BALTIMORE, Md. — You can only see about 1-2 feet in front of you, on a good day. Today is not one of those days.
"Immediately once you're in the water, it gets real dark real quickly,” Evan Woodard said, describing what he saw when he dropped his underwater drone into Baltimore’s harbor.
Woodard is a treasure hunter of sorts. We first interviewed him in October about his magnet fishing expeditions. He bought the drone to help him explore the depths of the waters around Baltimore and continue his search for interesting items lost to the harbor's floor.
But this week, he’s using the technology to give people a glimpse into the conditions at the Key Bridge salvage team’s underwater job site.
"I can't imagine being down there right now in these conditions working, basically feeling around with your hands trying to find something that's maybe like a foot in front of you and you still can't see it."
Today, the Army Corps of Engineers released a new video showing the incredible coordination happening right now beneath the surface of the Patapsco River. The divers need to get directions from operators on ships above them, guiding them through the river’s cloudy waters using sonar imaging tools.
"It's an underwater ballet,” Woodard observed.
The Navy also released renderings of the wreckage to illustrate what the supervisors are using to guide the divers below them.
As Governor Moore explained during today's press conference, "We can't use conventional cameras to map the area. Therefore, we need to use sonar. Unified Command is using high-tech devices that emit sound to help us map a three-dimensional rendering of the collapse site. This is the best equipment on the market for this type of work, and is only become commercially available over the last decade."
The water in the river was already murky from all the debris, after the collapse. Runoff from the rain is only making visibility worse. The stormy weather makes the currents more powerful too.
"It's actually a lot stronger than what you see on the top. So right now the water looks pretty calm, but in there I can actually feel the drone being pushed and pulled away from me. So that's something the divers have to battle against too."
