Bridge collapse hits port operations

Some 95,000 tons of a modern cargo ship collided with part of the US' aging infrastructure on Tuesday, and the Baltimore bridge it rammed into collapsed, disrupting one of the country's busiest ports.

Divers returned to the site early on Wednesday for the six workers missing. The six people unaccounted for and presumed dead were part of a construction crew repairing potholes on the bridge.

The disaster has forced the indefinite closure of the Port of Baltimore, and created a traffic quagmire for the city and the surrounding region.

As the odds of their survival vanished, the search for the missing workers was suspended on Tuesday evening, 18 hours after they were thrown from the fallen Francis Scott Key Bridge into the frigid waters at the mouth of the Patapsco River.

"We do not believe that we're going to find any of these individuals alive," Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath said at a briefing.

It is unclear whether the collapse of the bridge into the river was due to any fault in the structure itself. Officials have said the crew of the 9-year-old Dali ship warned Maryland officials of a possible collision because they had lost control as it went off course and seemed to lose power.

President Joe Biden said during a news conference on Tuesday at the White House that the federal government would "pay the entire cost of reconstructing" the bridge "and I expect the Congress to support my effort". Biden promised to visit Baltimore, 64 kilometers away, as soon as possible.

In 2021, he pushed through Congress the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to renovate and rebuild aging infrastructure such as ports, roads and bridges. It includes $110 billion to upgrade roads and bridges.

US Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina told Newsmax that Congress has to "be smarter "about how it spends money.

"Why — after all these bills, after the money — do we still have really old bridges and really old roads?" asked Mace, who voted against the Infrastructure Act. "Because we're not spending it on roads and bridges," she said, noting that only $110 billion from the act went toward that purpose.

All 22 crew members on the ship, owned by Grace Ocean Pte Ltd, were accounted for, its management company, Synergy Marine Pte Ltd, reported.

Major impact

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the closure of the port would have a "major and protracted impact on supply chains".

The Port of Baltimore handles more automobile freight than any other US port — more than 750,000 vehicles in 2022, according to port data, as well as container and bulk cargo ranging from sugar to coal.

Still, economists and logistics experts said they doubted the port closure would unleash a major US supply chain crisis or major spike in the price of goods, due to ample capacity at rival shipping hubs along the Eastern Seaboard.

The loss of the bridge also snarled roadways across Baltimore, forcing motorists onto two other congested harbor crossings and raising the specter of nightmarish daily commutes and regional traffic detours for months or even years to come.

Investigators from the US National Transportation Safety Board have boarded the ship and recovered its data recorder, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said on Wednesday. The recorder will be analyzed and the agency will also examine whether dirty fuel played a role in the ship's power loss, Homendy told CNN.

Agencies contributed to this story.