A Baltimore Uber driver said he’s lucky to be alive after being stopped by a quick-thinking police officer as he tried to cross the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday morning.
Gail Fairman was picking up passengers at the Amazon facility in Sparrows Point at 1:16 a.m. when she got the call to drop them off across the bridge in Maryland’s Brooklyn neighborhood. she told WBAL.
But it took several minutes for the passengers to emerge from the car, which Fairman now says may have saved lives.
“Honestly, if my passenger had been any slower to come out and get into my car, we probably would have been on the bridge when it collapsed,” she said. Ta.
Fairman said he was “at the front of the line” trying to cross the bridge over the Patapsco River around 1:30 a.m. when he was stopped by a police officer.
“When I rolled down the window and asked him what was going on, he said the bridge was gone,” she told a local news outlet.
The Uber driver said he couldn’t actually see the bridge fall into the water below because it was dark outside, and he couldn’t hear the sound of metal crashing because his windows were down and his radio was on.
In fact, she didn’t fully realize what had happened until she saw a video posted on social media later that morning of a huge cargo ship crashing into a bridge and falling into the river, WBAL reported.
Police were alerted to the possible crash about 90 seconds before receiving a mayday call from the crew of the Singapore-based ship Dali.
“Please stop all traffic on the Key Bridge,” an emergency dispatcher told officers around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to police radio communications.
“A ship that has just lost its rudder is approaching.”
Two police officers who happened to be nearby responded, took up positions on opposite ends of the 1.6-mile bridge, and drove cars across while the 130,000-ton Dali cargo ship apparently lost power and hurtled out of control toward the bridge. was prevented.
Police noted that pothole repair workers were still on the bridge, apparently on a meal break.
But before they could warn, the Dali hit a support beam in the middle of the Patapsco River, and within seconds the entire bridge collapsed, throwing eight workers into the water.
Two people were rescued from the frigid waters hours later, and two bodies were recovered from the submerged truck on Wednesday.
Other workers at the scene are also presumed dead.
Carl McGibbon, Cofi Modica’s director of quality assurance and management and a freight transportation expert, said National Transportation Safety Board investigators will now investigate whether the 22 crew members on board the Dali were involved in the accident. The government will examine whether he acted rationally at that moment. damage.
But attorney Michael Mezzacappa, another expert on property damage cases in the shipping industry, noted that the crew had to make “split-second” decisions as they began to lose control of the 984-foot vessel. .
“I’m sure they did everything they could,” he told the Post, discussing what the crew and pilot must do as the ship turns toward the bridge. He said it was highly likely.
“There will always be people who would have done things differently,” Metsakappa said, but “it’s too early to know what they faced.”
Still, he said the crew’s decision to alert Maryland Department of Transportation officials to the potential collision was “a great thing” because it allowed the department to quickly dispatch officers to the scene.
