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Salvage crews are expected to pull the first section of Baltimore City’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge out of the water on Saturday, allowing barges and tugboats access to the disaster site, Maryland and U.S. officials said. , announced it would be the first step in a complex effort to reopen Baltimore City after it was locked down. port.
A steel truss bridge collapsed early Tuesday morning, killing six road workers. A huge container ship lost power and crashed into a support pylon, sending much of the bridge into the Patapsco River and cutting off shipping lanes in the Port of Baltimore.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a news conference that a crane will lift part of the bridge’s steel superstructure north of the crash site onto a barge and transport it to the Tradepoint Atlantic venue in nearby Sparrows Point. He said he would cut it into pieces that could be cut.
“This will ultimately allow us to temporarily open the restricted waterway and allow more vessels to enter the waters surrounding the collapse site,” Moore said.
He did not provide a schedule for this part of the clearance work. “It’s not going to take hours,” he said. “It won’t take a few days, but once this phase of work is completed, we can move more tugs, more barges and more boats into the area to accelerate the recovery.”
Workers have no plans yet to remove the crumpled section of the bridge’s superstructure resting on the bow of the 984-foot Singapore-flagged container ship Dali, which destroyed the bridge. Moore said it was unclear when the ship would be able to move, but said the hull was damaged but “intact.”
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Governor Moore says debris removal is a ‘very complex task’
“This is a very complex operation,” Moore said of the effort to remove debris from the bridge and open the Port of Baltimore to shipping traffic.
The bodies of the two workers who were repairing the bridge deck at the time of the disaster have been recovered, but Moore presumes that they died because the conditions were too dangerous for divers to work in with so much debris. He said efforts to recover the other four people still remain suspended.
Coast Guard Maj. Gen. Shannon Gilreath told reporters that teams from the Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy’s salvage division, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will need to clear debris from the Patapsco River’s deep-draft channel before moving the Dali. He said that there was. .
Saturday’s work will include cutting the parts just north of that waterway and hoisting them onto a barge with a 160-ton offshore crane. A larger 1,000 tonne crane is also being installed at the bridge site.
The work will be brought to Tradepoint Atlantic, the former Bethlehem Steel Mill site being developed as a distribution center for companies such as Amazon.com, Home Depot and Volkswagen. The facility’s port on the Chesapeake Bay side of the collapsed bridge is fully operational.
Baltimore Bridge Collapse Impacts Port Operations and Jobs
Five days have passed since the tragedy, and the work of about 15,000 people who work mainly in day-to-day port operations is still suspended. Although logistics experts say other East Coast ports should be able to handle container shipments, Baltimore is the nation’s largest port for importing and exporting “roll-on, roll-off” vehicles of agricultural and construction equipment.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is calling for a disaster declaration in which the Small Business Administration would allow small businesses affected by disasters to apply for emergency low-interest loans of up to $2 million through the end of 2024. He said he had approved the request.
The federal government on Thursday awarded Maryland an initial $60 million in emergency funding to begin clearing debris and rebuilding the Key Bridge, which was done with unusual speed. President Joe Biden has promised that the federal government will pay for all the costs of removing the debris and rebuilding the bridge.
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