Divers have recovered the bodies of two men who were working on a highway bridge in Baltimore early Tuesday when it was struck by a cargo ship and collapsed into the river below, police say.
The remains of the workers, who were 26 and 35, were found inside a red pickup truck submerged in roughly seven metres of water near the mid-section of the fallen Francis Key Scott Bridge on Wednesday.
Col. Roland L. Butler Jr., superintendent for Maryland State Police, said officials have paused the search for the bodies of four more workers, who are presumed dead, because conditions in the water had become too dangerous.
The two men who died and the four who are presumed dead were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, Butler said. The man from Hondouras has been identified as Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandova by that country’s deputy foreign affairs minister.
Rescuers pulled two construction workers alive from the Patapsco River on Tuesday. One was hospitalized.
All eight were part of a work crew repairing potholes on the road surface when the cargo ship Dali, leaving Baltimore for Sri Lanka, struck one of the bridge’s pillars.
Experienced master mariner Alain Arsenault explains what likely led up to a massive container ship striking and destroying a major Baltimore bridge, temporarily closing one of America’s biggest ports.
Based on sonar scans, authorities “firmly” believe the other vehicles with victims inside are encased in superstructures and concrete from the collapsed bridge, Butler said during an evening news conference.
Earlier Wednesday, federal safety investigators recovered the ship’s data recorder, according to Jennifer Homendy, chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). NTSB investigators will also interview the ship’s crew, she said.
A highway team also will be looking at the twisted remains of the 2.6-kilometre bridge as they try to determine how and why the ship smashed into the pillar.
Homendy said the Singapore-flagged vessel had one of the newer models of data recorder and that officials would be looking to gather information including “positioning of ship, the vessel itself, speed, you name it.”
“It’s going to take some time,” she said. “We may be on scene five to 10 days.”
Homendy said a preliminary fact-based report is typically available in two to four weeks, while an NTSB investigation report with…
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