This Tuesday the largest bridge in Baltimore (USA) collapsed in a few seconds after being hit by a freighter.
A group of maintenance workers were working on the catwalk.
The freighter—named
Dali
—had just left the port.
Minutes later, the crew informed the port authorities that they had problems with the propulsion and that the bridge was in their path, which meant that road traffic could be cut off.
A nearby webcam broadcast the crash live.
The boat enters the perspective at 1:23 in the morning.
The electrical and propulsion problems that the crew warned about are observed, which allows us to understand what happened moments before the crash.
The
Dali
, about 48 meters wide and almost 300 meters long, deviated from its course moments before passing under the structure.
The span of the bridge, that is, the distance between the pillars that support the metal construction, was about 366 meters.
The clearance, which is the distance between the water and the bottom point of the bridge, exceeds 56 meters, so the space was more than enough for a boat of these characteristics.
The collision with one of the pillars was enough for the walkway to collapse.
The
Dali
is a vehicle that can transport up to 10,000 containers.
An initial estimate from an engineer to the Efe agency estimates that there may be 150,000 tons in motion - the equivalent of 1,500 buses - at about 15 kilometers per hour.
Baltimore woke up to images of its most iconic bridge being severed and to the news that emergency services had rescued two people and were searching for another seven missing people (a figure that would later be reduced to six).
The four lanes of road that supported the bridge, where more than 31,000 vehicles on average travel daily, have sunk into the Patapsco River.
The port of Baltimore is the sixteenth in the country by activity, where goods worth $74 billion entered the United States last year.
It is not one of the largest on the American east coast, and handles a load that is 10 times smaller than the port of New York.
It is, however, the American leader in handling cargoes of various types of products, such as automobile shipments (about 750,000 vehicles passed through there in 2023), salt or sugar.
It is the second largest national infrastructure for coal exports.
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