The country would soon wake to the news — that a wayward container ship, lacking power, had barreled straight into a support pier, felling within seconds a half-century-old structure essential to East Coast transportation and commerce. But as the darkened tide continuously rocked a vessel carrying thousands of steel containers and, now, a bridge span, the noise was the only hint of ruin.
“That banging, it’s what we kept hearing,” said Marcus Johnson, a Baltimore County assistant fire chief and one of the first responders present that morning.
Thursday marks the 6-month anniversary of the Key Bridge collapse after a 984-foot, 100,000-ton container ship named the Dali rammed into it, a tragedy that rattled Baltimore, killed six construction workers toiling through the night, and launched national efforts to study and better protect infrastructure. The effects are most felt locally, though, where residents can easily recall the flashbulb memory of where they were when they learned the news early that Tuesday morning.
“Feels like yesterday, feels like an eternity,” said Bruce Gartner, executive director of the Maryland Transportation Authority, which owned the bridge and is responsible for its rebuild.
In the immediate aftermath, crews set up shop on land as close as they could to the scene. For Baltimore County responders, that was the Dundalk side; for Baltimore City, it was near Fort Armistead. When Johnson arrived on-site around 2 a.m., about a half-hour after the collapse, he spotted the city responders’ emergency lights flashing about 1.5 miles away, across the Patapsco River. Realizing the two teams needed to unite their efforts, he got in his car.
“My first instinct was to drive across the bridge,” he said.
Every day before then, it would have been a quick, 3-minute drive. Instead, he became perhaps the first person in post-bridge Baltimore to drive all the way across the city to reach a location that the Key Bridge, now lost in the water, had once connected.
Two Million Lost Hours
Traffic is not a tragedy. There is nothing inherently appalling about a drive taking 10 minutes longer than it should, nothing cataclysmic about being stuck behind a bevy of brake lights. And yet, it can be maddening, and can, ultimately, rob residents of their most precious commodity: time.Six months after the collapse of the Key Bridge, traffic impacts remain — and they will continue for years. It’s one of the most far-reaching consequences of the disaster. The 30,000 vehicles that took the Key Bridge each day have all been rerouted and will not be able to use a rebuilt span until at least 2028.
Vehicles have spent over 2.6 million more hours on three particularly impacted Baltimore-area roadways — Interstate 95, Interstate 695 and Interstate 895 — from April 1 to Sept. 21 of this year as compared with the same time frame last year, according to data from the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of Maryland.
The analysis is not definitive, cautioned the lab’s founder and director, Michael Pack, but, given that the data does not include delays on other, smaller roads, it’s likely a conservative estimate of the severe congestion impact.
Traffic engineers compute how costly delays are using estimates of the worth of time. For example, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute has set the national average hourly cost per passenger vehicle as $39.30 per hour and $64.68 per hour for commercial vehicles.
Those 2.6 million extra vehicle hours have resulted in a loss of time equating to at least $108 million, a figure that does not include the cost of fuel or environmental impacts of emissions. Over the course of four-and-a-half years — the amount of time between the collapse and the expected bridge rebuild — that number could exceed $1 billion.
In some cases — such as heading north on I-95 during the evening rush hour — average travel times have increased by 50 percent. And when traffic is bad, it’s really bad. Comparing the 95th percentile commutes (meaning especially lengthy travel times) shows a more than two-fold increase during morning rush hour on some roadways.
No magic pathway or temporary bridge is coming to mitigate the congestion. People might continue to adjust to a “new normal,” Pack said, but the traffic is expected to continue until the new bridge is ready.
It’s difficult to predict, Pack said, but added: “I doubt there would be a vast improvement.”
‘The Best of Us’
The morning of the collapse, video of the bridge collapse circulated immediately. By 4 a.m., it had made its way to Honduras, to Martin Suazo Sandoval, whose youngest brother, Maynor, had been fixing potholes on the bridge.Martin got out of bed, summoned his nephew and resolved to travel across Honduras to the town where his mother, Rosa Emerita Sandoval Paz, lives. They wanted to give her as much information as possible without harming her fragile health.
She had a strange feeling when they arrived, Martin recalled, and when, accompanied by a doctor, they finally told her the circumstances, she immediately fainted.
