Did warnings to get off the Key Bridge reach the construction crew fixing potholes?

An officer blocking Inner Loop traffic responded “10-4,” then added he would “run up on the bridge” once another officer arrived to take his place.

That never happened. Instead, a half minute later, a stunned-sounding first responder radioed: “The whole bridge just fell down. Start, start whoever. Everybody. The whole bridge just collapsed.”

John Huntzberry, a former Brawner employee who left in 2020, said he’d spent countless nights on the Key Bridge cutting out potholes and filling them in with new concrete. He knew the foreman of the lost crew, one of two men whose bodies were found Tuesday in a red pickup truck.

Huntzberry said he believes the state inspector would have called the crew with a warning, if he’d heard one, but that he didn’t know whether that happened. Describing the wind on the bridge and the potential for noise from loud tools, he speculated it was possible the pothole crew couldn’t hear any call, or that they were on a break in their trucks and missed it.

Had they heard about the ship’s issue when the pilot first called for help — NTSB investigators have said the ship’s pilot made a general radio call for nearby tugs’ assistance at 1:26 a.m. and reported the Dali had lost all power and was approaching the bridge at 1:27 a.m. — Huntzberry said he thought that would be enough time to escape the bridge.

“If you jump in a truck going 60 miles per hour on a bridge, it doesn’t take three minutes to get way down,” he said. “But … there’s a lot of factors in play there.”

Brawner is an efficient, safety-conscious company, Huntzberry said. They have safety plans in place for “the stuff that usually goes wrong,” namely distracted drivers or workplace accidents.

“There’s really no way to protect someone from a freak accident,” he said.

Bobby Knutson Jr., another former Brawner employee, too, said “the last thing we ever thought about was a boat.”

“We were always aware of traffic, and there was a lot of times where there was accidents, and people would either be under the influence, coming into lane closures, or just an accident in general, people not paying attention,” Knutson said. “Obviously, you think about falling, depending on what you’re doing.”

“But you never thought about boats,” he said.

Five construction workers and one inspector were killed last March, almost exactly a year before the Key Bridge collapse, in a separate high-profile incident also along the Baltimore Beltway, I-695. That high-speed crash led to scrutiny of Maryland’s highway work zone safety and proposed legislation this year to boost fines and add greater flexibility for installing work zone cameras.

The police present Tuesday were assigned to a construction detail, Kruszynski said, in place to assist with traffic as needed. Had they been on normal patrol, rather than that detail, it’s possible they could have taken minutes, not seconds, to close bridge traffic.

“There are people alive with their families today that would’ve perished, had they not stopped traffic, in seconds, without a second thought,” Kruszynski said. “The fact they were assigned to that detail is what made the difference. That, and their quick thinking.”

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