By David Lawder and Joel Schectman
(Reuters) – Salvage teams were expected to lift the first piece of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge out of the water on Saturday to allow barges and tugboats to access the disaster site, Maryland and U.S. officials said, the first step in a complex effort to reopen the city’s blocked port.
The steel truss bridge collapsed early Tuesday morning, killing six road workers, when a huge container ship lost power and crashed into a support pylon, sending much of the span careening into the Patapsco River, blocking the Baltimore Harbor shipping channel.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a news conference that a section of the steel superstructure of the bridge north of the crash site would be cut into a piece that could be lifted by crane onto a barge and taken to the nearby site Tradepoint Atlantic at Sparrows Point.
“This will ultimately allow us to open a temporary, narrow channel that will help us get more ships into the water around the collapse site,” Moore said.
He declined to provide a timeline for this portion of the cleanup work. “It won’t take hours,” she said. “It won’t take days, but once this phase of the work is complete, we will be able to move more tugboats, more barges and more boats into the area to speed up our recovery.”
Workers will not yet attempt to remove a crumpled portion of the bridge superstructure that rests on the bow of the Dali, the 984-foot-long Singapore-flagged container ship that tore down the bridge. Moore said it was unclear when the vessel might be moved, but said its hull, though damaged, was “intact.”
“This is an extraordinarily complex operation,” Moore said of the effort to remove bridge debris and open the Port of Baltimore to shipping traffic.
The bodies of two workers who were repairing the bridge at the time of the disaster have been recovered, but Moore said efforts to recover four other presumed dead remain on hold because conditions are too dangerous for divers to work amid too much debris.
Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath told reporters that teams from the Coast Guard, U.S. Navy Rescue Arm and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said debris from the Patapsco River deep-draft shipping channel would had to be removed before the Dali could be moved. .
Saturday’s operation involves cutting a piece just north of the canal and lifting it with a 160-ton marine crane onto a barge. There is also a larger, 1,000-ton crane on the bridge site.
The piece will be brought to Tradepoint Atlantic, the site of the former Bethlehem steel mill that is being transformed into a distribution center for companies including Amazon.com (NASDAQ:), Home depot (NYSE:) and Volkswagen (ETR:). The facility’s port, which is located on the side of the collapsed bridge into the Chesapeake Bay, is fully operational.
Five days after the tragedy, the jobs of around 15,000 people whose work revolves around daily port operations are suspended. While logistics experts say other East Coast ports should be able to handle container traffic, Baltimore is the largest U.S. port for “roll-on, roll-off” vehicle imports and exports of agricultural and construction machinery.
U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said the Small Business Administration has approved the state’s request for a disaster declaration that would allow small businesses affected by the disaster to apply for low-interest emergency loans of up to $2 million until end of 2024.
The federal government on Thursday awarded Maryland an initial $60 million emergency fund to clear rubble and begin rebuilding the Key Bridge, an extraordinarily rapid outlay. President Joe Biden has promised that the federal government will cover all costs of clearing the rubble and rebuilding the bridge.