The Baltimore shipwreck has drawn attention to the ship’s safety record.
Baltimore:
Rescuers have lost hope of finding more survivors in the Baltimore bridge collapse, the Coast Guard said, as their efforts Wednesday turned to searching for the bodies of missing people and seeking more answers about what caused the container ship to hit the bridge.
Search divers are expected to return to the waters surrounding the twisted remains of the Baltimore Harbor bridge at dawn, searching for six missing workers who are now presumed dead.
The disaster forced the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest ports on the U.S. East Coast, to close indefinitely and created a traffic quagmire in Baltimore and surrounding areas.
The search for the missing workers, 18 hours after they were thrown from the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge into Patapsco, was suspended Tuesday night as the possibility of their survival faded. The cold waters at the mouth of the Patapsco River.
“We didn’t think we were going to find anyone alive,” Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gillies said at a news conference.
Maryland State Police and U.S. Coast Guard officials said reduced visibility and increasingly dangerous currents in the debris-strewn channel made continued search and rescue efforts on the river too risky to conduct at night.
Starting at 6 a.m. (1000 GMT) on Wednesday, “we hope to put divers in the water and begin a more detailed search to try our best to recover those six missing people,” State Police Colonel Roland Butler Roland Butler told reporters Tuesday night.
Rescuers pulled two other workers from the water on Tuesday, and one was taken to hospital. The six people presumed dead include workers from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, according to the Mexican consulate in Washington.
The eight people, who were working to repair potholes on the bridge’s base, were working on the bridge’s support towers when the Singapore-flagged container ship Dali, which left Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka, hit the bridge’s support towers around 1:30 a.m. (0530 GMT), officials said. staff member. ).
A section of support across the 1.6-mile (2.6-kilometer) span almost immediately collapsed into the water, sending vehicles and workers into the river.
The 948-foot (289 m) vessel reported a loss of propulsion shortly before impact and dropped anchor to slow the vessel, giving transportation authorities time to stop traffic on the bridge before the accident occurred. Authorities said the move may have prevented a higher death toll.
It was unclear whether authorities also attempted to alert staff before the impact.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a news conference on Tuesday that the bridge met code and had no known structural issues. Officials said there was no evidence of foul play.
Ship safety record
The Baltimore shipwreck has drawn attention to the ship’s safety record. In 2016, the ship was involved in an accident at the Belgian port of Antwerp, where it crashed into a pier while trying to leave a North Sea container terminal.
An inspection in Chile in 2023 found defects in “propulsion and auxiliary machinery,” according to the public Equasis website, which provides ship information.
But the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore said in a statement that the ship passed two foreign port inspections in June and September 2023. The agency said the faulty fuel pressure gauge was corrected after an inspection in June 2023 before the ship left port.
Video footage on social media showed the ship hitting the base bridge in the dark, with the headlights of vehicles on the bridge clearly visible as it plunged into the water and the ship burst into flames.
The ship is owned by Grace Ocean Pte Ltd and all 22 crew members on board are missing, its management company Synergy Marine Pte Ltd reported.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said closing the port would have “significant and lasting impacts on the supply chain.” The Port of Baltimore handles more automobile freight than any other port in the United States — by 2022, it will handle more than 750,000 vehicles, as well as containerized and bulk cargo ranging from sugar to coal, according to port data.
Still, economists and logistics experts say they doubt the port closures will trigger a major U.S. supply chain crisis or a sharp rise in commodity prices, given the abundance of capacity at rival East Coast shipping hubs.
The collapse of the bridge also caused chaos on Baltimore’s roadways, forcing motorists to two other congested port crossings and raising the specter of nightmarish daily commutes and regional traffic detours for months and years to come.
Named for the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the bridge carries about 31,000 vehicles across the water every day and is a major route for motorists between New York and Washington to avoid downtown Baltimore. It opened in 1977.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday pledged to visit Baltimore, 40 miles (64 kilometers) away, as soon as possible and said he wanted federal funding to rebuild the bridge.
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Jennifer Homendy said a team of 24 agency personnel was on scene investigating the accident. She said Singaporean security personnel would arrive in Baltimore on Wednesday.
Tuesday’s disaster may be the worst bridge collapse in the United States since 2007, when the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis plunged into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people.
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