ton span of the bridge, a task that took 10 hours. He said the piece was considered a “relatively small lift” compared to what's to come.
“The scale of this project, to be clear, it is enormous, and even the small lifts are huge,” he said.
Moore said crews will lift a 350-ton piece from the bridge later Monday as weather allows.
Officials earlier said the temporary channel would have a controlling depth of 11 feet, a horizontal clearance of 264 feet and a vertical clearance of 96 feet.
“This marks an important first step along the road to reopening the port of Baltimore,” Capt. David O'Connell, federal onscene coordinator of the response, said in a statement Monday. “By opening this alternate route, we will support the flow of marine traffic into Baltimore.”
Two additional larger channels are planned as more debris is removed from the waterway, which officials said would allow more maritime traffic to resume. They declined to provide a projected timeline for those channels being opened.
Earlier Monday, the governor and other state and local leaders met with members of the International Longshoremen's Association Local 333, which represents port workers whose jobs could dry up while shipping is suspended.
President Joe Biden will visit the collapse site Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announced Monday. He will meet with state and local officials and get an “on-the-ground look” at federal response efforts, Jean-Pierre said.
Moore said he expects the president will leave with a better understanding of the task at hand.
“He's going to see the fact that we have a ship that is almost the size of the Eiffel Tower, that weighs about as much as the Washington Monument, that's in the middle of the Patapsco River,” Moore said. “He's going to see a bridge that has been in existence since I was alive — I don't know what that skyline looks like without the Key bridge — and he is going to come and he's going to see it sitting on top of a ship.”
Also Monday, the Small Business Administration opened two centers in the area to help companies get loans to assist them with losses caused by the disruption of the bridge collapse.
Yvette Jeffery, a spokesperson for the agency's disaster recovery office, said affected businesses can receive loans for as much as $2 million. She said the effects could range from supply-chain challenges to decreased foot traffic in communities that depended heavily on the bridge.