Workers have removed part of a bridge that collapsed after a ship collision in Baltimore, Maryland, to allow crane access to the crash site.
According to the Reuters news agency, Maryland and US officials said that work had been going on for several days to raise the first piece of the collapsed Francis Scott Bridge from the water so that tugboats could access the crash site.
It is the first step in a complex effort to reopen the city’s port, which has been closed since the accident, according to officials.
The steel-framed bridge collapsed in the early hours of Tuesday when a container ship rammed into the pier while it was in the sea. In this accident, six laborers working on the bridge drowned, out of which only two bodies have been found.
The bridge’s steel structure collapsed into the waterway connecting the port to the sea, suspending shipping from Baltimore.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore told a news conference that a section of the bridge’s steel superstructure north of the crash site will be cut off and lifted by crane onto a barge and the nearby Trade Point Atlantic site. will be brought to
“This will ultimately help us to open a temporarily limited channel that will facilitate bringing more rescue machinery around the bridge collapse site,” the governor said.
“It won’t take hours, it won’t take days, but once we complete this phase of the work,” he declined to provide a timeline for this part of the clearance work. , so we can move more tugboats and barges to the area to speed up the recovery work.’
A portion of the bridge fell onto a 984-foot-long container ship, which is still in the same condition. Governor Moore said workers will not attempt to remove the broken portion of the gray bridge structure above the ship yet.
It is not clear when the ship can be moved, but they said the cargo ship has been damaged. “It’s a very complicated operation,” Gurney said of efforts to clear the bridge and open the Port of Baltimore to shipping traffic. The bodies of two workers who were repairing the bridge deck at the time of the accident have been recovered, but Governor Moore said efforts to recover the bodies of four other workers are still on hold as divers work amid the debris. Very dangerous.