Divers are expected to return to the waters surrounding the ruins of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore Harbor to search for six missing construction workers who are now presumed dead.
Rescue teams pulled two other workers from the water alive on Tuesday, March 26, 2024, and one of them was hospitalised.
Authorities said that the accident sent a number of vehicles and eight construction workers into the Patapsco River.
Jeffrey Pritzker, a Senior Executive at Brawner Builders, the employer of the construction workers, said the other six were presumed dead, given the water’s depth and the length of time since the crash.
The search for the workers was suspended on Tuesday evening, 18 hours after they were thrown from the fallen bridge into the frigid waters at the mouth of the Patapsco River.
At a briefing, Coastguard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath stated, “We do not believe that we’re going to find any of these individuals alive.”
Roland Butler, Maryland’s secretary of state police, disclosed that the focus of the authorities was “going away from the search and rescue portion to a recovery operation.”
This means that rather than performing the search and rescue mission they had been doing, it’s search and recovery. The divers will search for the bodies of those six still missing.
These six men, all crew workers who were still atop the bridge when the ship struck, are apparently immigrants from Latin America who are in the United States.
The Guatemalan consulate says that two of them are Guatemalans, one in their 20s, another in their 30s, and a father of three who is 40 years old from El Salvador.
They were working on repairing potholes in the asphalt on top of the bridge when suddenly, the ship struck that pillar, causing a catastrophic failure that caused them to plunge into the waters beneath.
All 22 crewmembers onboard the Dali, the ship that struck the bridge, were reported safe.
It remains to be seen, meanwhile, if investigators will be able to board the Dali.
Singapore’s Port Authority Says Vessel Had Valid Certificates
Singapore’s Marine and Port Authority stated that the Dali, which was involved in the bridge collapse, had valid classification certificates on its structural integrity and equipment functionality at the time of the incident.
It added in a statement that Dali passed two separate foreign port state inspections in June and September of last year.
Meanwhile, the federal transportation safety agency said that it will launch an investigation into the safety record of the cargo ship as well as the construction and design of the bridge.
The Singapore-flagged Dali cargo ship was setting off from the Port of Baltimore to Colombo, Sri Lanka, when it apparently lost power and struck a pillar of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Synergy Marine Group, which manages the ship, disclosed that the impact happened while it was under the control of one or more pilots, who are local specialists who help guide vessels safely in and out of ports.
Synergy said in a statement on Wednesday, March 27, 2024, that one crew member was treated at a hospital for a minor injury.
The ship is owned by Grace Ocean Private Ltd., and Danish shipping giant Maersk said that it had chartered the vessel.
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