The founder of the Dali‘s operating company had warned that port infrastructure posed critical problems to the industry nearly three years before the ship caused a major bridge collision in Baltimore.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by the Dali, a 948-foot-long cargo vessel, early Tuesday, sending vehicles into the harbor and causing Maryland to declare a state of emergency. The Dali was being operated by Synergy Marine Group, a Singapore-based charter vessel company, at the time of the collision.
Synergy Marine Group’s founder and CEO Rajesh Unni had warned about the dangers that the existing infrastructure posed back in April 2021 when he told Bloomberg, “Traffic on the seas is different from what it was 10 years ago.”
“How do we adapt as an industry?” he asked. “It’s convenient to blame the captain, but we need to look at how the port infrastructure needs to change, how ships transit.”
Synergy Marine Group declined Newsweek‘s request for comment.
Rescue workers are searching for “upwards of seven people,” according to Baltimore City Fire Chief James Wallace. Another two have already been pulled from the water. It is unclear how many vehicles were on the bridge at the time of the collapse.
Synergy confirmed that all crew members, including two pilots onboard the Dali have been accounted for. There were no reports of injuries on the ship.
“Whilst the exact cause of the incident is yet to be determined, the ‘DALI’ has now mobilised its Qualified Individual Incident response service,” the company said in a statement. “The US Coast Guard and local officials have been notified, and the owners and managers are fully cooperating with Federal and State government agencies under an approved plan.”
Wallace said on Tuesday morning that crew members were still aboard the Dali and that “there has been communication between the ship crew and the Coast Guard.” The ship left Baltimore at 1 a.m. and was less than 30 minutes into its planned 27-day journey to Colombo, Sri Lanka, when it hit the bridge.
Jim Watson/AFP
Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said there is “absolutely no indication” that the Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge intentionally.
The 1.6-mile bridge is part of Interstate 695, and according to a Maryland state government report from November, saw more than 12.4 million passenger and commercial vehicles last year.
The Dali, which had returned back to the U.S. from Panama just a week ago, had been harboring in New York before it arrived to Baltimore on Saturday. It was built by the South Korea-based Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2015.
The 2021 Bloomberg article said that the shipping industry had been seeing a rise in lost containers, with more than 3,000 boxes falling into the sea in 2020, and more than 1,000 within the first four months of 2021.
It cited a number of reasons for the sudden uptick in accidents, including unpredictable weather, larger vessels, which carry a higher number of containers, overworked crews and the post-pandemic consumer demand that pushed shipping lines to deliver products quicker.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.