Rescuers have lost hope of finding more survivors of the Baltimore bridge collapse, the coast guard said, as efforts switched on Wednesday to looking for bodies of the missing.
Search divers were expected to return near dawn to the waters surrounding the twisted ruins of the bridge in Baltimore Harbor to search for six workers missing and now presumed dead.
The disaster has forced the indefinite closure of the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest on the US Eastern Seaboard, and created a traffic quagmire for Baltimore and the surrounding region.
As the odds of their survival vanished, the search for the missing workers was suspended on Tuesday evening, 18 hours after they were thrown from the fallen Francis Scott Key Bridge into the frigid waters at the mouth of the Patapsco River.
"We do not believe that we're going to find any of these individuals alive," Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath said at a briefing.
Starting at 6 a.m. (1000 GMT) on Wednesday, "we're hoping to put divers in the water and begin a more detailed search to do our very best to recover those six missing people," state police Colonel Roland Butler told reporters late on Tuesday.
Rescuers pulled two other workers from the water alive on Tuesday, and one of them was hospitalized. The six presumed to have perished included workers from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, according to the Mexican Consulate in Washington.
Officials said all eight were part of a work crew repairing potholes on Key Bridge's road surface when the Singapore-flagged container vessel Dali, leaving Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka, plowed into a support pylon of the bridge at about 1:30 a.m. (0530 GMT).
A trestled section of the 1.6-mile (2.6 km) span almost immediately crumpled into the water, sending vehicles and workers into the river.
The 948-foot (289 m) ship had reported a loss of propulsion shortly before impact and dropped anchor to slow the vessel, giving transportation authorities time to halt traffic on the bridge before the crash. That move likely prevented a higher death toll, authorities said.
It was unclear whether authorities also tried to alert the work crew ahead of the impact.
Clay Diamond, executive director of the American Pilots’ Association, said he has been in close contact with officials from the Association of Maryland Pilots who described to him what happened as the ship approached the bridge. He said when the ship was a few minutes out, it lost all power, including to its engines.
Diamond said widely circulated images show the ship’s lights turning off and then back on, sparking questions about whether the vessel had regained power. But, he said, the emergency generators that kicked in turned the lights back on but not the ship’s propulsion.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore said at a Tuesday news briefing the bridge was up to code with no known structural issues. There was no evidence of foul play, officials said.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the path to rebuilding the collapsed bridge won’t be easy or quick.
“This is no ordinary bridge. This is one of the cathedrals of American infrastructure,” he said at a news conference in Baltimore on Tuesday afternoon. “It has been part of the skyline for this region for longer than many of us have been alive.”
