March 29, 2024 - Baltimore Key Bridge collapse

The Chesapeake 1000, the largest crane on the East Coast that is currently docked near the Francis Scott Key Bridge, can lift about 1,000 tons — but the challenge is that the part of the bridge sitting on the top of the vessel is between 3,000 to 4,000 tons, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said Friday.

To help with this massive task, the Navy will supply Maryland with four heavy-lift cranes, Moore added. "Two have already arrived, one arrives tonight, and the fourth is arriving on Monday.”

“In the coming weeks We expect to have the following entities inside of the water: seven floating cranes, 10 tugs, nine barges, eight salvage vessels and five Coast Guard boats,” he added.

Seeing the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge up close underscored to officials how difficult it will be to clear the channel, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said on Friday.

He called the cleanup efforts a “remarkably complex operation.”

He said teams from various agencies and the Coast Guard went to survey the damage and view the ship, which “is nearly the size of the Eiffel Tower.”

He said crews will have to navigate obstacles like high wind and electrical wires. The governor explained that officials need to reassess the operation with every piece of bridge debris that is moved.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and other officials are providing an update on the ongoing clean-up efforts of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.

The news conference comes as a massive crane inches closer to the site of the bridge collapse to help clear debris.

CASA, an organization that provides critical services to working-class and immigrant families, is also holding a separate event at this time with construction workers to honor the bridge collapse victims.

Mexican national Carlos Hernández, 24, is one of the construction workers presumed dead after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed on Tuesday, his family told CNN affiliate Univision.

"I wake up, I want to think I am dreaming, but wake up and I know this is reality – that my son was there,” Hernández's mother, Lucia Zambrano, told Univision, adding that she’s asking for help getting a humanitarian visa so she can travel to Maryland, be with her son and put pressure to keep searching for him.

Hernandez's girlfriend, Jazmin Alvarez, who lives in Mexico, also spoke with Univision during the interview and recounted how she found out about the incident. 

“By 4 a.m., his aunt, Mariela, had called me. She told me they had an accident, but I never imagined it was this bad, I thought it was a car accident,” Alvarez added and shared a voice message Hernandez sent her minutes before the bridge collapsed.

"Yes, my love, we just poured the cement and we’re just waiting for it to dry," Hernández told Alvarez in the voice note. 

The massive cargo ship crash into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge will likely lead to billions of dollars in liability claims. Marine insurance companies will be on the hook for much of the costs.

With various owners and companies involved – and with some maritime laws predating even the Titanic sinking – untangling the web, figuring out who owes what, and addressing the damages from both lives lost and to physical structures will be complex.

How much will the rebuilding cost? It’s still too early to know the final bill for damages and rebuilding. The bridge alone could be worth more than $1.2 billion, said Loretta Worters, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute.

Then there will almost certainly be large liability suits, medical costs for survivors, clean-up costs, and more, she added. Damage and losses to cars and clean-up from the debris and reconstruction will also factor into the total, Worters said.

The potential cost of insurance claims from the bridge collapse could be between $1 billion and $3 billion, analysts at Barclays wrote in a note Wednesday.

Claims for damage to the bridge alone could be some $1.2 billion, Barclays' analysts said in a note Wednesday, with wrongful death liabilities likely totaling between $350 to $700 million. The analysts also expected some to-be-determined business interruption claims.

Read more about why paying for the collapse will be complicated.

A massive crane is getting closer to Baltimore’s scene of destruction Friday, tasked with clearing up to 4,000 tons of precarious debris that has hampered search crews after this week’s catastrophic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

The crane – the largest on the East Coast – was headed to the site in the Patapsco River where a 984-foot cargo vessel slammed into the bridge Tuesday. Six people were killed, but four of their bodies remain missing.

The crane will help expedite the monumental challenge of moving dangerous debris so crews can resume their search for the missing victims and reopen a cargo channel that’s vital to the local and national economy.

In addition to the crane, three heavy lift vessels are expected to start arriving Friday, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN. But workers at the scene still face “an incredibly complex job,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said Thursday.

High above the Patapsco River early Tuesday, a group of men fixed potholes on the Key Bridge, which is used by 30,000 motorists every day.

They were fathers, husbands and sons who had traveled far from poor villages in Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala.

Now they were the centerpiece of a global disaster, with loved ones left wondering what they must have felt in those terrifying final moments before tumbling several stories into the cold river.

One of the people pulled out alive from the water was a worker from the Mexican state of Michoacan, which said in a statement the three Mexican bridge workers were related.

Authorities have told the families they haven’t given up on recovering their loved ones from the twisted wreckage in the waters of the Patapsco, but they aren’t sure when that process will begin. Debris must be removed from the water before more bodies can be recovered.

“We know our people are involved,” Rafael Laveaga, chief of the Mexican Embassy in Washington’s consular section, said of the immigrants who died working for a living.

On Friday, a massive crane was being moved to the scene of the collapse. It will be part of the massive effort to clear up to 4,000 tons of debris that has hampered search crews.

Sigue nuestra cobertura en Español del colapso aquí.

Maryland officials are moving at "full speed" to accomplish four main priorities in the days following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, Gov. Wes Moore said Thursday.

Here are the directives mandated by Moore:

The governor promised to give regular updates on all of these directives but said they will take a long time to accomplish.

"This work will not take hours. This work will not take days. This work will not just take weeks. We have a very long road ahead of us," Moore said.

They worked the overnight shift fixing potholes on a famed bridge that 30,000 Marylanders relied on every day. But their work ended in tragedy Tuesday morning when a 213-million-pound cargo vessel crashed into the bridge, plunging the construction workers into the dangerously cold water below.

After a daylong search, officials called off the rescue mission and said six workers were presumed dead. The six construction workers were immigrants from four countries – Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala.

Two bodies – those of Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes from Mexico and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera from Guatemala – have since been recovered from a pickup truck in the water, Maryland State Police said Wednesday.

These are some of the victims' stories:

Read more about the victims and their stories. Sigue nuestra cobertura en Español del colapso aquí.