The piece will be taken to Atlantic Trading Point, the site of the former Bethlehem Steel Works.
Maryland and U.S. officials said salvage crews will pull the first section of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge out of the water on Saturday to allow barges and tugboats to access the disaster site as the city reopens to lockdown The first step in a complex endeavor. port.
The steel truss bridge collapsed early Tuesday, killing six road workers, when a large container ship lost power and struck a support tower, sending much of the bridge into the Patapsco River and blocking the Port of Baltimore’s shipping channel. .
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a news conference that a portion of the bridge’s steel superstructure north of the crash site will be cut into one piece that can be lifted by crane onto a barge and transported to the nearby Atlantic Ocean at Sparrow Point. Trade Point Factory.
“This will ultimately allow us to create a temporary restricted channel that will help us get more vessels into the waters around the collapse site,” Moore said.
He declined to provide a timeline for that portion of the cleanup. “It won’t take hours,” he said. “It won’t take a few days, but once we complete this phase we can move more tugs, more barges and more vessels into the area to speed up our recovery.”
Workers will not yet try to remove the damaged portion of the bridge’s superstructure, which sits on the bow of the Dali, the 984-foot Singapore-flagged container ship that caused the bridge to collapse. Moore said it was unclear when the ship would be moved, but said its hull, while damaged, was “intact.”
“This is a very complex operation,” Moore said of the effort to clear the bridge debris and open the Port of Baltimore to navigation.
The bodies of two workers who were repairing the bridge deck at the time of the disaster have been recovered, but Moore said efforts to recover four other suspected dead workers were still on hold because conditions were too dangerous for divers to work through too much debris.
Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gillies told reporters that teams from the Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy Salvage Division and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the deep-draft channel of the Patapsco River must be cleared of debris before the Dali can be moved. wreckage. .
Saturday’s operation involved cutting a block of stone north of the channel and lifting it onto a barge using a 160-tonne offshore crane. There is also a larger 1000 ton crane on the bridge site.
The piece will be brought to Tradepoint Atlantic, the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant that is currently being developed as a distribution center for companies including Amazon, Home Depot and Volkswagen. The facility’s port, located on the Chesapeake Bay side of the collapsed bridge, is now fully operational.
Five days after the tragedy, the work of some 15,000 people involved in day-to-day port operations was put on hold. While logistics experts say other East Coast ports should be able to handle container shipments, Baltimore is the largest U.S. port for “roll-off” vehicle imports and farm and construction equipment exports.
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen said the Small Business Administration has approved the state’s request for a disaster declaration, allowing small businesses affected by the disaster to apply for emergency low-interest loans of up to $2 million through the end of 2024.
The federal government on Thursday provided Maryland with $60 million in initial emergency funding to clear the debris and begin rebuilding the foundation bridge, a move that came quickly. President Joe Biden has pledged that the federal government will cover all costs of clearing the debris and rebuilding the bridge.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
