The Coast Guard resumed this Wednesday at 6 a.m. the search for the workers who sank in the Patapsco River when a freighter collapsed off the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore (Maryland) early Tuesday morning.
The employees of the Brawner Builders company, who were repairing Interstate 695 at the time of the crash, had been presumed dead the night before and could not be notified in time.
Their identities have not yet been released, but the embassies of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have reported that some victims are those countries.
The families of Honduran Maynor Suazo and Salvadoran Miguel Luna confirmed to Noticias Telemundo that both are among the missing.
Carmen Luna, Miguel Luna's wife, explained: “He left yesterday at 6:20, he stopped by the work where I am.
He left, he was going to work, he was happy, he was happy... That was the last call we had." "Let them find them, what my heart desires most, let them do everything possible to find them," the woman said before that the Coast Guard announced that the rescue operation had concluded due to the dangerousness of the waters for the search teams.
Martín Suazo, Maynor's brother, asked the authorities for their part to continue the search for the missing.
“We want them to be found so we can repatriate my brother's body to Honduras.
We need the US authorities to support us and especially the Honduran consulate.
We hope they take action on the matter and do not let the case be forgotten.”
The Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Honduras confirmed Maynor's death this Tuesday.
"The accident surprised him" when she was working on the bridge, Honduran Vice Foreign Minister Antonio García told Noticiero TN5 in Tegucigalpa.
He added that the Government is willing to assist in the repatriation of the remains.
Suazo, 39, was originally from Azacualpa, in western Honduras, he added.
Likewise, the Mexican consulate in Washington also confirmed in a statement published in X that there were Mexican citizens among the missing, but did not specify how many.
Until now, only the death of two Guatemalans has been confirmed, a 26-year-old man from San Luis (Petén) and another 35-year-old man from Camotán (Chiquimula), as announced by the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A long investigation
National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy told NBC News that the freighter's
black box
, a device that could reveal data to investigators, including the positioning and speed of the ship, what could have happened to its energy, as well as the conversations that occurred within it during the last 12 hours.
An NTSB investigative team is scheduled to board the freighter Wednesday and speak with crew members.
The official explained that her team will examine a number of issues, including what protections the bridge's support structures had and whether they should have been more robust, and the possibility that contaminated fuel could have played a role in the tragedy, the The Wall Street Journal.
Homendy also noted that they will analyze how the bridge was destroyed due to the loss of a single support pillar and how similar catastrophes could be avoided in other places in the country.
"We are going to study this type of infrastructure to prevent this type of collapse from occurring," she declared. However, Homendy was cautious by making it clear that the investigation could last two years.
The deadly collapse in the middle of the night
Early Tuesday morning police radio received an alert: a huge freighter had lost its steering ability and was heading toward the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Bay.
Within about 90 seconds, officers responded that they had managed to stop vehicle traffic on the bridge in both directions.
One of them said that she was about to enter the bridge to alert a construction team, but it was too late: without direction and loaded with huge containers, the ship crashed into a support pillar.
"The whole bridge went down," said a frantic officer, "start up, start up whoever, everyone... the whole bridge went down."
When the freighter collided with the pillar around 1:30 a.m., it caused a long span of the bridge, a key link in the region's transportation networks, to sink into the Patapsco River.
In an interview this Wednesday with MSNBC, the governor of Maryland, Democrat Wes Moore, praised the quick response after the call for help, which probably contributed to preventing more victims.
“The fact that they were able to stop cars from getting on the bridge saved countless lives, because if there had been more cars on the bridge when it collapsed, a tragedy would have become an even more catastrophic event,” the governor said, “ So the debt of gratitude that we all owe to these first responders is incalculable.”
Help for port workers
State Senate President Bill Ferguson said Wednesday that they are working "on an emergency bill to financially help workers affected by this tragedy."
The Port of Baltimore employs 15,000 workers and processes more than $80 billion in goods annually.
"Yesterday I spent hours talking to union leaders, dock workers, small business owners and big industry leaders who all had the exact same message: we must unblock the Baltimore Harbor Channel," he wrote on the social network X. "They are right And until we do, the cost to families will be enormous,” he concluded.
With information from
The Associated Press
and
NBC News