Controlled demolition of Key Bridge piece atop Dali delayed by lightning, to take place Monday

Hayes Gardner, Baltimore Sun
Updated ·3 min read

The salvage of a 984-foot container ship with millions of pounds of bridge material laying across its bow can be unpredictable.

After authorities said last week that they would use explosive devices to break up the span, Tom Gilmour, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral who is a maritime consultant, joked about scheduling the event.

“You’d be better off picking a team for March Madness than picking the right day,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun.

That uncertainty about the timing, given the medley of factors at play in a complicated salvage, including the weather, proved correct. After initially scheduling the controlled demolition for Saturday, authorities postponed it until Sunday when weather complicated preparation efforts. Then, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, the delayed detonation was again rescheduled due to lightning within 10 miles of the ship, Key Bridge Response Unified Command said in a statement.

Related Articles

It is now tentatively scheduled for around 5 p.m. Monday.

The Dali, a cargo ship with thousands of containers aboard, has sat in the Patapsco River since it appeared to lose power in the early hours of March 26, slamming into one of the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s support piers, collapsing the span into the water and killing six construction workers. In the nearly seven weeks since, crews have worked to clear the debris in an effort to reopen the shipping channel. The detonation will mark the most dramatic effort yet to free the ship, which is expected to be pushed to the Port of Baltimore roughly two days after the piece of bridge is sliced up with the explosives.

A chunk of Interstate 695 weighing 8 million to 12 million pounds has been draped over the front of the Dali since the collision, posing one of the most challenging aspects of the salvage effort. Crews have cut into that portion of bridge, placing small charges inside the cuts and then encasing those cuts with wraps similar to large piece of tapes. The detonation will cut the large piece into smaller chunks, which are expected to fall into the water and be cleaned up later.

The explosions will last just a few seconds.

“From a distance, it will sound like fireworks or loud thunder and appear as puffs of smoke,” Unified Command has said.

During the detonation, the 21-person crew still aboard the Dali will shelter in place.

People within 2,000 yards — a zone that mostly covers water but does include a few businesses on Hawkins Point — are asked to wear hearing protection during the blast. After the detonation, the ship is expected to remain grounded. Authorities will then, in a slow and controlled fashion, refloat the vessel during high tide. It will be surveyed and then later pushed by tugboats to the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal for further analysis.

Removing the ship from the incident site is a major step toward reopening the 50-foot-deep shipping channel, which authorities have said will be open by the end of May. The clearing of the channel will bring an economic boost for the Port of Baltimore, which has seen limited activity since the bridge collapse.

The precise cause of the disaster has not been determined, but the National Transportation Safety Board is examining what went wrong on the Dali, as well as the structural components of the bridge. It has searched the Dali’s engine room to understand why the vessel lost power.

A new bridge, which will be built where the old span stood, is expected to be constructed by 2028 and cost between $1.7 and $1.9 billion. State officials plan to identify the builder by this summer.