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      Baltimore Investigation Turns to Ship’s Deadly Mechanical Failure

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      The Dali reported a power blackout and steering problems before hitting the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The disastrous mechanical failure so far has not been explained.Just minutes before the cargo ship Dali was set to glide under Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, the ship’s alarms began to blare. The lights went out. The engine halted. Even the rudder, which the crew uses to maneuver the vessel, was frozen.As a frantic effort to restore the ship was underway, the pilot soon recognized that the aimless vessel was drifting toward disaster, and called for help.The cascading collapse of the vessel’s most crucial operating systems left the Dali adrift until it ultimately collided with the Key bridge, knocking the span into the river and killing six people. But as crews this week were still sorting out how to disentangle the ship and recover the bodies of those who died, investigators were also turning to the most central question: What could have caused such a catastrophic failure at the worst possible moment?Engineers, captains and shipping officials around the world are waiting for that answer in an era when the industry’s largest ships can carry four times as much cargo as those just a few decades ago, navigating through congested urban ports under bridges that may carry tens of thousands of people a day,Already, a few key questions are emerging, according to engineers and shipping experts monitoring the investigation, and most of them point to the electrical generators that power nearly every system on the 984-foot vessel, not only the lights, navigation and steering, but the pumps that provide fuel, oil and water to the massive diesel engine.The “complete blackout” reported by the pilot is hard to explain in today’s shipping world, in which large commercial vessels now operate with a range of automation, computerized monitoring, and built-in redundancies and backup systems designed to avert just such a calamity. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Officials Identify 2 Bridge Collapse Victims by ID and Fingerprint

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      Under the center span of the collapsed Baltimore bridge, divers on Wednesday morning found a red pickup truck with the bodies of two men, the first victims to be recovered during a two-day search that has been complicated by the bridge’s twisted debris and bad weather.Now, officials say they will need to pause the recovery effort altogether — with four more victims not yet found — so that pieces of the crumpled bridge can first be removed from the Patapsco River.Col. Roland Butler, who leads the Maryland State Police, said officials understood the importance of giving closure to the families of the six construction workers presumed dead after a cargo ship slammed into the bridge, the Francis Scott Key, early Tuesday. But, he said, other vehicles that fell from the bridge — possibly with the construction workers inside — are trapped behind debris that makes the area too dangerous for divers.“We have exhausted all search efforts in the area around this wreckage, and based on sonar scans, we firmly believe that the vehicles are encased in the superstructure and concrete that we tragically saw come down,” he said.For now, Colonel Butler said, the authorities would focus on cleaning up the debris.“Once that salvage effort takes place, and that superstructure is removed, those same divers are going to go back out there and bring those people closure,” he said of the victims’ families.Barges, including some with cranes, are already on the way to the collapse scene to pull the mangled structure from the river, the Coast Guard said.The two men who were found on Wednesday morning are Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, of Baltimore, and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, who lived just outside the city. Mr. Hernandez was originally from Mexico, and Mr. Castillo from Guatemala.Officials said one of the victims was identified by a driver’s license found with him, and another by his fingerprints.Both men, as well as the four still missing, were doing maintenance work on the bridge when a large cargo ship barreled into a support pier, bringing the span down into the river below at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday.Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland said that divers started the search for victims less than an hour after the bridge collapsed. He said officials have been taking the recovery part of the search as seriously as they took the rescue effort, when they believed the missing victims might have still been alive.Jacey Fortin More

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      Questions Swirl Over Baltimore Bridge Collapse

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      Questions swirl over the bridge’s collapse after a massive cargo ship slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge moments after losing power early on Tuesday.As a spring tide rushed out of Baltimore harbor just after midnight on Tuesday, the hulking outlines of a cargo ship nearly three football fields long and stacked high with thousands of containers sliced through frigid waters toward the Francis Scott Key Bridge.The vessel, the Dali, was a half-hour into its 27-day journey from Baltimore to Colombo, Sri Lanka.Then the lights on the Dali went dark. The crew urgently reported to local authorities that they had lost power and propulsion. The ship bore down on the bridge.In a scene captured from a livestreaming camera, the ship smashed into a pillar of the bridge with so much force that the massive southern and central spans of the bridge collapsed within seconds.A highway repair crew was on the structure, working the night shift, filling potholes. At least eight members of the construction crew plunged into the 50-foot-deep Patapsco River below.Six people were presumed dead as officials suspended the search-and-rescue effort on Tuesday night.“Based on the length of time we’ve gone in this search, the extensive search efforts that we’ve put into it, the water temperature, that at this point we do not believe we are going to find any of these individuals still alive,” Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath said.Two construction workers were rescued from the water; one went to the hospital and was later released.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bridge Collapse in Baltimore Puts an Election Year Spotlight on Infrastructure

