In Baltimore, I saw the ghost of a bridge and fought my impulse to look away

Video of the crash shot around the world. It was everywhere Tuesday. But it somehow felt unreal. The boat seemed to be moving too slowly. The massive metal spans fell too fast.

In one clip that spread and spread online, a woman could be heard exhaling with disbelief just after the Dali hit. “Oh!” as the bridge tumbled around the ship. Then another sharp exhale: “Uuuhhhh.” And the rest of it went down.

What none of the videos quite convey, though, is the sheer, horrible scale of it all. I stood Wednesday on a grassy outcropping just south of where the bridge used to be. It was raining so hard I couldn’t take notes, so I spoke into my recorder instead. On the tape, I sound like I’m seeing a ghost and trying to convince myself it’s real.

Modern container ships are almost unbelievably large. The Dali stretches about 300 metres, or three football fields long. It likely hit the bridge with the force of about 10 million pounds, one expert told the Baltimore Banner.

From the shore Wednesday it looked gargantuan and out of place, a huge patchwork rectangle with chunks of metal literally hanging off its sides. Even in person, it looked like a toy, as if someone had taken a train from a larger set and smashed it into the bridge from a smaller one.

The train didn’t move. The bridge fell apart like Lego.

On Wednesday night, just after 8 p.m., investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board gave a press conference in Baltimore. Jennifer Homendy, the board’s chair, explained that the Francis Scott Key Bridge was “fracture critical.” That means it had no redundancy built in. If any part of it failed, she said, all of it would fail.

“The preferred method for building bridges today is that there is redundancy built in,” Homendy said. But the Key Bridge was built in 1973. So when the Dali took out the pillar supporting one span, several other spans fell.

The bridge, which was last inspected in 2023, was in “satisfactory” condition, Homendy said. It was one of more than 17,468 fracture-critical bridges in the United States and had an annual average traffic of more than 30,000 vehicles a day.

The full investigation into the accident will take months, if not years. But investigators already have a basic timeline, culled from recordings and other data taken from the ship.

According to the U.S. Coast Guard, the Dali underwent “routine engine maintenance” before departing the Baltimore harbour at about 12:40 a.m. Tuesday. It then entered the McHenry Channel at about 1:24 a.m. travelling about 9.2 miles per hour. Just before 1:25 a.m., numerous alarms sounded on the deck and the ship’s video recording cut out.

At 1:27, the local pilot steering the ship out of the harbour ordered the Dali to drop anchor. A dispatcher reached out to police and told them the Dali was powerless and headed toward the bridge.

It is both a tragedy and a miracle that there was work going on on the bridge that night. Because of the construction, there were already police officers at either end of the span who were able to shut down traffic before the impact occurred.

That’s the miracle. The tragedy is that there were still eight men working the overnight shift on the bridge at 1:29 when the Dali, powerless but still going about 8 miles an hour, collided with a supporting pillar and brought the bridge down. 

I’ve thought a lot over the past four years about the human instinct to look away. I covered the pandemic and clocked the switch some months in when readers didn’t really want to hear it anymore.

I felt something of that in myself staring into the water Wednesday. The images were so striking; my brain kept cycling through imagery and metaphor trying to avoid the concrete facts of what I saw.

It was my feet that brought me back. I had to cross through flooded grass to get to where I was standing. After a few minutes, I realized how wet I was and how cold.

I thought about the eight men then. Two of them walked away alive. Two more were pulled out dead on Wednesday. They were identified as Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, who was from Mexico and living in Baltimore, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, who was from Guatemala and living in Dundalk, Md. They were submerged in a red pickup truck. The other four are also presumed to have died, thought to be trapped beneath the wreckage. No one can be sure when their bodies will be found.

As I stood staring into the mist on Wednesday at the broken shards of the bridge, I thought how cold they must have been, how scared. They were doing a job that is literally meant to be unseen, the overnight shift fixing potholes on a commuter bridge. And yet their deaths have become a spectacle, their final moments seen and seen, replayed endlessly online.

Correction – March 28, 2024

This article was edited from a previous version that referred to the Dali as a tanker ship.