The cargo ship that lost power and crashed into a bridge in Baltimore underwent “routine engine maintenance” in port beforehand, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday, as divers recovered the bodies of two of six workers who plunged into the water when it collapsed. The others were presumed dead, and officials said search efforts had been exhausted.
Investigators on Wednesday began collecting evidence from the vessel that struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the previous day. The bodies of the two men were located in the morning inside a red pickup submerged in about 25 feet (7.6 meters) of water near the bridge’s middle span, Col. Roland L. Butler Jr., superintendent of Maryland State Police, announced at an evening news conference.
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He identified the men as Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, who was from Mexico and living in Baltimore, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, who was from Guatemala and living in Dundalk, Maryland.
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All search efforts have been exhausted, and based on sonar scans, authorities “firmly” believe the other vehicles with victims inside are encased in superstructures and concrete from the collapsed bridge, Butler said.
A coworker of the people missing said yesterday that he was told the workers were on break and sitting in their trucks parked on the bridge when it crumpled.
The investigation picked up speed as the Baltimore region reeled from the sudden loss of a major transportation link that's part of the highway loop around the city. The disaster also closed the port that is vital to the city's shipping industry.
Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board boarded the ship and planned to recover information from its electronics and paperwork, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said.
Late, Wednesday, Homendy said there were 56 containers of hazardous materials on board the Dali when it crashed. The containers, holding 760 tons of hazardous materials, according to Homendy, mostly contained corrosives, flammables and "miscellaneous" materials including lithium ion batteries, NBC News reported.
Some containers have been breached, Homendy said, adding that a sheen can be seen on the waterway.
Homendy said that some of the breached containers are in the water and some are on the vessel and that she does not know the total number of breached containers or the timeline for getting them out, as that does not fall on the NTSB.
She added that it is a "pretty dangerous situation" that is preventing officials from getting to the hazardous materials to assess what remains.
The agency also is reviewing the voyage data recorder recovered by the Coast Guard and building a timeline of what led to the crash, which federal and state officials have said appeared to be an accident.
The ship’s crew issued a mayday call early Tuesday, saying they had lost power and the vessel's steering system just minutes before striking one of the bridge’s columns.
At least eight people went into the water. Two were rescued, but the other six — part of a construction crew that was filling potholes on the bridge — were missing and presumed dead.
The debris complicated the search, according to a Homeland Security memo described to The Associated Press by a law enforcement official. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the document or the investigation and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said the divers faced dangerous conditions.
“They are down there in darkness where they can literally see about a foot in front of them. They are trying to navigate mangled metal, and they’re also in a place it is now presumed that people have lost their lives,” he said Wednesday.
Among the victims are people from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, according to diplomats from those countries.
Guatemala’s consulate in Maryland confirmed that two of the missing were Guatemalan citizens working on the bridge. Mexico’s Washington consulate also confirmed in a statement posted on X that Mexican citizens were among the missing but did not say how many.
The Honduran man was identified as Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandova by that country's deputy foreign affairs minister.
"The hope we have is to be able to see the body," Suazo’s brother told NBC News. "We want to see him, find him, know whether he is dead, because we don’t know anything."
Father Ako Walker, a Catholic priest at Sacred Heart of Jesus, said outside a vigil that he spent time with the families of the workers as they waited for news of their loved ones.
“You can see the pain etched on their faces,” Walker said.
María del Carmen Castellón told Telemundo 44 that her husband Miguel Luna, 49, was one of the missing employees working on the bridge. Castellón said Luna is a father of six from El Salvador.
Capt. Michael Burns Jr. of the Maritime Center for Responsible Energy said bringing a ship into or out of ports with limited room to maneuver is “one of the most technically challenging and demanding things that we do.”
There are “few things that are scarier than a loss of power in restricted waters,” he said. And when a ship loses propulsion and steering, “then it’s really at the mercy of the wind and the current.”
Video showed the ship moving at what Maryland’s governor said was about 9 mph (15 kph) toward the 1.6-mile (2.6-kilometer) bridge. Traffic was still crossing the span, and some vehicles appeared to escape with only seconds to spare. The crash caused the span to break and fall into the water within seconds.
The last-minute warning from the ship allowed police just enough time to stop traffic on the interstate highway. One officer parked sideways across the lanes and planned to drive onto the bridge to alert a construction crew once another officer arrived. But he did not get the chance as the powerless the vessel barrelled into the bridge.
Attention also turned to the container ship Dali and its past.
Synergy Marine Group, which manages the ship, said the impact happened while it was under the control of one or more pilots, who are local specialists who help guide vessels safely in and out of ports.
The ship, which was headed from Baltimore to Sri Lanka, is owned by Grace Ocean Private Ltd., and Danish shipping giant Maersk said it had chartered the vessel.
The vessel passed foreign port state inspections in June and September 2023. In the June 2023 inspection, a faulty monitor gauge for fuel pressure was rectified before the vessel departed the port, Singapore’s port authority said in a statement Wednesday.
The ship was traveling under a Singapore flag, and officials there said they will be conducting their own investigation in addition to supporting U.S. authorities.
The sudden loss of a highway that carries 30,000 vehicles a day, and the disruption of a vital shipping port, will affect not only thousands of dockworkers and commuters but also U.S. consumers who are likely to feel the impact of shipping delays.
“A lot of people don’t realize how important the port is just to everything,” said Cat Watson, who takes the bridge to work everyday and lives close enough that she was awakened by the collision. “We’re going to be feeling it for a very long time.”
The Port of Baltimore is a busy entry point along the East Coast for new vehicles made in Germany, Mexico, Japan and the United Kingdom, along with coal and farm equipment.
Ship traffic entering and leaving the port has been suspended indefinitely. Windward Maritime, a maritime risk-management company, said its data shows a large increase in ships that are waiting for a port to go to, with some anchored outside Baltimore or nearby Annapolis.
Speaking at a White House news conference, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the Biden administration was focused on reopening the port and rebuilding the bridge, but he avoided putting a timeline on those efforts. He noted that the original bridge took five years to complete.
Another priority is dealing with shipping issues, and Buttigieg planned to meet Thursday with supply chain officials.
From 1960 to 2015, there were 35 major bridge collapses worldwide due to ship or barge collisions, according to the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure.
