Rebuild bridge “neither quick nor easy”

WASHINGTON (EFE).— The US authorities recognized that rebuilding the Baltimore bridge that collapsed early last Tuesday following the crash of a cargo ship will not be “neither quick, nor easy, nor cheap,” and they affirmed that the highest priority is to return to open river traffic.

“We still don’t fully know the condition of the parts of the bridge that are still standing or that have infrastructure below the water’s surface, so reconstruction will not be quick, easy, or cheap, but we will get it done,” he said in a statement. press conference by the Secretary of Transportation of the United States, Pete Buttigieg.

The official appeared, accompanied by Vice Admiral Peter Gautier, deputy commander of Coast Guard operations, at the White House, following meeting with President Joe Biden, who made it clear that “this entire administration will provide support in all aspects to the recovery process.” and reconstruction.”

The Department of Transportation, he said, has four priorities: reopen the port, deal with disruptions in the supply chain until the port reopens, rebuild the bridge and deal with the implications for land transportation until it serves once more. passed.

To this end, he explained, the Coast Guard, in coordination with the Army Corps of Engineers, will meet to clean the channel and reopen it so that the port can fully function once more.

“We are concerned regarding the local economic impact with some 8,000 direct jobs associated with port activities and we are concerned regarding the implications that will extend beyond the region,” he said.

The port of Baltimore, he recalled, “is an important port for both imports and exports and is the largest auto handling port in the country.”

The container ship Dali hit the Francis Scott Key bridge around 1:30 a.m. last Tuesday, causing the collapse of much of the infrastructure in a few seconds.

At least 6 employees of a company that was doing repair work on the bridge died, all of them of Latin American origin, while efforts continue to rescue the bodies.

The causes of the event are being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an organization independent of the United States Government that is dedicated to accident investigation.

“What has become clear is that a bridge like this, completed in the 1970s, simply was not built to withstand a direct impact on a critical supporting dock from a ship weighing around 200 million pounds, a very large amount.” higher than that of “the cargo ships that were in service when the bridge was built,” the secretary stated.

Gautier explained for his part that “the President’s direction is to put the port into operation as soon as possible and that therefore the Coast Guard’s top priority now is to restore the waterway for maritime transport and to be able to remove the remains of the ship. ”.