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      When a bridge carrying Interstate 95 in Philadelphia collapsed last summer, President Biden came to town six days later and stood alongside Pennsylvania’s governor for an announcement that it would be repaired and reopened within two weeks.Now that an interstate highway bridge in Baltimore has fallen into the water after being struck by a cargo ship early Tuesday morning, the president, who counts a major infrastructure law as part of his first-term accomplishments, will have another challenge to demonstrate what a competent government response looks like.Maryland isn’t a presidential battleground, but like Pennsylvania it does have a Democratic governor who is a key Biden ally with significant political ambitions of his own and a Senate race that will help determine which party controls the chamber next year.Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland declared a state of emergency and said he was in contact with federal and local authorities.It will take time to determine the political fallout from the Baltimore bridge collapse. The dramatic video of the Francis Scott Key Bridge crumbling into the Patapsco River is ready made for doom-and-gloom political ads. The human toll of the collapse remains undetermined. And if Baltimore’s port is closed for a significant period it would enact a severe and extended economic toll on the region.President Biden arrived in Philadelphia six days after a bridge carrying Interstate 95 collapsed last summer. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesSo far Maryland officials have not sought to cast blame or seek a partisan advantage. Former Gov. Larry Hogan, a centrist Republican who is running for the Senate, wrote on social media that he was praying for those still missing. The two Democrats in a primary to face Mr. Hogan, Representative David Trone and Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, released similar statements of grief and shock.When the Interstate 95 bridge in Philadelphia reopened 15 days after it collapsed, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania declared it a feat of government competence and has since incorporated it into his talking points for why Mr. Biden deserves a second term.Now Mr. Biden, who is scheduled to travel to North Carolina on Tuesday and has been briefed on the bridge collapse, has another high-profile opportunity to demonstrate how his administration responds to a major civic calamity. The White House has not yet revealed any plans for Mr. Biden to visit Baltimore — though typically presidents do not appear at disaster sites until local authorities have been able to assess the extent of the damage. More

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      Shani Mott, Black Studies Scholar Who Examined Power All Around Her, Dies at 47

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      Her work looked at how race and power are experienced in America. In 2022, she filed a lawsuit saying that the appraisal of her home was undervalued because of bias.Shani Mott, a scholar of Black studies at Johns Hopkins University whose examinations of race and power in America extended beyond the classroom to her employer, her city and even her own home, has died in Baltimore. She was 47.She died of adrenal cancer on March 12, said her husband, Nathan Connolly, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins.Though Dr. Mott spent her career in some of academia’s elite spaces, she was firmly committed to the idea that scholarship should be grounded and tangible, not succumbing to ivory tower abstraction. She encouraged students to turn a critical eye to their own backgrounds and to the realities of the world around them. In a city like Baltimore, with its complicated and often cruel racial history, there was plenty to scrutinize.“How do we think about what we’re doing and how it relates to a city like Baltimore?” is how Minkah Makalani, the director of the university’s Center for Africana Studies, described some of the questions that drove Dr. Mott’s work. “There was this kind of demanding intellectual curiosity that she had that she brought to everything that really pushed the conversation and required that people think about what we’re doing in more tangible ways.”Her research focused on American books both popular and literary, and how they revealed the kind of conversation about race that was allowed by the publishing industry and other cultural gatekeepers. This work connected to a larger theme of her scholarship: how big institutions determine how race is discussed and experienced in America.As an active member of the Johns Hopkins faculty, she pointedly explored the ways the university engaged, or did not engage, with its own workers and the majority Black city in which it sits. In 2018 and 2019, Dr. Mott was a principal investigator for the Housing Our Story project, which interviewed Black staff workers at Johns Hopkins whose voices had not been included in the campus archives. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peter G. Angelos, Owner of the Baltimore Orioles, Dies at 94

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      Mr. Angelos, who built a fortune as a class-action lawyer, endeared himself to fans by investing in free agents to bolster the team.Peter G. Angelos, the longtime owner of the Baltimore Orioles who built a fortune as a class-action lawyer, died on Saturday. He was 94.His death was confirmed in a statement from his family that was posted on the team’s social media account, which said that Mr. Angelos had “passed away quietly.” No cause was given, though the statement acknowledged that he had been ill for several years.Mr. Angelos’s death came as his family awaited approval by Major League Baseball owners to sell the team — valued, along with its assets, at $1.725 billion, according to The Baltimore Sun — to David Rubenstein, the president of Inner Harbor Sports.The sale was approved on March 20 by the Maryland Stadium Authority board, which was required under the terms of the team’s lease for ownership to be transferred.As the owner of the Orioles, Mr. Angelos, who grew up in Baltimore, endeared himself to fans by investing in free agents to bolster the team.“Peter Angelos was a true Baltimorean,” Brandon M. Scott, the city’s mayor, said on social media. “His impact on Baltimore & Baltimoreans will live for generations.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More