According to Colonel Roland L. Butler Jr., of the Maryland State Police, the rescue operations turned into a search and recovery operation for the bodies. Although several teams are searching, considering the depth of the river’s water and the length of time they have been missing, the six workers who were on the bridge at the time of the collapse have already been presumed dead.
Efforts to find them will, however, continue on Wednesday.
“We don’t believe we’ll find any of them alive”Baltimore Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath also lamented at a press conference.
Maryland State Police and U.S. Coast Guard officials explained that reduced visibility and strong currents in the canal, now littered with debris, made search efforts in the river too risky to continue overnight.
From the early hours of Wednesday morning, “We hope to get divers into the water and begin a more detailed search to do our best to recover these six missing people”said Roland Butler.
The six people who remain missing after the bridge collapsed in the early hours of Tuesday were part of a construction team that was repairing holes in the bridge’s pavement.
The cargo ship “Dali” that collided with the bridge in Baltimore had already had problems detected in June, during an inspection.
Since its construction in 2015, the vessel, which is owned by the company Grace Ocean PTE but which was now being used by the Synergy Marine Group, was subject to 27 inspections. In June last year, one of them, in Chile, identified a problem with “propulsion and auxiliary machinery”, according to data from the Equasis system, cited by the Associated Press (AP).
The most recent date is September 13th and was carried out by the US Coast Guard in New York. The same system states that “the standard examination” did not identify any problems.
In 2016, an inspection in Belgium indicated that damage to the hull had impaired the navigability of the “Dali”, after it hit the pier used for mooring ships in the port of Antwerp.
In the June inspection, the container ship had a damaged bunker pressure monitor, but it was repaired, and a new assessment of the vessel is scheduled for June this year.
The Port Authority of Singapore said on Tuesday it was in contact with the US Coast Guard to “provide the necessary assistance”, indicating that it will also open its own investigation into the accident.
Singapore’s Synergy Group also confirmed on Tuesday that none of the ship’s 22 crew members were injured and said it was working with authorities to determine the cause of the accident. Before the collision, the container ship’s crew issued a warning that it was adrift, allowing authorities to cut off traffic on the bridge and prevent a greater tragedy.
Local authorities are now trying to determine what led the “Dali” to deviate from its initial course, as the ship began to capsize two minutes before the impact that would end up collapsing the bridge.
Both the local police and the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, Alejandro Mayorkas, stated that there was no evidence that this was a terrorist act or even a deliberate one, but the FBI (North American federal police) has already joined the investigation.
Tags: Collapse Baltimore Bridge Authorities report missing people dead
--
