The bodies of two workers who fell into the Patapsco River after a massive container ship slammed into and destroyed Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge earlier this week were recovered on Wednesday morning, authorities confirmed. The search for four others was suspended, with authorities citing conditions in the water that made it too dangerous for dive teams to continue.
The two men were found around 10 a.m. in a red pickup truck submerged in 25 feet of water, Col. Roland L. Butler Jr., secretary of Maryland State Police, said at an evening news conference. They were identified as Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, of Baltimore, originally from Mexico; and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Dundalk, Maryland, who was from Guatemala.
Both were part of a construction crew fixing potholes on the bridge, as were the four men who remain missing, Butler said. He explained that the missing are believed to be “encased” within the mangled debris of the 1.6-mile-long bridge. “We have exhausted all search efforts in the area around this wreckage,” he said.
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Two other workers were rescued, one of them seriously injured, after the early morning collision on Tuesday, officials previously said.
According to a preliminary timeline of the disaster pieced together by National Transportation Safety Board investigators, the 985-foot, Singapore-flagged container ship, the Dali, suffered a “complete blackout” and issued its first mayday alarm around 1:24 a.m. on Tuesday. The warning allowed police to halt traffic before the ship slammed into the 47-year-old bridge, sending it crumpling into the water within seconds.
Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the crash site was in ruins. “It’s pretty devastating, certainly, seeing not just what’s going on with the cargo containers, but just looking at what was a bridge span—three bridge spans that [are] pretty much gone,” she said at the news conference. “It’s just utter devastation.”
Homendy also said that one of the agency’s senior hazmat investigators identified 56 containers of hazardous material aboard the Dali, which had been bound for Sri Lanka. “That’s 764 tons of hazardous materials—mostly corrosives, flammables and some miscellaneous hazardous materials, class nine hazardous materials which would include lithium-ion batteries,” she said. “Some of the hazmat containers were breached.”
Only two containers went into the water, however, neither of which contained hazardous materials, according to Vice Adm. Peter Gautier, deputy commandant for operations for the U.S. Coast Guard, who spoke at a White House press briefing on Wednesday.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at the briefing that authorities did not yet have an estimate of when or how the bridge would be rebuilt, but that it would not be “quick, easy, or cheap,” according to ABC News.
The NTSB investigation is expected to take between 12 and 24 months to complete, Homendy said. There were 23 people aboard the Dali at the time of the collision, 21 crew members and two pilots, none of whom was seriously injured. Investigators spoke to its captain, mate, chief engineer, and another engineer on Wednesday, and will speak to the two pilots on Thursday, she added.
