Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg could not say Sunday when debris from the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse would be removed from the nation’s vital shipping lane.
“We haven’t received a timeline yet,” the country’s top transportation official told CBS’ “Face the Nation” about the large expected wreckage from the destroyed Baltimore Bridge, which runs about 2.6 miles upstream on the Patapsco River. talked about the removal of It is an important shipping route that handled $80 billion in cargo last year.
“This is going to be a very complex process. There are still forces in that steel right now,” Buttigieg said. “So it takes a lot of time to safely dismantle the ship and make sure it stays where it’s supposed to be and doesn’t start rolling.”
Early Tuesday morning, the container ship Dali lost control and crashed into a Maryland bridge pier with an estimated force of up to 100 million newtons. This is enough power to launch a space rocket. The New York Times reported. The bridge collapsed immediately.
The waterway serves as a key gateway to the Port of Baltimore, where about 1.1 million containers carrying a record 52.3 million tons of foreign cargo docked last year. The port served as a major entry point for sugar and gypsum (minerals used in everything from fertilizer to drywall), and was also a major export port for the country’s automobiles.
“Work is currently underway, and some of the non-federal channels are already in the works,” Buttigieg said. “And we have a thousand tonne capacity lift crane installed on the barge and another 600 tonne crane is currently on its way to back it up.”
An estimated 8,000 people work at the port.
According to multiple reports, Dali lost power and was thrown into chaos. Authorities have not yet announced the official cause of the disaster.
Buttigieg added that there is no estimate yet on when the bridge, named after the author of the poem that inspired the national anthem, could be rebuilt.
“I would say it took about five years to build the first bridge,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily tell us about the timeline for the rebuild. There’s a lot that goes into how we design that rebuild.”
Experts say a new bridge could cost at least $400 million. According to the Associated Press. Buttigieg expects Congress to spend a lot of money.
Buttigieg said the federal government is currently leveraging $60 million in emergency relief funds through the Federal Highway Administration to address the aftermath of the disaster.
“We may have to look to Congress to supplement that funding. If you remember the bridge collapse in Minnesota in 2007, similar things have happened in the past, and we ended up with about 260,000. There was $1,000 in damage,” he said, referring to the deadly fall on Interstate 35 over the Mississippi River.
“It means your district could be next. Also, this has historically been bipartisan,” the transportation giant said.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore emphasized that this crisis doesn’t just affect the state.
“This is also a national economic disaster,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “This is going to affect farmers in Kentucky. This is going to affect auto dealers in Ohio. This is going to affect restaurant owners in Tennessee.
“The Port of Baltimore is the largest port in the country with all of this.”
