“Stop all traffic on the Key Bridge.”
The blunt order from an officer in Baltimore’s busy commercial port was one of the first warnings of a catastrophe that experts now predict will transform shipping on the East Coast and change the way ships and bridges operate around the world. But after the freighter Dalí lost power early Tuesday, there were very few minutes to act.
In those minutes, many people—from the ship’s crew, who sent out a distress signal, to Transportation Authority police officers, who stopped traffic headed for the Francis Scott Key Bridge—did what they could to avoid the catastrophe, which is likely to have saved many lives.
However, regardless of their actions, several factors made the catastrophe almost inevitable. When a boat this size loses engine power, there is very little that can be done to correct its course, even by dropping anchor. And Key Bridge was particularly vulnerable. As early as 1980, engineers had warned that, due to its design, the bridge would not survive a direct hit by a container ship.
The collision and subsequent collapse of the bridge took with it seven road workers and an inspector who could not be alerted and removed from the bridge in time; Two were pulled alive from the water, but four others remain missing and are presumed dead. According to authorities, two bodies were recovered on Wednesday.
The ship’s 21 crew members, all Indians, who had prepared for a long voyage to Sri Lanka on the Dali, were also caught up in the disaster. Although none of them were injured, they were held on board for more than a day as the ship remained in port, with the ruins of the bridge tangled around it, as authorities began their investigation.
The accident, the deadliest bridge collapse in the United States in more than a decade, will have a lasting impact on the Port of Baltimore, where 8,000 people work, and on the industries that depend on the port, which is the main American transportation hub. of automobiles and other wheeled equipment, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday.
“It is difficult to overstate the impact of this collision,” Buttigieg said.
He compared the Dalí, which roughly spans a city block, to the size of an American aircraft carrier.
“A 100,000-ton impact against this pillar,” he said of the impact on the bridge’s support structure.
Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation into the accident, went aboard the Dalí Tuesday night to gather documentation. They obtained data from the trip data recorder, the equivalent of an airplane’s black box, in the hope that it could help investigators determine the causes of the crash.
Buttigieg commented that any private party found at fault for the accident “will be held accountable.”
Half an hour after midnight on Tuesday, the Dalí, loaded with cargo containers, left the dock, guided by two tugboats, as usual. On board was a local port pilot with more than 10 years of experience and in-depth knowledge of the Port of Baltimore, as well as an apprentice doing his internship.
The sky over the Patapsco River was clear and calm, illuminated by the full moon.
At 1:25 a.m., after the two tugs had separated and turned around, the Dalí had accelerated to about 10 miles per hour as it approached the Key Bridge.
Then, for reasons still being investigated, the ship’s powerful propulsion system stopped. The lights flashed and went out.
The ship suffered a “total blackout,” according to Clay Diamond, head of the American Pilots Association, who was informed of the Dalí captain’s account.
The port pilot noticed that the ship was beginning to turn to the right, towards one of the pillars that supported the Key Bridge. He urged the captain to try to restart the engine and ordered the crew to make a sharp left turn. As a last measure, he ordered the crew to drop anchor on the port side.
The crew issued a distress signal at 1:27 a.m. One of the tugs, the Eric McAllister, turned around and raced toward the ship.
But the failures on board occurred in cascade. When the emergency generator was turned on, a puff of thick smoke billowed out of the ship’s exhaust chimney, briefly restoring lights, radar and steering. But it was of no use. Without propulsion, the 95,000-ton ship had become an unstoppable object, drifting toward one of Baltimore’s busiest bridges.
On the ground, Maryland Transportation Authority officers immediately sprang into action. “I need one of you on the south side and one of you on the north side to stop all traffic on the Key Bridge,” someone is heard saying on the audio recording of emergency radio traffic from that night. “A ship is approaching that has just lost its rudder. So until they get it under control, we have to stop all traffic.”
Vehicular traffic on both sides of the bridge was stopped as the ship continued its inexorable drift towards the 2.5 kilometer long arch.
A minute later, the agents realized that there were several workers on the bridge, many of them immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico, who were still working on the bridge in the freezing darkness, taking advantage of the scarce night traffic to fix potholes.
“There are people working on the bridge,” an officer is heard saying in the audio recording of the radio exchange between the officers. “You might want to let whoever the foreman is, see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily.”
But the ship was already hitting the bridge. Almost at the same time, the dock buckled and collapsed, twisting over the ship, its cargo containers piled high on the deck. Then the rest of the bridge collapsed, breaking into sections as it plummeted and splashed into the dark waters of the river.
“The size and weight of these vessels make them very difficult to stop, even with propulsion,” said Stash Pelkowski, a professor at the State University of New York Maritime College and retired Coast Guard rear admiral. Without electrical power, he said, “there was very little the Dalí’s captain or crew could do.”
The sinking occurred in a matter of seconds. Except for the stumps of the pillars, the central span of the bridge had sunk into the frigid river (where divers would spend all day searching for bodies among the twisted metal) at 1:29 a.m.
“Commissioner, the entire bridge collapsed!” an agent shouted. “Whoever it is, everyone, the entire bridge just fell.”
Minutes after the bridge collapsed, the two tugboats that had accompanied the Dalí arrived at the scene, followed shortly by the Coast Guard and the first units of the Baltimore City Fire Department.
Two of the workers who had been on the bridge were rescued from the water. The others could not be located.
Jack Murphy, owner of Brawner Builders, the company whose workers had been on the bridge, received a phone call about the collapse and immediately drove to the area, about 30 minutes away. The coast guard boat and diving teams were already searching the water for the missing. He spent the night next to the bridge and began calling the families of the missing.
Police reported Wednesday that the bodies of two workers had been found in a red pickup truck near the bridge debris. They were identified as Alejandro Hernández Fuentes, a 35-year-old Mexican immigrant, and Dorlián Ronial Castillo Cabrera, a 26-year-old Guatemalan.
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