The first boats used the temporary shipping lane that opened among the ruins of the Baltimore Bridge on Monday to allow ships deemed “essential” to pass, port authorities announced.
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A tugboat pushing a fuel barge intended for refueling aircraft at Dover Air Force Base, a US Army air base in Delaware, passed through the corridor at 3pm local time on Monday (7pm GMT), becoming the first ship to travel since World War II. . The bridge collapsed on March 26.
The various national authorities, the states of Maryland and Baltimore, previously indicated in a press statement that this corridor constitutes the first step towards the gradual resumption of maritime traffic in the port of the northeastern United States, which is one of the main ports in the United States. Country.
But this lane is not currently wide enough to allow navigation of large ships and is intended primarily for vessels “engaged in” clearance and salvage operations.
It is 3.4 meters deep and 80 meters wide.
“It will not be wide enough for container ships to pass. Work is underway to gradually open the passage to more ships, but we do not have a timetable for that,” Coast Guard spokeswoman Carmen Caver told AFP.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore confirmed during a press conference that a second shipping lane should be accessible “in the coming days.”
He added that these two roads “will help us have more ships around the collapse site.”
This announcement comes after the launch on Sunday of the process of clearing the bridge elements, which is a complex process that required cutting and transporting the first section, which weighs “about 200 tons.”
The White House also announced on Monday that US President Joe Biden, who is running a re-election campaign against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, will visit the site on Friday.
At the beginning of last week, a container ship sank at the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, on the American East Coast, in the middle of the night. The bridge collapsed and six workers who were working on the structure were killed or missing and presumed dead.
The governor of Maryland stressed the difficulty of recovering bodies that have not yet been found in “water so turbid and filled with debris that divers cannot see more than a meter in front of them.”
The boat is still stuck in place under the rubble of the bridge, hindering maritime traffic in one of the country's busiest ports.
