A massive hydraulic grab arrived in Baltimore over the weekend as officials planned a Thursday opening of the deepest alternate channel yet for vessels to travel through the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Officials plan to open the 35-foot channel for only a few days to let deeper-draft ships through. Traffic won’t be let through next week as crews enter the next stage of operations, which will involve lifting steel off of the cargo ship that struck the Key Bridge last month as well as using the grab to clear debris from the Baltimore harbor’s 50-foot shipping channel.
The new alternate channel will be the deepest of the four temporary routes into the harbor and the Port of Baltimore, which has been blocked to most vessel traffic since the Dali struck a bridge support column March 26, causing the 1.6-mile bridge to collapse and killing six construction workers.
Democratic Gov. Wes Moore touted the opening of the temporary channel at a news conference Tuesday, which marked exactly four weeks since the bridge collapsed.
“This is an important step forward. This is an important milestone,” Moore said. “But I also want to be very clear: This is not the goal. This is a step on the journey, but it’s not the destination. We have to and we will open the full federal channel.”
The Fort McHenry Limited Access Channel is planned to open to commercially essential vessels from Thursday until 6 a.m. next Monday, according to a marine safety bulletin issued Monday evening by the Coast Guard, which noted that weather could impact the schedule. Vessels hoping to transit the new channel, which runs close to the still-immobile Dali, will have to request access and be approved based on their size and other factors. Deeper-draft vessels will need to be helmed by a Maryland pilot and escorted by two tugboats.
Five of the vessels currently stranded in the Baltimore harbor, including a car carrier, are currently expected to get out in that time, said David O’Connell, Captain of the Port for the Key Bridge Response Unified Command. Inbound vessels are expected include a small bulk carrier and a ship carrying aluminum, he said.
After Monday morning, the temporary channel is set to remain closed until at least May 10, according to the bulletin. While it’s closed, officials plan to rig up the critical piece of bridge debris sitting on the bow of the Dali, Rear Adm. Shannon N. Gilreath of the Coast Guard said Tuesday.
Moore said the workers who are pulling crumpled steel from the water are doing so in such close proximity to passing vessels that they could feel the ships’ vibrations.
“This work is complicated,” Moore said. “This work is dangerous.”
The mammoth hydraulic grab received from Texas over the weekend will be attached to the Chesapeake 1000 crane and work as a “vital part” of debris-removal operations at the bottom of the Patapsco River in the next stage of operations, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Michael Himes, a spokesperson for the Unified Command. The set of four hydraulic claws weighs 165 metric tons when empty and can hold up to 1,000 metric tons, according to its Dutch manufacturer, The Grab Specialist.
The footprint of salvage operations in the water will have to change to accommodate the colossal size of the hydraulic grab when it moves in for subsurface debris removal, Himes said. He recalled the grab being on standby — but not used due to size constraints — when he worked in the public information office during the salvage operations on the Golden Ray, a Baltimore-bound cargo ship that capsized off the Georgia coast in 2019. This time around, the grab is going to get work.
The hydraulic grab was built in 2015 in its manufacturer’s factory in the Netherlands and is the only one in the world of its size with four independent hydraulic claws, the company’s managing director, Emiel Bleyenberg, said in an email. Soon after it was built, the grab was used by the global salvage firm Ardent to clear wreckage from the Troll Solution, a jack-up offshore oil rig that collapsed in 2015.
Baltimore Sun reporter Alex Mann contributed to his article.
