Authorities to Use Explosives Saturday to Free the Ship That Hit the Key Bridge

BALTIMORE (The Baltimore Sun/TNS) — The Dali has sat, entangled with the remains of the Francis Scott Key Bridge that it knocked down, for the past six weeks, becoming a Baltimore landmark as crews work to clear the channel around it of debris.

But in the most dramatic step yet to free the ship, authorities plan to use explosive devices Saturday evening to slice up a huge piece of bridge sitting atop the container ship, paving the way for it to be freed and pushed from the incident site in the coming days.

The Dali crash into one of the span’s support piers March 26 after losing power, bringing down the bridge and killing six construction workers. The body of the last missing construction worker, Jose Mynor Lopez, 37, was recovered Tuesday. All the victims were Latino immigrants who were working an overnight shift filling potholes on the bridge. Police officers were able to stop traffic moments before the collapse, but they didn’t have enough time to alert the workers.

If all goes as planned, the detonation will sound like fireworks, look like puffs of smoke and plunge into the water the pieces of bridge that have weighed the ship down.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosive cuts, however, the Dali is likely to remain in the Patapsco River. Freeing a ship is a calculated, steady process and, despite the suddenness of the explosion, it is best to slowly refloat a ship, experts say.

“You want the ship to move on your terms, not its terms,” said Mike Dean, executive director of the American Salvage Association.

If a ship is made too light, too fast, it could jolt upward and swing around uncontrolled, potentially damaging its hull by bumping into a piece of debris. “The last thing you want to do is knock a hole in the ship,” Dean said.

After the explosions, which will last just a few seconds, the ship is likely to stay put for about two days as it is surveyed, said Bob Petty, a spokesperson for the Key Bridge Response Unified Command.

Then, he said, it will be moved to the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal. Petty said that tugboats will “more likely than not” need to push it to the dock, which is a little over 2 nautical miles from where the ship has been stranded since late March.

The ship is expected to stay there for a few weeks while wreckage embedded in the deck is cleared. Some of the containers onboard will be unloaded, too, to make the deck accessible.

Wreckage on the ship will be removed, investigators will get back on board, the Dali’s condition will be further analyzed and the ship patched up before likely heading to a still-be-determined shipyard for further repair.

Each salvage effort presents unique challenges and the Dali, a 984-foot ship that knocked down 50,000 tons of steel and concrete, particularly so.

Dean, the former executive director of the Navy’s salvage and diving division, worked to free more than 20 ships over his career, but never saw a situation in which a bridge sat on a ship.

Dan Magone, a salvor based in Alaska, has directed 79 efforts to free ships a minimum of 58 feet in length and wrote a book about his varied experiences.

“I never did anything twice,” he said.

The AP contributed to this report.