Trapped vessels start to move out of Baltimore following bridge disaster
Source: Reuters
April 1, 2024 6:57 PM EDT Updated 28 min ago
April 1 (Reuters) - The Port of Baltimore opened a temporary channel on Monday, freeing some tugs and barges that had been trapped by last week's bridge collapse, but officials said wider restoration of commercial shipping remained frustrated by unyielding conditions. Baltimore's shipping channel has been blocked since a fully loaded container ship lost power and collided with a support column on the Francis Scott Key Bridge last Tuesday, killing six road workers and causing the highway bridge to tumble into the Patapsco River.
A recovery team led by the U.S. Coast Guard and the state of Maryland aims to quickly reopen the port, the largest in the U.S. for "roll-on, roll-off" vehicle imports and exports of farm and construction equipment. But first it must free the cargo vessel Dali, stuck under steel bridge debris with 4,000 containers and a 21-member crew aboard who have been stranded on the ship since last week. To illustrate the task ahead, officials said recovery workers needed 10 hours to cut free and remove a 200-ton piece of debris - what they called "a relatively small lift."
"We're talking about something that is almost the size of the Statue of Liberty," Governor Wes Moore told a news conference. "The scale of this project, to be clear, is enormous. And even the smallest (tasks) are huge." Beneath the surface, the job is even more complicated than originally imagined, said U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath, as the twisted steel is obscured by murky waters darkened by the volume of debris.
"These girders are essentially tangled together, intertwined, making it very difficult to figure out where you need to potentially cut so that we can make that into more manageable sizes to lift them from the water," Gilreath told the same news conference. Officials declined to estimate how long it would take to clear the harbor given the scale of the disaster.
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/maryland-opens-temporary-channel-collapsed-bridge-site-governor-2024-04-01/
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