That night, the six construction workers still in the Patapsco River were assumed to be dead by authorities, but the Suazo Sandoval family held onto a sliver of hope.
“We knew that my brother could swim, and we had great hope,” Martin said in Spanish. “You believe in God and had a great hope that he was alive.”
For almost two agonizing weeks, Martin and his family in Honduras anxiously awaited updates from another brother, Carlos, who lives in Baltimore. Martin said videos posted on social media falsely saying that his brother had been found alive “played with our feelings, played with our family’s dignity.”
Then, Maynor’s body was found.
“It was even harder when they told us Maynor had been found dead,” Martin said.
Lost was the little brother who supported his siblings and his parents. Lost was the perpetual dreamer. The generous man who worked hard jobs in America — like repairing roadways at 1 a.m. — to send money back to Honduras to support youth sports, the terminally ill, the handicapped.
He was the Suazo Sandoval family’s “fundamental pillar.”
“He left himself with nothing to support others,” Martin said. “He was the best of us in the family.”
Maynor called his mother each day, without fail. The afternoon before the collapse, he told her that he loved her, that he had to hang up to go to work and that he would call her the next day.
“The next day, I awaited a call,” his mother, Sandoval Paz, recalled in Spanish.
Attorneys representing the estates or families of the six victims — Maynor, Miguel Angel Luna, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, Dorlian Castillo Cabrera, Carlos Daniel Hernandez Estrella and Jose Mynor Lopez — have filed lawsuits against the Dali’s owner. Among the legal jargon in the claims is a brief, personal description of each immigrant who sought in Baltimore a better life.
Those few sentences fail to fully encompass the men. And any dollar amount will fail to make up for their loss, Martin said.
“None of this will stop our pain,” he said.
Years of Litigation
The bodies of the six victims have been found, tons of debris have been removed from the Patapsco River, and the Dali cargo ship is on its way to China for repairs.The lengthy Key Bridge fallout, however, will carry on in courtrooms and litigation that could take several years. Grace Ocean Private Ltd. and Synergy Marine Ptd. Ltd., the Dali’s Singaporean owner and manager, have turned to a 19th-century law in an effort to limit their liability in the disaster to $44 million — a drop in the bucket of the billions of economic loss from the event.
More than two dozen lawsuits, however, counter those efforts. None are more explosive than the U.S. Department of Justice’s assertions that cheap, shoddy quick fixes precipitated the disaster. And none are likely to seek as much in damages as a claim by the state of Maryland, the owner of the bridge.
In a news conference Tuesday, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown vowed that the state would move quickly in asking a federal judge for a trial date.
“It is our goal to break through this limitation of liability — that they, so quickly after their gross negligence and reckless conduct, ran to the courthouse steps to limit their liability, based on a law passed 150 years ago when you had wooden ships and crowded ports,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Port of Baltimore continues to rebound economically. The shipping channel, blocked by the bridge that once spanned it, was closed for months, forcing vessels to unload at other ports. Some fretted that lost business would never return to Baltimore, but in recent months, the port has begun to bounce back.
The public port terminals are currently handling roughly 60 percent of the cargo as they did at this point last year, but are receiving about 90 percent of the ships, Maryland Point Administration spokesperson Richard Scher said. That discrepancy means that ships are unloading less cargo than usual — which could be a vestige of the shipping channel being closed.
This week has been a busy one, though, as 19 container ships are expected at the Seagirt Marine Terminal — a figure that approaches the pre-collapse norm.
After the sun rose on March 26, Johnson, the fire chief, took a silent moment, standing next to a couple of federal officials, to digest the scene in front of him. He took a moment to think on the collapse shortly afterward, when a flight he was on happened to provide a bird’s eye view of the bridge’s “blank space.” And as he later analyzed the wreckage from a police boat, he took another pause to process the loss.
Reflecting recently, he stressed how bizarre it still is to see the disconnected bridge, and his realization of just how often he drove over the span. But his reflections mostly lie with the victims.
Port workers were impacted. Commuters continue to face traffic delays. But, for the families of six construction workers, they will forever be searching for what was lost.
“They left for work,” Johnson said. “You expect your family to come home from work.”
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