Nearly eight weeks after crashing into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, destroying a Baltimore landmark but itself becoming a fixture on the horizon, the container ship Dali is afloat again. The ship returned to a berth in Baltimore Harbor Monday morning, making the two-and-a-half-mile journey surrounded by tugboats.
Moving the Dali is a crucial step in efforts to fully reopen the main channel leading to the port, which was blocked in the early hours of March 26, when the Dali lost power and hit the bridge. The bridge collapsed on impact, killing six workers who were carrying out repairs on the bridge’s roadway, blocking the waterway with an estimated 50,000 tonnes of metal and debris and disrupting trade in one of the major hubs of the country’s maritime transport.
The rescue and recovery operation involved more than a thousand workers and dozens of barges, cranes, helicopters and coastguards. Access to and from the port returned piecemeal: on April 1, a temporary channel opened with a depth of 11 feet; in the days and weeks that followed, other channels were opened with depths of 14, 20, and 45 feet.
But while hundreds of ships have used these alternative routes, returning the port to its usual traffic requires opening the permanent channel, which is 50 feet deep and 700 feet wide. The authorities have set a goal of reopening this channel by the end of May.
Moving the 947-foot-long Dali was a complex and risky task, given that the ship was blocked by thousands of tons of mangled steel. Cranes removed 182 of the ship’s 4,700 containers, some of which were mixed with the bridge wreckage. Last Monday, crews detonated small charges that had been placed around a massive section of the bridge across the Dali’s bow, sending the section sliding into the water in a plume of black smoke.
Over the next week, sonar specialists and dive teams surveyed the area around the ship for submerged and unstable wreckage, with cranes removing debris that could pose a risk. Final preparations to move the ship began Sunday afternoon, officials said, and included casting off, raising anchors and removing some of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that had been pumped into the ship as ballast to increase stability.
Guided by tugboats, the ship began moving shortly before 7 a.m. Monday, more than an hour after its scheduled departure time of 5:30 a.m. Back at the dock, the Dali will undergo repairs and further inspection.
“Today we took a huge step forward in our mission to recover from collapse,” Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland said Monday, “but our work is not done.”
Federal investigators are we are still trying to determine more details about the cause of the accident and who could be at fault. A preliminary report released last week by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Dali experienced at least two electrical outages hours before leaving port. The failures potentially contributed to the accident, which occurred when the ship’s electrical circuit breakers tripped, leading to a loss of propulsion and steering capability, the NTSB said in its report.
The crew, officials said, will remain on board the ship while docked. The remaining containers on the Dali will be unloaded and Maersk, the shipping company that chartered the vessel, will arrange for the cargo to be delivered to its customers in another way.
