Rescue crews are working to lift the first piece of the collapsed Baltimore Bridge

UNITED STATES:

Rescue crews worked to lift the first piece of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge out of the water Saturday to allow barges and tugboats to access the disaster site, Maryland and U.S. officials said, the first step in a complicated effort to reopen the city’s blockaded 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 pillar. Much of the opening fell into the Patapsco River, blocking the Baltimore Harbor shipping channel.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore told a news conference that a section of the bridge’s steel superstructure north of the crash site would be cut into a piece that could be lifted by crane onto a barge and transported to the nearby Tradepoint Atlantic site in Sparrow Point.

“This will ultimately allow us to open a temporary limited channel that will help us find more boats in the water around the collapse site,” Moore said.

He declined to provide a timeline for that portion of the cleanup work. “It won’t take hours,” he said. “It won’t take days, but once we get this phase of the work done, we can move more tugs and more vans and more boats into the area to speed up our recovery.”

Workers will not yet attempt to remove a crumpled section of the bridge’s superstructure resting on the bow of the Dali, the 984-foot-long Singapore-flagged container ship that brought down the bridge. Moore said it was unclear when the ship could be moved, but said its hull, although damaged, was “intact.”

“This is an extremely complicated operation,” Moore said of the effort to clear the bridge debris and open the Port of Baltimore to shipping traffic.

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 others presumed dead remain on hold because conditions are too dangerous for divers to work in too many debris.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath told reporters that teams from the Coast Guard, the US Navy’s salvage arm and the US Army Corps of Engineers said debris from the Patapsco River Sea Channel would need to be removed before the Dali could be moved. .

Saturday’s operation involves cutting a piece just north of this channel and lifting it with a 160-tonne marine crane onto a barge. A larger 1,000-ton crane is also located on the bridge site.

The piece will move to Tradepoint Atlantic, the former Bethlehem steel mill site that is being developed into a distribution center for the likes of Amazon.com ( AMZN.O ) Opens a New Tab , Home Depot ( HD.N ) New Tab and Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), opens new tab. The facility’s port, which is located on the Chesapeake Bay side of the collapsed bridge, is fully operational.

Tradepoint Atlantic did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the company’s role in the rescue operation.

Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefield said Tradepoint officials agreed to allow other vessels to unload vehicles at the facility’s deep-water dock to prepare for shipment to dealers.

In Oklahoma, authorities said Saturday they closed a section of U.S. Highway 59 near Sallisaw after a barge struck a bridge over the Arkansas River. There were no immediate reports of injuries, according to media reports, and officials would conduct inspections on the bridge.

Five days after the tragedy in Maryland, the jobs of about 15,000 people whose work revolves around the day-to-day operations of the port are on hold. While logistics experts say other East Coast ports should be able to handle container traffic, Baltimore is the largest U.S. port for vehicle imports and “roll-on, roll-off” exports of farm and construction equipment.

U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said the Small Business Administration has approved the state’s request for a disaster declaration that allows 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 granted Maryland an initial $60 million in emergency funding to clear debris and begin rebuilding the Key Bridge, a remarkably quick disbursement. President Joe Biden has pledged that the federal government will cover all the costs of removing the debris and rebuilding the bridge.