At nearly 1:30 a.m. on the morning of March 26, 2024, the container ship Dali collides with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The bridge collapse kills six people and cripples the Port of Baltimore for almost three months.
The Dali left the port’s Seagirt Marine Terminal shortly after 12:30 a.m. on March 26, bound for Sri Lanka with a cargo weighing more than 55,000 tons. At 1:25 a.m., the ship experienced two electrical outages that cut power to the ship’s lighting, steering pumps and main engine. The crew quickly corrected the first outage, but within just over 100 feet from the bridge, the ship lost power a second time. The Dali’s pilot turned the rudder hard to port in an attempt to avoid a collision; however, with no power to the propeller, the ship couldn’t turn fast enough.
The ship’s crew called the Maryland Transit Authority to report the electrical failure, prompting the on-duty officer to close traffic to the bridge. Unable to change course, the 947-foot-long ship collided with a pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge at 1:29 a.m. At the time, a road maintenance crew was working on the bridge’s southbound lanes. Within seconds, the steel through-truss of the 185-foot-high bridge collapsed into the water. Six road workers were killed; two others, along with one member of the ship’s crew, were injured.
The Dali sat in Baltimore Harbor, pinned under the wreckage of the bridge, for two months after the accident. Crews had to remove tens of thousands of tons of steel from the collapsed bridge to refloat the ship, while clearing temporary channels for access to the port. A month after the accident, Maryland Governor Wes Moore announced that a new, deeper channel would open temporarily to allow ships that had been stuck in the Port of Baltimore to leave the harbor safely. The channel fully reopened 11 weeks after the collapse.
At the time of the accident, between $100 million and $200 million worth of cargo typically passed through the port of Baltimore each day, and some 8,000 jobs depended on it directly. The accident led to job losses among these workers and temporarily shut down most trade in and out of the port. However, the relatively swift cleanup operation led by the Army Corps of Engineers minimized the economic fallout. By November 2024, the volume of containers traveling in and out of the port returned to precollapse levels. In the meantime, affected workers received financial support from the state and federal government.
The Key Bridge, which first opened in 1977, was named for Francis Scott Key. Key was inspired to compose a poem, titled “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” when he witnessed American troops at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry withstand a British bombardment during the War of 1812. The poem eventually became the Star-Spangled Banner.
