The city of Baltimore is suing the operators of the container ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge, killing six people. The disaster occurred a month ago. What did they discover? What happened before the disastrous blackout that made a 300 meter long, hundreds of thousands of tons “monster” ungovernable?
Dali container ship ‘clearly unseaworthy’
The Dali would have been “clearly unseaworthy, none of this should have happened,” lawyers representing the mayor and city council argued. The ship had already encountered, without doing anything, problems with the electrical supply of the containers that same morning, but it had set sail anyway. She had “an incompetent, careless, untrained crew.” The accident was the direct result of “carelessness, negligence and recklessness”. It will be a no-holds-barred legal battle: compensation claims will run into the billions for the costs of replacing the bridge, diverting traffic, cleaning up the Patapsco River and recovering lost revenue associated with disruptions to the Port of Baltimore.
The owner and operators of the Dali container ship that collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last month are therefore accused of knowingly allowing an “unseaworthy” vessel to leave port. They are directly responsible for the accident, according to court documents filed this week by lawyers in response to a request from the ship’s owner and its management company to limit their financial liability for the March 26 accident.
It all revolves around a power supply problem
Everything, or at least a lot, revolves around an electricity supply problem encountered a few hours before leaving the port of Baltimore, heading towards Sri Lanka. Instead of solving the problem, according to the lawyers of the “city” of Baltimore, the ship’s managers almost ignored it before leaving the port. Only a few minutes passed and the Dali lost power and hit the bridge, “causing an immediate collapse, killing at least six people, shutting down the region’s main economic engine,” the city said in one of its documents.
An article fromAssociated Press on April 15 revealed, citing an anonymous source, that alarms had sounded on some of the ship’s refrigerated containers before it left port, indicating general power supply problems. So neither the ship’s owner nor its manager would have limited liability in the case, the city argues, because they did not adequately train and supervise the crew, did not follow safety rules and operating procedures, and did not carry out maintenance , proper equipment and inspection of the vessel. The accident was said to be the direct result of the “carelessness, negligence and recklessness of the owner and operators, as well as the unseaworthiness of the vessel,” the city said.
The Dali’s owner and operator, from Singapore, filed a joint petition in the Maryland District Court earlier this month arguing that the accident was “not due to any fault, negligence or lack of care” on his part. The litigation will be very long, and the investigation into the cause of the accident is still ongoing. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. Coast Guard are still trying to determine the cause of the blackout on the Dali. The FBI has also opened a criminal investigation.
The shipowner and operator of the container ship have officially requested to limit their liability for the accident to $43.7 million, the equivalent of the total value of the vessel and its cargo, in accordance with the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851: yes This is a law that allows the shipowner to limit his liability when a situation occurs beyond his control, beyond his control. Compensation claims from the accident are likely to exceed several billion dollars.
The bridge collapsed due to the domino effect
The victims of the disaster were workers resurfacing the road. The policemen who jumped into the middle of the road blocked traffic and avoided a massacre. It collapsed, experts explain, due to a domino effect: a localized impact was enough to cause the entire structure to collapse. The works of the past did not have the redundancy and structural robustness of today (and cargo ships were much smaller in size). The domino occurred when a pier on the bridge was hit, effectively causing the loss of support: an effect disproportionate to the causes that generated it. In modern bridges the damage would have been limited to the affected area.
Most of the crew of the Dali, a 289 meter long container ship, are from India. One man on board was slightly injured when the vessel collided with the bridge. For now, the Dali’s crew is not scheduled to disembark: they are unlikely to leave the ship until she is moved. A complicated and potentially many-month-long process.
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