March 30, 2024
BALTIMORE (AP) — A crane that can lift 1,000 tons, described as one of the largest on the East Coast, arrived near a collapsed highway bridge in Baltimore as crews prepared Friday to begin clearing debris that paralyzed the search for four missing personnel and ships left for dead and prevented from entering or leaving the city’s major port.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore called the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after a collision with a shipment an “economic disaster” and described the difficult situations ahead in recovering workers’ bodies and tons of debris to reopen the Port of Baltimore.
“What we’re talking about today is simply the Maryland economy; it’s about the national economy,” Moore said at a news conference, with the massive crane in the background. “The port handles more cars and more agricultural equipment than any other port in this country. “
Moore visited the site on Friday and said he saw shipping boxes torn “like papier-mâché. “The damaged pieces of the bridge weigh up to 4,000 tons, Moore said, and crews will have to cut the metal girders before they can pull them out of the Patapsco River.
The available apparatus will come with seven floating cranes, 10 tugboats, nine barges, eight rescue vessels and five Coast Guard ships, Moore said. Much of it comes from the Navy.
“When you walk by there and see it up close, you realize how complicated it is. You realize how difficult the paintings in front of us are,” Moore said. “With such a complex rescue operation and, frankly, with an unprecedented rescue operation, you have to plan every moment. “
The water prevented divers from entering the river, Moore said. When they change, they will resume their efforts to recover the structure’s workers, who were repairing potholes in the bridge when it fell early Tuesday morning.
“We want to wipe out those families,” Moore said.
The Coast Guard is targeting what’s left of the bridge and the container shipment that hit it so it can clear the port’s shipping routes, Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said.
Teams of engineers from the Army, Navy and Coast Guard Corps of Engineers, as well as personnel sector experts, are comparing how to “break this bridge down into good-sized pieces that we can get up,” Gilreath said.
The Maryland Department of Transportation has already focused on the structure of a new bridge and is “studying state-of-the-art structure, engineering and design strategies so that we can accomplish this task quickly,” Secretary Paul J. Paul said. Wiedefeld.
Adam Ortiz, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional administrator for the Mid-Atlantic region, said there is no indication of active discharges from the ship or the presence of fabrics in the water that were hazardous to human health.
Col. Roland L. Butler Jr. , superintendent of the Maryland State Police, said the Federal Aviation Administration has been asked to identify a tactical no-fly zone that would start 3 nautical miles in all directions from the middle span of the bridge and get larger upward. 1,500 feet.
Butler pleaded with others to keep drones away from the domain and said law enforcement was ready to take action if airspace was violated.
The victims of the bridge collapse came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, officials said. At least eight other people fell into the water when the boat hit the bridge column, and two of them were rescued.
Divers recovered the bodies of two men in a pickup truck from the river, but the nature and location of the debris confounded the efforts of the other four workers.
“Divers can put their hands on that façade, and they can’t even see them,” said Donald Gibbons, an instructor at the Carpentry Technical Centers in the Eastern Atlantic States. “That’s why we say visibility 0. Es a bit like blocking, being in a dark closet on a dark night and not being able to see anything.
Baltimoreans stopped at lookout posts in the morning to observe the cranes. Ronald Hawkins, 71, who may barely see the bridge from his home, remembers witnessing its structure in 1972. It opened in 1977.
Now, sadly, it stopped in search of closure.
“I’m going to come here every day because I need to see the bridge come out of the water,” Hawkins said. “It’s something that hurts. “
President Joe Biden’s administration approved $60 million in immediate aid, with Biden saying the federal government would pay the full cost of rebuilding the bridge that carried Interstate 695.
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