The Port of Baltimore opened a temporary channel on Monday to free some tugboats and barges trapped by a bridge collapse last week, but officials said the broader recovery of commercial shipping was still hampered by poor conditions.
Shipping in Baltimore last Tuesday after a loaded container ship lost power and collided with support columns of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, killing six road workers and causing the highway bridge to plunge into the Patapsco River. The channel has been blocked.
Recovery teams led by the U.S. Coast Guard and the state of Maryland aim to quickly reopen the port, the nation’s largest importer of “roll-off” vehicles and exports of farm and construction equipment.
But first it must free the cargo ship Dali, which is trapped under the rubble of a steel bridge with 4,000 containers and 21 crew members trapped on board since the accident.
To illustrate the task ahead, officials said it would take rescuers 10 hours to clear and remove a 200-ton piece of debris – which they called a “relatively small lift.”
“We’re talking about something almost as big as the Statue of Liberty,” Gov. Wes Moore said at a news conference. “To be clear, the scale of this project is massive. Even the smallest (task) is massive. of.”
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gillies said that beneath the surface, the work was more complicated than initially thought, as the twisted steel was obscured by murky water obscured by large amounts of debris.
“These girders are essentially tangled and intertwined, so it’s difficult to figure out where we need to make the cuts so that we can get them into a more manageable size,” Gillies said at the same news conference. Lift them out of the water.”
Officials declined to estimate how long it would take to clear the port.
Ship traffic resumed for the first time on Monday after rescue teams opened a temporary channel with a controlled depth of 11 feet (3.35 meters) on the north side of the wreckage.
The Coast Guard said on Facebook that the first vessel to pass through the strait was a tug pushing a barge that supplies jet fuel to the U.S. Department of Defense, and posted footage of the barge sliding beneath a truncated portion of the bridge that still stands. video.
A second temporary channel on the southbound side, with a depth of 15 to 16 feet (4.6 to 4.9 meters), will open “in the coming days,” Moore said.
Once the wreckage is cleared, a third channel with a depth of 20 to 25 feet (6.1 to 7.6 meters) will allow nearly all tugboats and barges to enter and exit the port, Gillies said.
U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Baltimore on Friday to see first-hand the economic recovery, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said.
The Biden administration has helped secure barges and cranes and provided an early influx of funding and is working with Congress to ensure the federal government pays to rebuild the bridge.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
