Baltimore Key Bridge collapse updates: Two bodies of workers recovered

“This demonstrates that migrants go out and do risky jobs at midnight, and for this reason they do not deserve to be treated as they are by certain insensitive, irresponsible politicians in the United States,” Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said during a news briefing on Wednesday, adding that “insensitive, irresponsible” politicians do not understand the contributions migrants make to the country.

Mexico’s foreign affairs ministry told The Telegraph that the two missing Mexican workers are from the states of Veracruz and Michoacán.

Two two agencies will work of making the port fully operational again, officials said during a White House press briefing that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Vice Admiral Peter Gautier attended.

Divers on Wednesday recovered the remains of two of the six workers missing since they were tossed into Baltimore Harbor from a highway bridge that collapsed into shipping lanes when a faltering cargo freighter rammed into the structure, officials said last night.

The bodies were pulled from the mouth of the Patapsco River a day after the massive container ship lost power and its ability to manoeuvre before ploughing into a support pylon of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, knocking most of it into the water below.

The cargo ship Dali that crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge can reach almost to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris if stood upright, and about two-thirds of the way up the Empire State Building in New York.

It can carry the equivalent of almost 10,000 standard-sized metal shipping containers, and at the time of the accident was carrying nearly 4,700 containers. But while those figures are impressive, the Dali pales in comparison to the world’s largest container ships, which can carry more than 24,000 containers.

There are environmental and economic advantages to operating giant container ships, but their sheer size and weight make them difficult to manoeuvre and stop — especially when something goes wrong.

Dali’s length is measured to be around 984 feet (300 metres) and it weighed 95,000 tons when empty.

Here’s what you should know about the mid-sized ocean monster:

The Dali set out from the Port of Baltimore around 1am on Tuesday, a local pilot manoeuvering the container ship towards open waters after two days in the harbour in preparation for its next sail to Sri Lanka.

The 948-foot vessel edged closer to Francis Scott Key Bridge and its four lanes of I-695 over the Patapsco River; early-morning traffic was relatively light as construction crews fixed potholes on the major thoroughfare that’s served the region since 1977.

The bridge was in fair condition, according to May 2023 inspection records from the National Bridge Inventory; the construction was essentially cosmetic and the workers, presumably, immersed in routine.

Then the lights of the Dali went off, on, and off again; it wasn’t long before the ship issued a mayday call and officers rushed to stop additional traffic from crossing Key bridge. The Dali, having lost propulsion and power, crashed into a bridge support buttress just before 1.30am; less than a minute later, the majority of the structure vanished beneath the surface of the Patapsco.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a major highway artery for Baltimore and the wider region, has forced the indefinite closure of the city’s port, one of the busiest on the US Eastern Seaboard.

It is now almost exactly two days since the Dali container ship brought down the bridge, and the US Coast Guard says its priorities at this stage are to restore the waterway for shipping, stabilise the vessel and extricate it from the wreckage.

Speaking at a White House news briefing, Vice Admiral Peter Gautier said the remnants of the bridge needed to be cleared from the vessel before it can be moved.

The Maryland Transportation Authority said that it is too early in the investigation to understand the full picture of what caused the collapse.

“It’s what we call a continuous structure every little piece is connected to another – and unfortunately it’s a catastrophic collapse,” they said.

Reports suggest that the Dali had “lost propulsion” as it left the port embarking on its journey, with crew notifying officials that they had lost control of the vessel, ABC reported, citing an unclassified intelligence report.

“The vessel notified MD Department of Transportation (MDOT) that they had lost control of the vessel and an collision with the bridge was possible,” ABC said, quoting the report by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“The vessel struck the bridge causing a complete collapse.”

However, some have also questioned whether the structural integrity of the bridge itself was strong enough.

Julian Carter, a structural and civil engineering expert, earlier told Sky News that the structures of the bridge were “very weak” at certain points.

Fire officials said earlier that they do not have any information as to whether there was a problem with the 300-metre-long ship, and have not spoken to the pilot of the vessel yet.

Chief Wallace added that he could not confirm if there had been a fuel leakage from the cargo ship.

“We hope as the sun comes up, we will get a much better picture if we do have a fuel spill and what the impact has been so far,” he said.

Gov Moore said on Wednesday that it’s still unclear what caused the ship’s power to go out. “There needs to be accountability to make sure these things do not happen again and that we have a system in place to make sure they don’t,” he said at a press conference.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told CBS News on Wednesday that the agency has the voyage data recorder, which can provide “a timeline” of the lead-up to the crash as early as later today. The instrument can also give insights into positioning of the vessel and power loss, she said.

Many questions remain about the collision, including why the ship hit with the bridge in the first place. But many of them are structural: how was the ship able to reach the bridge, why was it not protected against such collisions, and why the bridge collapsed so quickly once the collision had happened.

Experts say it may be too early to say exactly what happened during the collision and the collapse that resulted. But they caution that bridges of this kind are specifically built with protections against such crashes – and that it may have required a huge impact to make the bridge fall in this way.

Seeing the site on the Patapsco River where a cargo ship hit brought down Baltimore’s Key Bridge is “devastating”, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board Jennifer Homendy said.

“It’s just utter devastation,” the NTSB chief said, adding that she is thinking of families who lost people and those who are waiting to reunite with their loved ones.

“It’s pretty devastating, certainly, seeing not just what’s going on with the cargo containers, but just looking at what was a bridge span — three bridge spans that are pretty much gone,” she said in a news briefing last night.