2024-03-27 00:52:19
There is no hope. The search for survivors was suspended in Baltimore on Tuesday evening, after the collapse of a highway bridge hit by a ship, the six people missing are now presumed dead, a coast guard official announced. “Based on the length of the search (…), the temperature of the water, at this time we do not believe that we will find these individuals still alive,” said Vice Admiral Shannon Gilreath during the a press conference.
Help had been deployed in the air, on land, at sea and even underwater. Only two survivors had so far been found, one of whom was seriously injured. Until then, emergency services had been working around the immense twisted metal structure, in an impressive deployment of resources including boats, drones, helicopters and divers.
Joe Biden promised to mobilize all necessary federal resources, and pledged that the bridge would be rebuilt, admitting that it would take time. The toll would have been worse if the ship, which suffered a “momentary loss of propulsion”, had not managed to send out a distress call. 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 Singapore-flagged container ship veer off course and hit a pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing several of the structure’s arches to collapse into the port. In these videos, we see lights from maintenance vehicles on the bridge, before it buckles and falls in pieces. “Our sonar detected the presence of submerged vehicles,” said James Wallace, the city’s fire chief.
VIDEO. Bridge collapsed by a cargo ship in Baltimore: “The pile had no chance of resisting”
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott spoke of “an inconceivable tragedy,” with police saying they ruled out a possible terrorist act. 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.
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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