BALTIMORE – The Port of Baltimore opened a temporary channel on April 1, 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.
The Port of 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 on March 26, killing six road workers and causing the highway bridge which loops around Baltimore to fall into the Patapsco River.
A recovery team led by the United States Coast Guard and the state of Maryland aims to quickly reopen the port, the largest in the US for “roll-on, roll-off” vehicle imports and exports of farm and construction equipment.
But it must first free the cargo vessel Dali, stuck under steel bridge debris with 4,000 containers and a 21-member crew who have been stranded on the ship since the disaster.
To illustrate the task ahead, officials said recovery workers needed 10 hours to cut free and remove a piece of debris weighing more than 200,000kg – 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 US 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,” he told the same news conference.
Officials declined to estimate how long it would take to clear the harbour, given the scale of the disaster.
Limited ship traffic resumed for the first time on April 1 after recovery teams opened a temporary channel with a controlling depth of 3.35m on the northbound side of the wreckage.
The first vessel to transit the channel was a tugboat pushing a barge supplying jet fuel to the US Department of Defence, the coast guard said on Facebook, posting video of the barge sliding beneath a truncated section of the bridge that is still standing.
A second temporary channel on the southbound side with a depth of 4.6m to 4.9m would open “in the coming days”, Mr Moore said.
Once debris is cleared, a third channel is planned with a depth of 6.1m to 7.6m that would allow almost all tug and barge traffic in and out of the port, Rear-Adm Gilreath said.
US President Joe Biden will get a first-hand look at the recovery on April 5 when he travels to Baltimore, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said.
The Biden administration has helped secure barges and a crane along with an early influx of money, and was working with Congress to ensure the federal government pays to rebuild the bridge. REUTERS
