Live Updates: Baltimore Bridge Rescue Efforts Shift to Recovery of 6 Missing Workers
Investigators were piecing together on Wednesday what had caused a massive cargo ship to lose propulsion as it left Baltimore and strike a major bridge, making it collapse. Rescue workers were trying to recover the bodies of six workers who plunged into the cold waters from the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it fell.
Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that agency investigators had boarded the ship overnight and had begun to interview the crew and collect data. She told CNN that the agency hoped to release more information gleaned from the ship’s data recorders later Wednesday.
The disaster severed Interstate 695 and upended operations at one of the nation’s busiest ports, causing a major disruption to shipping and global supply chains that is likely to ripple for weeks. The port is a vital link for the auto and coal industries.
Divers resumed the search for the workers in the Patapsco River early Wednesday, Mayor Brandon M. Scott of Baltimore told a local television station. The Coast Guard suspended the search for survivors shortly after dusk on Tuesday, some 18 hours after the impact. Officials said they were presuming that the missing members of a road repair crew that had been working on the bridge were dead, given the elapsed time and the cold water temperature. Two surviving workers had been plucked from the river earlier Tuesday.
Investigators were also beginning to piece together what led the cargo ship, a Singapore-flagged vessel nearly three football fields in length, to abruptly lose propulsion and plow into a mid-river pylon holding up the bridge.
Officials said that shortly before the impact, the ship, the Dali, suffered a “complete blackout” and issued a mayday warning, prompting traffic to be stopped at both ends of the bridge and averting a larger tragedy.
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One of the missing workers is a Honduran citizen, 38-year-old Maynor Yasir Suazo Sandoval, who had been living in the United States for two decades, according to Honduras’s migrant protection service. A nonprofit organization that provides services to the immigrant community in Baltimore identified another as Miguel Luna, a 40-year-old father of three from El Salvador.
President Biden said he expected the federal government to pay for the “entire cost” of the bridge’s reconstruction, calling on Congress to support funding for the work.
Ships belonging to Grace Ocean Private Ltd., the owner of the Dali, have been cited in recent years for labor violations.
The National Transportation Safety Board said its investigation would look into the structure of the bridge, including what protective structures existed around its pylons. The secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, called the disaster a “unique circumstance,” saying he doubted that any bridge could have withstood a direct impact of such magnitude.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico confirmed in a news conference that two of the missing workers were Mexican citizens. He refused to identify them but said that their families were being assisted by the government. Mr. López Obrador added that the episode showed how migrant workers in the U.S. often take risky jobs. “That is why they do not deserve to be treated as some irresponsible and insensitive politicians in the United States tend to treat them,” he said.
Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, said private companies would be held accountable for the crash at the Francis Scott Key Bridge if they are found to be responsible. “We can’t wait for that to play out to get to work right now,” he said in an interview with CNN.
Wes Moore of Maryland said divers were dealing with tremendously dangerous conditions as they searched for the missing workers. “We’re talking about frigid temperatures, we’re talking about a moving tide, we’re talking about darkness and mangled metal,” Mr. Moore said in an interview with CBS News. He said the economic impact of the collapse would be immense, as the port is indirectly connected to about 100,000 jobs.
Mayor Brandon M. Scott of Baltimore said rescue workers from federal, state and city agencies were still searching the waters for the missing construction workers who were on the bridge when it collapsed. Speaking to the local television station WJZ-TV early Wednesday, the mayor said the rescue workers were hoping to find the victims so their families could have “closure,” adding: “We know that they know they will not be coming back alive.”
Ships belonging to the company whose container vessel crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday have been cited in recent years for labor violations, which include underpaying ship crews and holding crew members onboard for months past their contracts, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.
In 2021, the authority detained the Western Callao, another ship formerly owned by the company, the Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd., after it found that the management was in arrears paying 13 crew members and had kept them on the ship for more than 12 months, well beyond their nine-month contracts. In 2020, an inspection of the same ship in Australia found that eight sailors had been aboard it for more than 11 months.
Another ship owned by Grace Ocean, the Furness Southern Cross, had 10 seafarers aboard for more than 14 months. The infractions were “serious and shameful” violations of an international convention on maritime labor, Michael Drake, the executive director of operations for the authority, said at the time, in October 2021.
“This type of behavior is unethical and in complete contravention to the Maritime Labor Convention,” Mr. Drake said. “The international conventions that protect seafarers’ rights are very clear.”
