Baltimore Lost More Than a Bridge

You could see the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Fort McHenry, the pentagon-shaped keep that inspired the bridge’s namesake to write the verses that became our national anthem. You could see it from the pagoda in Patterson Park, another strangely geometric landmark from which I’ve cheered on teams at Baltimore’s annual kinetic-sculpture race. You could see it from the top of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the city’s biggest employer. This morning, my husband sent me a photo of the familiar view out his window at work—now dominated not by the soaring bridge, but by a hulking container ship, halted in the middle of the water with metal strewn over and around it.

Videos of the bridge’s collapse are stunning. At about 1:30 a.m., the ship, called the Dali, lost power and crashed into one of the bridge’s central pillars. Within 15 seconds, the straight line of the bridge’s span bends and breaks, and the entire structure tumbles into the harbor.

The bridge was one of only three roadways crossing Baltimore’s defining waterways, and until this morning, each of those routes served its own purpose. The I-95 tunnel, which cuts across the mouth of the harbor, was for people commuting between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The famously congested Baltimore Harbor Tunnel—part of I-895—passed beneath the Patapsco River and is for people bypassing the city completely. The Key Bridge, farther down the river toward the Chesapeake Bay, handled the least traffic of the three. But it was part of the Baltimore Beltway, the circular highway that forms the unofficial boundary of the Baltimore metro area and shuttles into the city to help make it run. Of the three routes, the Key Bridge was the most visible and beautiful, standing alone above the water in a long, graceful arch.

[David A. Graham: Why ships keep crashing]

Officials had enough notice of the Dali’s distress that it blocked cars from entering the bridge before its collapse, but Maryland’s transportation secretary told reporters this morning that the department was searching for six missing construction workers who may have fallen into the 48-degree water. The crew was working to fix potholes—to keep Baltimore’s beat-up roads in good enough shape to keep traffic flowing into the city. Two workers have already been pulled from the water, one of whom was in such bad shape that they couldn’t be asked what happened. As of about 10:08 a.m., no one but the construction crew was believed to have fallen into the water. But had the collapse happened a few hours later, hundreds of people might well be dead: On average, about 31,000 cars and trucks cross the bridge every day.

The cars, for now, can be rerouted. But the remnants of the bridge (not to mention the Dali) are blocking the city’s waterways for any other ships that are scheduled to enter. Baltimore is now America’s 17th-biggest port by tonnage—a respectable rank, if a far cry from the early days of the United States, when shipping made the city the third-most-populous in the country—and may well drop further down the list if the harbor remains inaccessible. (Maryland Governor Wes Moore has yet to comment on when the port might reopen for business.) But Baltimore is a city defined by water. The Gwynns Falls and the Jones Falls trickle through our parks. The Inner Harbor is our Times Square; our economy is tied up in trade and transportation. Ships are in the city’s bones. The brackish harbor is in its heart.

Baltimore is also a city that can’t catch a break, full of people who find joy in its absurdities. The Trash Wheel Family—a set of four solar and hydro-powered, googly-eyed machines that keep litter in the city’s rivers from entering the harbor—are local celebrities. Every week, a group of magnet-fishers meets at the harbor to pluck benches, scooters, and other treasures from the water, proudly displaying their haul along the sidewalk. Every year, bicycle-powered moving sculptures shaped like dragons and dogs and fire trucks compete to paddle down a short stretch of the harbor without capsizing. But no one ever really forgets that the harbor itself is visibly polluted, that much of the city’s infrastructure is breaking and broken, that the state has held back funding to fix it, that Baltimore’s mayoral administrations have been riddled with corruption, that people are still getting by on too little, that the murder rate is still too high.

[Read: The aftermath of the Baltimore bridge collapse]

Baltimore Harbor is one of the city’s most important links to the rest of the world; to cut it off is to clog our blood supply. Moore has already said that the bridge will be rebuilt to honor this morning’s victims. We can still get out of the city with trains and cars. But this morning, Baltimore feels that much more claustrophobic. Looking out toward the Chesapeake used to be an exercise in optimism, in feeling all the possibilities of being connected to the wider world and the terrifyingly wide swell of the Atlantic. Today, it’s an exercise in mourning and resolve.