Trapped vessels start moving out of Baltimore after bridge collapse

The Port of Baltimore opened a temporary channel on Monday, freeing some tugs and barges that had been trapped by last week’s bridge collapse, but officials said wider restoration of commercial shipping remained frustrated by unyielding conditions.
Baltimore’s shipping channel has been blocked since a fully loaded container ship lost power and collided with a support column of the Francis Scott Key Bridge last Tuesday, killing six road workers and causing the highway bridge to tumble into the Patapsco River.

A recovery team led by the U.S. Coast Guard and the state of Maryland aims to quickly reopen the port, the largest in the U.S. for “roll-on, roll-off” vehicle imports and exports of farm and construction equipment.
But first it must free the cargo vessel Dali, stuck under steel bridge debris with 4,000 containers and a 21-member crew stranded aboard since the accident.
To illustrate the task ahead, officials said recovery workers needed 10 hours to cut free and remove a 200-ton piece of debris – what they called “a relatively small lift.”

“We’re talking about something that is almost the size of the Statue of Liberty,” Governor Wes Moore told a news conference. “The scale of this project, to be clear, is enormous. And even the smallest (tasks) are huge.”

Beneath the surface, the job is even more complicated than originally imagined, said U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath, as the twisted steel is obscured by murky waters darkened by the volume of debris.

Barge cranes are shown near the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge on the Patapsco River, in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. March 30, 2024. U.S. Coast Guard/Petty Officer 2nd Class Taylor Bacon/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights

“These girders are essentially tangled together, intertwined, making it very difficult to figure out where you need to potentially cut so that we can make that into more manageable sizes to lift them from the water,” Gilreath told the same news conference.
Officials declined to estimate how long it would take to clear the harbor.
Limited ship traffic resumed for the first time on Monday after recovery teams opened a temporary channel with a controlling depth of 11 feet (3.35 meters) on the northbound side of the wreckage.
The first vessel to transit the channel was a tugboat pushing a barge supplying jet fuel to the U.S. Department of Defense, the Coast Guard said on Facebook, posting video of the barge sliding beneath a truncated section of bridge that is still standing.
A second temporary channel on the southbound side with a depth of 15 to 16 feet (4.6 to 4.9 meters) would open “in the coming days,” Moore said.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/maryland-opens-temporary-channel-collapsed-bridge-site-governor-2024-04-01/