Crews work to lift first piece of collapsed Baltimore bridge in ‘complex operation’

Salvage crews worked to lift the first piece of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge from the water on Saturday to allow barges and tugboats to access the disaster site, Maryland and US officials said, the first step in a complex effort to reopen the city’s blocked port.

The steel truss bridge collapsed early on Tuesday morning, killing six road workers, when a massive container ship lost power and crashed into a support pylon. Much of the span crashed into the Patapsco River, blocking the Port of Baltimore’s shipping channel.

Sparks could be seen flying from a section of bent and crumpled steel on Saturday afternoon, and video released by officials in the evening showed demolition crews using a cutting flashlight to slice through the thick beams.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore told a press conference that a section of the bridge’s steel superstructure north of the crash site would be cut into a piece that could be lifted by crane onto a barge and brought to the nearby Tradepoint Atlantic site at Sparrows Point.

“This will eventually allow us to open up a temporary restricted channel that will help us to get more vessels in the water around the site of the collapse,” Moore said.

He declined to provide a timeline for this portion of the clearance work. “It’s not going to take hours,” he said. “It’s not going to take days, but once we complete this phase of the work, we can move more tugs and more barges and more boats into the area to accelerate our recovery.”