Baltimore: Sound document after bridge collapse

The sound document of the moment when the fate of the collapse, after the impact of the Dali ship on its pillar, was released by the Maryland Transportation Authority and while two of the six missing were recovered dead on Wednesday (27.03.2024). At the sound of panic officials announcing to the communication center that the Patapsko River bridge in Baltimore has just collapsed. “One of you go to the north side. Stop all traffic on the bridge” refers to the beginning of the sound, which brings to public the . “A ship that has lost navigation control is approaching. So until they fix the problem we have to stop the traffic on the bridge,” it is heard from the communication center side. The same employee makes a new appeal to close the bridge and asks to check that there is no one on the bridge. “Just make sure there’s nobody on the bridge” he sounds like. A few seconds later it sounds: “Center, the bridge just collapsed. Send, send everyone. The whole bridge collapsed”. The sound noise: The staff member on the other side asks: “Do we know if the traffic on the bridge had stopped?” and the answer follows: “I can’t go to the other end, the whole bridge has collapsed”. Six people are considered dead after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore early Tuesday morning 26 March (about 07:30 Greek time), when the container-loaded cargo ship Dali collided on one of the pillars. Francis Scott Key Bridge was an entrance to the port of Baltimore, the busiest in the US for car exports and ninth busiest overall. The exact cause of the impact has not yet been determined, but the ship showed a blackout and broadcast a distress signal before it collided on the bridge. Dali sailed from the port of Baltimore and had a course to the port of Sri Lankan capital Colombo, a journey that would last 27 days. The cargo container ship Dali, flying the flag of Singapore, departed the port bound for Asia when it collided frontally with a pillar of the bridge. LATEST – Maryland Transportation Authority dispatch audio has retrieved the paneled moments before and after the Key bridge collapse in Maryland Tuesday. 🔴 Workers are heart scrambling to shut down the bridge as a shipping container lost its steering. — Newsweek (@Newsweek) The bridge, used daily by tens of thousands of vehicles, collapsed like a deck of cards and part of it ended up on the ship’s deck. Two dead were recovered – trapped in the vehicle The ones who died in the frozen waters of the port of Baltimore, on the east coast of the United States, were recovered yesterday Wednesday, authorities announced. “A little after 10:00, divers spotted a red van at a depth of about 7.6 meters,” he explained during an interview The Maryland police, the state where Baltimore is managed. “Two victims of tragedy had been trapped inside vehicle”. The bodies recovered were identified and are those of two men 35 and 26 years old, members of a street workers’ crew, repairing the Francis Scott Key bridge pavement when the accident occurred. The bodies of the other four of their colleagues, which were made clear yesterday by the authorities that they were now considered dead, have not yet been identified, the authorities added. Due to the amount of concrete and debris at the site where the accident occurred, divers “no longer have the ability to move safely” towards “what we think are the vehicles trapped,” said Roland Butler of the Maryland Police Department. It will therefore be necessary first to remove part of the bridge which prevents, in order to allow safe access to divers, clarification. The victims were repairing the 2.6 km long bridge road when large parts of it collapsed into the Patapsko River. Authorities had warned from the day before that they no longer considered that they would “find these people in life”. Two crew members were able to be rescued immediately after the accident. The workers missing were mostly nationals of Mexico and Guatemala. This is the worst bridge collapse for the US since 2007, when the I-35W bridge fell into the Mississippi River, resulting in 13 people being killed. It is also the worst accident in a ship impact bridge in the last 40-50 years, according to David Knight, an expert at the Institute of Civil Engineering. Dali was involved in another accident in Antwerp The ship that caused the Francis Scott Key bridge to collapse had also been involved in an accident in the port of Antwerp in 2016. According to the Belgian port authorities, on 11 July 2016 he had collided at the pier while attempting to sail from the container terminal in the North Sea. The port authority gave no further clarifications about the causes of the accident but reported that the ship remained anchored for repairs for some time after impact. Dali is owned by Grace Ocean Pt Ltd and managed by Synergy Marine Corp. Information from Skynews, Reuters, AFP