The US Coast Guard Captain of the Port (COTP) on Tuesday April 30th announced plans to open a 45ft-deep channel with a provisional scheduled opening date of May 10th. The container ship Dali, which collided with the Key Bridge on March 26th, causing its collapse, would be removed by that date, the state’s governor Wes Moore said on Tuesday.
Since the cleanup began responders have pulled more than 3,300 tons of steel out of the channel, including several sections of the main span weighing between 300 and 500 tons. However, the next lift, of the twisted and mangled section of the bridge that is currently trapping the Dali by its bow, will be the most challenging. Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath said at a press conference that the contractors would be making a number of simultaneous precise cuts to remove the section without collapsing it further,
The massive 1,000-ton hydraulic claw is meanwhile being used to grab tangled piles of steel girders off the bottom. This removes the need to send down divers to rig every lift.
When the channel reopens the UC said that it should have a control depth of 45ft, just five feet away from its depth pre-accident, and with a 300ft clearance. The vertical clearance will be 214ft. While the previous “limited access channel” was deep enough to move ro/ros and one sub-Panamax boxship, the deepened channel should be able to begin moving larger container ships in and out of the port. These ships will have a two-tug escort and a Maryland State Pilot on the vessel. The pilots will enforce a 3ft under keel clearance requirement for all vessels. Due to ongoing salvage operations, vessels will be restricted to 10 knots or less. There will also be restrictions in place if wind speeds are too high (above 15 knot wind speed, including gusts).
Three temporary shallow channels (with depths of 20ft, 14ft and 11ft) remain open for tug and barge traffic. A full 50ft channel restoration is still expected by the end of May.
Meanwhile, the bodies of two construction workers of the six who died in the accident remain missing. The Maryland State Police said they hoped that it would be possible to find them, but wreckage and zero-visibility conditions on the river bottom have made diving operations difficult. The police said that its own divers had “areas of interest” within the large mass of debris on the channel bed.
Maryland continues to seek the support of Congress to fund the reconstruction of the Key Bridge, a project expected to take five years or more and to cost several billion dollars. Who will end up paying for that is likely to be a mater for the courts, in cases that are also likely to take several years.
Governor Moore said this week that several members of Congress had visited the site of the disaster and that he anticipated the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee to visit soon.
Maryland’s transportation department is also considering upgrades to protect the giant Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which also lacks the heavy protective structures that have been mandatory for new bridges of this type for several decades, but which it has not been compulsory to add to bridges already in existence before the current rules came into effect in the early 1980s.
