(MENAFN- AsiaNet News) Divers found the remains of two of the six workers missing since they were tossed into Baltimore Harbor from a highway bridge that collapsed into shipping lanes when a cargo ship collided into the structure.
A day after the enormous container ship lost power and its ability to maneuver before slamming into a support pylon of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the remains were removed from the mouth of the Patapsco River on Wednesday.
Colonel Roland Butler of the Maryland State Police reported that the two men's remains were discovered in a red pickup vehicle submerged in around 7.62 meters of water close to the middle of the collapsed bridge.
He said that because of the increasingly dangerous conditions in the river littered with wreckage, officials had halted their efforts to find and recover more corpses from the depths. According to Butler, sonar pictures revealed more submerged cars that were impossible to approach because they were "encased" in fallen bridge rubble and superstructure.
The two men whose bodies were recovered on Wednesday. Four more workers who were part of a crew filling potholes on the bridge's road surface remained missing and presumed dead.
According to authorities, among the six workers were immigrants from El Salvador and Honduras. On Tuesday, rescuers extracted two workers alive from the water; one was taken to the hospital.
The bridge collapse led the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest on the United States Eastern Seaboard, to close indefinitely, processing more vehicle and agricultural equipment freight than any other in the country. According to port data, the Port of Baltimore handles more automotive freight than any other port in the United States, with over 750,000 automobiles expected in 2022, as well as container and bulk cargo ranging from sugar to coal.
Earlier on Wednesday, a team of federal investigators boarded the idled freighter, which was still tied in the port channel with part of the destroyed bridge stretched over its bow, to begin interrogating the ship's 22 crew members who remained on board.
In their first on-board visit to the ship late on Tuesday night, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) personnel recovered a key piece of evidence they hope will help piece together a precise timeline of the accident – the vessel's“black box” data recorder.
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