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    A Close-Up View of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse

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    From roughly 100 yards away, the site of one of the worst bridge collapses in the country’s history is haunting. Maroon containers larger than a car sat twisted and crushed. Massive beams of steel warped into crooked arches. Pillars of jagged concrete poked out from the water — a tomb of wreckage that dimly reflected on the gray-toned river. From roughly 100 yards away, deep into the Patapsco River in Baltimore, the site of one of the worst bridge collapses in the country’s history is a haunting scene. The U.S. Coast Guard allowed The New York Times to ride aboard a response boat on Saturday afternoon to witness up close the destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which was struck by the cargo ship Dali on Tuesday, killing six men, all construction workers who were working on filling potholes on the bridge.As the 45-foot-long Coast Guard vessel neared the scene of the disaster, a service member who had made several trips to the site braced passengers for the view to come. “It’s still shocking every time.”The Coast Guard boat initially neared the cargo ship on the rear side, the stern, which was spared from much of the impact of the collapse. Two people could be seen walking along the starboard, though it was unclear if they were investigators or crew members, all of whom are from India and have remained on the ship to keep it operable. An anchor that the crew members had used in desperation to keep the ship from hitting the bridge was visible, submerged in calm water. A thin and yellow boom floated around the ship to contain spills. It looked similar to crime-scene tape. The gray and red shipping containers were stacked up to nine rows high, partly shielding for a moment the wreckage that lay behind it.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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      Crews at Site of Bridge Collapse Work on Removing First Piece of Debris

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      The governor of Maryland said that the search for missing victims would resume when the conditions for divers improve.Crews in Baltimore on Saturday were working on pulling the first piece of wreckage out of the water after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, a tangible sign of progress in the daunting effort to reopen the busy waterway.Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath of the U.S. Coast Guard said at a news conference that his crew was aiming to lift the first segment of the bridge “just north of that deep draft shipping channel.” He added, “Much like when you run a marathon, you’ve got to take the first few steps.”The bridge was a critical transportation link to one of the largest ports in the United States, and the collapse is costing the region and the country millions of dollars the longer it is out of operation. More than 8,000 workers on the docks have been directly affected, Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland said.Mr. Moore said cutting up and removing the north sections of the bridge “will eventually allow us to open up a temporary restricted channel that will help us to get more vessels in the water around the site of the collapse.”Officials overseeing the cleanup added on Saturday that salvage teams will use gas-powered cutters to systematically separate sections of the steel bridge, which will then be taken to a disposal site.The work was occurring less than a week after a giant container ship known as the Dali suffered a complete blackout and struck the bridge, killing six construction workers and bringing the bridge down into the Patapsco River.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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      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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      Southern California Oil Sheen Is Unlikely to Stem From Spill, Tests Indicate

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      Samples from an oil sheen in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Huntington Beach, Calif., were more consistent with oil that seeps naturally.An oil sheen that emerged last week in the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California coast does not appear to have been caused by an oil spill, officials with the U.S. Coast Guard said on Monday.Oil samples collected from the sheen, which was about 2.5 miles long and half a mile wide, did not match anything that would have leaked from one of the oil rigs or ships in the water near Huntington Beach, Calif., according to preliminary tests conducted by the state’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response.The samples had characteristics of “freshly produced oil” from the local Monterey geological formation and were more consistent with oil that seeps naturally from the sea floor, though the tests did not conclusively determine their origin, the Coast Guard said.“We have many samples from all the oil rigs and their products, as well as the oil that was in the oil sheen,” Petty Officer Richard Uranga, a spokesman for the Coast Guard, said. “The oil doesn’t seem to be connected with the oil rigs.”The sheen was first spotted on Thursday evening, about 1.5 miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, where there are significant offshore oil operations.The discovery prompted concerns that equipment from those operations was spilling oil into the Pacific Ocean — a particularly alarming prospect in the wake of a major oil spill in the same area in 2021, during which 25,000 gallons of crude gushed from a crack in a pipeline and into the sea. The leak resulted in federal charges against three companies.The Coast Guard, as well as state and local agencies, investigated the new sheen over the weekend. Crews cleaned up about 85 gallons of oil offshore and removed about 1,050 pounds of oily sand and tar balls from the shore, the Coast Guard said. The various agencies have concluded their response to the incident.In Huntington Beach, popularly known as Surf City, beaches remained open over the weekend and on Monday, despite what seemed to be an increase in the appearance of tar balls, said Jennifer Carey, a spokeswoman for the city.She said that tar balls had been washing ashore regularly since the oil spill in 2021. Still, the city continued to monitor the situation, Ms. Carey said, adding that if beachgoers see tar on the beach, they should avoid it. If visitors see an area with heavy contamination, she added, they should report the situation to a lifeguard. More