The cleaning and removal of debris from the collapsed Baltimore bridge continues this Sunday, an operation that will be extensive and complicated, and to the point that a tentative date for the reopening of maritime traffic cannot yet be scheduled, authorities warned.
“This is going to be a very complex process,” US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned this Sunday in an interview he gave to CBS.
“There are, even now, forces acting on that steel, so a lot goes into making sure it can be safely dismantled.in order to ensure that the ship stays where it is supposed to be and does not swing into the channel,” Buttigieg elaborated.
Operations to remove a first portion of the damaged bridge, which fell on Tuesday when a cargo ship collided with one of its pillars, began on Saturday by specialized teams supported by the largest crane on the east coast of USA
Buttigieg added that this crane, capable of lifting up to a thousand tons of weight, will be joined in the coming days by another that can move up to 600 tons and that is on its way to the area of the accident, which left six people dead and lost. multi-millionaires.
“We have a ship that is almost the size of the Eiffel Tower and that is now trapped inside the canal that has the Key Bridge on top,” Maryland Governor Wes Moore told CNN today.
The cargo ship, called Dalí, and its crew of just over twenty sailors (mostly from India), have been stranded since Tuesday amid some 4,000 tons of debris and pieces of metal, some of which fell on the cover and damaged some containers.
Most of the cargo of this ship, which when at maximum capacity can support more than 110,000 tonshas not suffered damage, according to authorities.
The debris removal work will be done almost piece by piece, in an operation in which the pertinent investigations are carried out at the same time to find the causes of the accident.
“We need to have answers about what happened. “We need to know who should be to blame for this and make sure we hold them accountable,” Moore stressed today.
This same Sunday, the governor announced the launch of a telephone line to provide unemployment assistance to workers who have been affected by the collapse of the bridge that connects with the port of Baltimore, a maritime terminal that is responsible for about 8,000 direct jobs and about 10,000 indirect jobs, he said.
“People have to remember that this is not a Baltimore catastrophe, nor a Maryland catastrophe. “This is also a national economic catastrophe,” Moore said.
The governor reiterated that as soon as conditions allow, the divers will resume the search for the other four workers who are presumed to have died in the accident. whose bodies, however, have not yet been recovered.
Six people died in the accident, all of them Latin American workers who at the time of the event were carrying out asphalt patching tasks. Of them, rescue teams managed to recover two bodies.
The authorities have indicated that at the moment the accident site is not safe for divers to continue with recovery tasks.
With the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge Access to the port of Baltimore, one of the main ports on the Atlantic coast of the United States, was blocked, and through which in 2023 some $80 billion of merchandise from abroad would transit.
Due to the devastating effects on the local economy caused by the accident, the government’s Small Business Administration (SBA) will launch a low-interest loan program for small businesses in Maryland, Washington DC, and Delaware counties , Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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