Any factors about the crew of the Dali, the Grace-owned container ship that crashed into the Key Bridge, including fatigue, will likely be among the many items the National Transportation Safety Board examines as it looks for the cause or causes of the crash.
Grace Ocean owns 55 ships, according to Equasis, a public database of ship information. While global companies such as Maersk charter the vessels, the owners and the ship managers are generally responsible for managing the crew and maintaining the ships. The management company for the Dali, Synergy Marine, was not the company managing the two vessels cited by Australia.
The extremely opaque nature of global ship-owning makes finding the ultimate owners and holding them accountable for any violations difficult. According to Singapore company records, Grace Ocean is owned by the British Virgin Islands-based Grace Ocean Investment Limited. Lloyds List, which first reported Grace Ocean’s infractions in 2021, reported that Grace Ocean Investment is based in Hong Kong. But the company matching the name and address in Lloyd’s database dissolved in 2015, according to Hong Kong company records.
The Singapore company has four directors — two Filipino citizens, a Singaporean and a Japanese person — with all listing addresses in Singapore, records show.
Alexandra Wrage, the president and founder of Trace, a group focused on anti-bribery, compliance and good governance, said that ship ownership structures were designed to maximize opacity and minimize accountability.
“There are some good actors in this space, but shipping is the Wild West from a compliance and accountability perspective,” Ms. Wrage said. “And when compliance and accountability aren’t priorities, issues like environmental standards, labor practices and health and safety often aren’t either.”
The Dali had 22 crew members from India onboard, according to a statement from Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine. None were injured.
An inspection of the Dali last year at a port in Chile found that the vessel had a deficiency related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery.” The inspection, conducted on June 27 at the port of San Antonio, specified that the problem concerned gauges and thermometers.
The Dali has had 27 inspections since 2015, according to Equasis. The only other deficiency, a damaged hull “impairing seaworthiness,” was found in 2016, at the port of Antwerp, in Belgium. The vessel hit a berth at the port that year. A spokesman representing Grace Ocean and Synergy did not immediately have a comment on the labor violations or on the deficiency reported last year.
A construction company employee who said he had labored alongside the six men missing after a Baltimore bridge collapse on Tuesday said that many of his co-workers were migrants working to support their relatives.
“We’re low-income families,” said Jesus Campos, who has worked at the construction company, Brawner Builders, for about eight months. “Our relatives are waiting for our help back in our home countries.”
The men worked for Brawner, a contractor based in Baltimore County, a senior executive at the company said on Tuesday. The executive, Jeffrey Pritzker, and the Coast Guard said that all of the missing workers were presumed dead, given how long it had been since the collapse.
“They were wonderful family people,” Mr. Pritzker said, before describing the victims’ survivors. “Spouses, children.” He added, “It’s just a very, very bad day.”
The company routinely does maintenance on bridges operated by the state. Its workers were repairing the bridge’s roadway when it was struck by the ship. Mr. Pritzker said that Brawner’s owner was distressed and had spent the early hours of Tuesday near the bridge hoping for a rescue, and had also since met with families of all of the missing workers.
Mr. Campos spent much of Tuesday afternoon at a gas station near where the police had blocked off the road to the Francis Scott Key Bridge. He wore a black sweatshirt bearing the construction company’s name and milled about, waiting for news and speaking on the phone.
“It’s tough,” he said. “This situation is very difficult.”
He told The Baltimore Banner that the employees who remained missing were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.
A nonprofit that provides services to immigrants in Baltimore confirmed that at least one of the missing men, Miguel Luna, was from El Salvador. Mr. Luna, 40, is married and has three children, said Gustavo Torres, the executive director of the nonprofit, We Are Casa. He said Mr. Luna had been living in Maryland for at least 19 years.
Guatemala’s foreign affairs ministry confirmed that two of the workers were Guatemalan nationals, from the regions of Petén and Chiquimula. The ministry, which did not release the names of its citizens, said that the country’s consul general in Maryland had spoken with the siblings of the two workers and was hoping to meet with their families.
The Mexican Consulate in Washington said in a statement that the nationalities of the missing people were still being determined. Embassies for the other two countries mentioned by Mr. Campos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Officials said that in addition to the six missing workers, two people had been rescued from the water. One did not need medical treatment, and another was taken to a hospital and released later in the day.
State officials said the construction crew had been fixing potholes when the ship crashed into the bridge.
Brawner was founded in 1980, according to its website, and its employees work on schools, historic properties, bridges and other infrastructure.
Reporting was contributed by Jacey Fortin, Miriam Jordan, Patricia Mazzei and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
