BALTIMORE, Md. — The 61-foot Catlett has already been utilizing sonar, a remotely operated vehicle, and some of the top engineering minds in the country to help in the recovery mission on the Patapsco River, and the US Army Corps of Engineers will now focus on safely removing thousands of tons of concrete and steel from the channel and from atop the container ship Dali as well.
Lieutenant General Scott Spellmon is the Corps’ commanding general.
“A portion of that truss bridge is draped over the front of the vessel. That piece of the truss weighs somewhere between three and four thousand tons, so the heaviest crane we have on the eastern seaboard will be here tonight. It can lift a thousand tons,” said Spellmon.
That means cutting that truss alone into four pieces—-any one of which could pose a deadly risk to divers and salvage operators alike.
The Corps’ experts are working with the bridge’s original builders to plot out the exact dimensions and weight of each piece of the original structure, both above and below the water’s surface, and at a maximum depth of 50 feet, it can’t afford to leave anything undetected on the river bottom, which could jeopardize a passing vessel once the channel is re-opened.
“A large vessel like the Dali coming in, when it’s loaded, it’s drafting about 48 and a half feet, so there’s only about 12 to 18 inches of clearance beneath the bottom of that vessel and the bottom of the channel,” said Spellmon, “So that’s important because after we get the steel out of the water and I just attempted to describe the complexity with that, we have to make sure the bottom of that channel is absolutely clean. We can’t have any concrete with exposed rebar, remaining pieces of steel, containers. We have to clean off that entire shipping channel floor as well.”
Clearing the channel for even single-lane traffic would help in getting the port back in business, but the Corps says it’s far too early to determine how long that may take.
