Three heavy lift floating cranes on Friday arrived in Baltimore harbor to begin what Maryland’s governor described as a “remarkably complex operation” to clear crumpled girders from a collapsed bridge taken down by an errant container ship.
“To see it up close, you realize just how daunting a task this is,” Maryland Governor Wes Moore told a news conference after touring the disaster scene in a boat.
Migrant groups also honored the six Latino construction workers who lost their lives when the container ship Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge long before dawn on Tuesday, toppling it with stunning speed. The six were part of a pothole repair team.
Photo: US Coast Guard / Petty Officer 1st Class Brandon Giles / Reuters
“I am here to say that we immigrants are essential,” said Erika Aleman, a construction worker from Honduras who lives in Baltimore.
Vessel traffic through the busy Port of Baltimore has been suspended indefinitely, causing disruptions to trade spanning the globe, and Moore said that recovery would be lengthy.
“We cannot rebuild the bridge until we have cleared the wreckage,” Moore said. “This is going to be a long road.”
The complexity of the recovery dismayed those involved.
“We have to figure out the right plan to be able to break that bridge up into the right-sized pieces that we can lift,” US Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath said.
Twisted bridge trusses weighing thousands of tonnes still entrap the damaged container ship.
The Chesapeake, a 907-tonne lift capacity derrick barge, and two smaller crane barges arrived in Baltimore harbor, the US Navy said, and a fourth crane barge is to arrive next week.
The work of clearing tonnes of steel debris from the deep waters of the Patapsco River is made more delicate as the bodies of four workers have yet to be recovered. The four missing workers are believed to have been killed when the Singapore-flagged Dali lost power and careened into a bridge support column.
The federal administration has approved US$60 million in emergency funding for the cleanup and recovery operation, while the cost of building a new bridge could ultimately hit US$1 billion.
The operation is likely to take place in three phases: removing trusses from the bridge to allow one-way traffic into and out of the port; lifting bridge segments on the ship so it can be moved; and clearing steel and concrete debris from the river bed.
The project is expected take months, although one analyst told the US Naval Institute that the channel could be reopened for limited traffic in as little as one month.
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