Six people are presumed dead on Tuesday after the spectacular collapse of a major highway bridge in the strategic port of Baltimore, on the east coast of the United States, hit by a container ship in distress.
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Despite a vast deployment of rescue services by air, on land, at sea and even underwater, only two survivors were found, one of whom was seriously injured.
Six employees of a public works company who were working on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed are presumed dead, one of its bosses told a local newspaper. “We’re all in shock,” Jeffrey Pritzker told the Baltimore Sun.
It is “a terrible accident”, reacted President Joe Biden from the White House after the nighttime disaster, the results of which would have been worse if the ship, which suffered a “momentary loss of propulsion”, had not had managed to send out a distress call.
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This alert allowed authorities to cut off part of the road traffic on the bridge and save lives, said Wes Moore, the governor of the state of Maryland, who declared a state of emergency.
Impressive CCTV footage shows the MV Dali, a Singapore-flagged container ship, veering off course and hitting a pier of this bridge inaugurated in 1977, causing several arches to collapse into the port.
In these videos, lights from maintenance vehicles can be seen on the bridge, before it buckled and fell apart, around 1:30 a.m. local time (5:30 GMT).
“The whole bridge just collapsed! Start, start, anyone… everyone…”, an operator called on the emergency radio frequency in the seconds following the fall.
“Submerged vehicles”
Jennifer Woolf almost lost her 20-year-old son in the disaster. He took the bridge three minutes before the tragedy. “He came home in a panic, crying, trembling, and I started to cry too,” the 41-year-old American, met at a gas station that had become a crossroads for rescue and emergency services, told AFP. residents, shocked.
AFP
Search operations continued throughout the day Tuesday after authorities detected “the presence of submerged vehicles.” Around the debris of the bridge, boats, drones, helicopters and divers were active.
Joe Biden promised to mobilize all necessary federal resources, and pledged that the bridge would be rebuilt, although it would take time. Wanting to get ahead of insurers, the Democrat said he “intends that the federal government will pay the entire cost of reconstruction.”
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Crucial road axis
The 2.6 km long four-lane bridge was located in the southwest of Baltimore, a large American industrial and port city, in the state of Maryland, about 60 kilometers northeast of the capital Washington.
The port, now clogged, represents a hotspot for the economy of the east coast of the United States.
Shipping to and from Baltimore is “suspended until further notice,” officials said, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg predicting a “major and prolonged impact on supply chains.”
The vessel was operated by shipping company Synergy Group and chartered by Danish shipping giant Maersk, which said it was “horrified”. The crew is unhurt.
AFP
The ship in question, named Dali, is a recent container ship, 300 meters long and 48 meters wide, which was sailing towards Sri Lanka. Its crew, seeing the vessel suddenly ungovernable, tried to slow its course by dropping anchor, without succeeding in avoiding the collision.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott spoke of “an inconceivable tragedy,” with police saying they ruled out a terrorist act a priori.
AFP
Jennifer Homendy, head of the US Transportation Safety Agency (NTSB), explained to the press from Baltimore that the container ship’s data recorders represented “a crucial piece of the investigation”, carried out with the Coast Guard. . According to her, they should be picked up on Wednesday “or maybe this evening” Tuesday, because, at this stage, none of the 24 NTSB investigators mobilized had boarded.
The head of the investigation office said she had spoken with her counterpart from Singapore, who should come to Baltimore in the coming days as well as officials from the port authorities of the city-state, whose flag the Dali flies.
AFP
The investigation will have to determine how the shock caused by a single ship could destroy several arches of the metal bridge, the construction of which began in 1972 and which was inaugurated in 1977.
AFP
Even if the container ship has a powerful force of inertia, especially with its cargo, “the extent of the damage to the superstructure of the bridge seems disproportionate to the cause, it is a subject to be explored in the investigations,” commented Professor Toby Mottram, a structural expert from Britain’s University of Warwick.
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The “Dali”, a recent cargo ship flying the Singaporean flag
The cargo ship “Dali”, which caused the collapse of a bridge on Tuesday in Baltimore in the United States, is a recent container ship flying the flag of Singapore.
Built by the Korean Hyundai shipyard in 2015, it is 300 meters long, 48 meters wide, 24.8 meters high and 15 meters draft.
It is of average size for this type of ship (95,000 gross tons).
The ship left the port of Baltimore at 1 a.m. on Tuesday for a crossing of almost a month to the port of Colombo (Sri Lanka), according to the Marine Traffic website. It hit the bridge at 1:28 a.m. local time.
The ship belongs to the Hong Kong company Grace Ocean.
Danish giant Maersk confirmed on Tuesday that it was transporting its customers’ goods.
AFP
The Singaporean company that operates the Dali, Synergy Marine, said it was being operated by two pilots at the time of the collision.
No member of the crew was injured and there was no pollution noted, Synergy stressed.
Twenty-two crew members were on board at the time of the accident, according to the Port of Singapore. Searches are currently being carried out to find people who have fallen into the water.
Accustomed to journeys between Asia and the East Coast of the United States, the “Dali” crossed the Panama Canal on March 13 before passing through the ports of New York, Norfolk and finally Baltimore.
Shortly after it was launched, in 2016, the ship caused a first incident by hitting a quay in the port of Antwerp (Belgium), according to the Vessel Finder and Shipwrecklog sites.
Its tanks can hold up to 8,344 cubic meters of fuel oil, according to Marine Traffic. It is insured by the British company Britannia.