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Key Bridge collapse minute-by-minute: Recordings, reports fill in timeline of Baltimore disaster

Lilly Price and Annie Jennemann, The Baltimore Sun on

Published in News & Features

Miguel Luna headed to his construction job around 6:30 p.m. Monday, where he and six other workers filled potholes overnight on the towering Francis Scott Key Bridge.

A 22-person Indian crew aboard the Dali, a hulking cargo ship involved in an accident in Belgian waters eight years earlier, prepared to set off on a 28-day voyage to Sri Lanka after it spent the weekend in Baltimore. Two Maryland pilots boarded the ship early Tuesday to navigate the 984-foot vessel out of the harbor. It departed the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal around 12:39 a.m.

Over the next 50 minutes it would experience power and mechanical failures until it smashed into a support column for the Francis Scott Key Bridge, sending most of the 1.6-mile structure crumbling into the Patapsco River. The bodies of two construction workers were recovered Wednesday; Luna and three other workers are presumed dead. Two people survived.

Dispatch audio, Coast Guard reports, a National Transportation Safety Board summary of data from the ship’s voyage data recorder and video of the disaster offer a minute-by-minute account of the moments before and after the bridge’s collapse:

12:51 a.m.: The Dali’s status is changed to “under way using engine” and its speed is recorded at about 3 knots on myshiptracking.com, a website that tracks ships’ locations via the Automatic Identification System, a technology used to avoid collisions.

1:09 a.m.: Two tugboats guiding the Dali leave once the ship turns to begin its departure out of the port waters.

 

1:18 a.m.: A port call for the departure of the Dali was recorded on myshiptracking.com. The ship was moving at a speed of 7 knots. Motorists traveling on Interstate 695, the Baltimore Beltway, cross the Key Bridge

1:24 a.m. to 1:26 a.m.: Dali appears to begin turning toward one of the vital bridge supports at a speed of around 8 knots, or about 9 mph.

1:24:59: The sounds of numerous alarms are recorded on the ship bridge’s audio. The ship’s power goes out, flickers partially back on a minute later, and goes out again by 1:26 a.m. Black smoke billows from the ship.

1:26:39: With the power outage likely impacting navigation, the pilot radios for a tug boat. A pilot association dispatcher, meanwhile, phones a Maryland Transportation Authority duty officer to report the ship’s loss of power.

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