By Dan Belson
Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE —Baltimore Police officers arriving at Fort Armistead Park in the early hours of March 26 pointed their flashlights into the water and tried to make sense of what they were looking at.
“That’s something big time.”
“It sounded like a cannonball.”
“This is gonna be a hell of a cleanup.”
The officers, bewildered after receiving the initial call for a water rescue, were looking at the scene millions would wake up to that morning — the main span of the Francis Scott Key Bridge had fallen into the Patapsco River.
Their response was documented in body camera footage released this week by Baltimore Police showing roughly the first hour of response efforts from one officer’s perspective. The footage shows perplexed night shift officers quickly realizing the gravity of the collapse in front of them as a Maryland Transportation Authority Police officer explains the basics: A cargo ship lost power and hit the bridge and a construction crew was missing.
The 52-minute clip then shows response efforts ramping up, including the construction crew’s lone survivor arriving on shore after being rescued by transportation authority police. Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace later makes a cameo in the footage, telling officers that the mayor would be coming and the governor had been notified.
The video is timestamped with a start time of 1:39 a.m. — about 10 minutes after the bridge fell. The first 60 seconds, showing the officer driving through South Baltimore, contains no audio. He’s accompanied by another officer, who at one point wonders out loud why transportation authority police behind them seem so eager to get onto the scene.
He finds out once they arrive at the park minutes later. A transportation authority officer explains that they believe several maintenance workers were on the bridge when it fell.
The officers then get out of their car and look at the Patapsco.
“Is that the Key Bridge that collapsed?”
The transportation officer then explains that the ship seen pinned under the span of Interstate 695 , the Dali, had lost steering and hit a support pier, causing the bridge to collapse. He explains this again to additional officers who seem just as shocked.
At the time, less than an hour after the collapse, the transportation authority officer says they believe 20 or more construction workers were on the bridge when it fell, and notes that they stopped traffic after getting a call “probably a minute” before it collapsed.
It would turn out that only eight people were on the bridge. Six workers died, and a construction inspector escaped without plunging into the water at all. The other survivor, Julio Cervantes , is shown being brought ashore before officers discuss the search and rescue efforts.
“It’s a tragedy, obviously … I hope everybody survives,” one says.
“That’s a long fall … I mean, that guy looked like he was all right, but it’s cold,” another responds.
The bodies of two more workers were found the next day. It would take weeks of removing wreckage to find the remaining four workers who died, and longer to move the Dali and clear the channel.
Officials have now shifted their focus toward rebuilding the bridge, with the process for picking a builder underway and a meeting slated for Thursday night to discuss demolishing the remaining spans. The transportation authority was still finalizing documentation of its initial disaster spending, a $50 million contract for debris removal, on Thursday, a spokesperson said.
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