The crew finished filling eight potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge and took a break in vehicles parked on the span nearby. The inspector checked their work, saw concrete still drying on two of the patches and began walking back to his own car.
“I started to hear a crumbling thunder noise,” Damon Davis told federal investigators, “and I instantly ran away.
“I stopped, I turned around, and I see the entire bridge collapse,” according to the NTSB transcript of the interview. “I call the foreman; then I quickly realize everything.”
Almost 20 months later, on Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board is scheduled to release the findings of its investigation of the Dali container ship’s crash into the Key Bridge, which plunged into the Patapsco River and killed six construction workers, including the foreman Davis had tried to call.
Much is already known from previously released reports, with the NTSB saying that the Dali lost power twice as it left the Port of Baltimore in the early morning hours of March 26, 2024, leaving the crew unable to steer the massive vessel away from striking a bridge support. The agency’s preliminary report also said the Dali had two blackouts the day before.
The Department of Justice cited the Singapore-based companies that own and operate the Dali for negligence for allowing “an abjectly unseaworthy vessel” to set sail and saying they “must be held fully accountable for the catastrophic harm they caused.” In October 2024, the companies agreed to pay almost $102 million to settle the DOJ civil claim.
Despite these previous findings, many questions remain to be answered, at NTSB’s meeting on Tuesday and beyond, said one maritime expert.
“You find out different things as time goes on,” said Lawrence B. Brennan, a former senior admiralty counsel and captain of the Navy. “It didn’t happen because of ‘A,’ it happened because of ‘B.’
“Things go wrong, people make mistakes,” said the retired maritime lawyer and adjunct professor at Fordham Law School. “It’s usually a combination of human factors and mechanical things. It’s rarely a single thing.”
At the meeting on Tuesday morning in Washington, NTSB board members will vote on a probable cause of the crash, which interrupted traffic at the busy port for months, as well as on land, with the Baltimore Beltway now an incomplete circle. The board will also vote on safety recommendations and any changes to the draft of its final report.
It likely will not be the last word, with other agencies having launched investigations, including the FBI and the U.S. Coast Guard. The FBI’s Baltimore office said its policy is not to provide updates on specific investigations. The Coast Guard did not respond to an emailed question, but its website said a marine board is investigating, although the NTSB was designated as the lead federal agency to determine the cause of the accident.
Meanwhile, the crash and liability for it will be hashed out in dozens of lawsuits that have been filed: By survivors who escaped the bridge collapse; families of the men who were killed; businesses claiming harm from the interruption in port and highway traffic, and, finally, both Baltimore City and the State of Maryland, saying the Dali owner and manager were negligent.
Those companies, ship owner Grace Ocean Private Ltd., and operator, Synergy Marine PTE Ltd., have sued the vessel’s manufacturer, Hyundai Heavy Industries, claiming defective design.
While the NTSB’s final report is not yet available, it has previously released thousands of pages of documents from its investigation. Some are highly technical, from schematics of the electronic system of the nearly 1,000-foot-long Dali to finely detailed diagrams of the 1.6-mile Key Bridge.
Others, though, are wrenchingly human, transcripts of interviews with those on the ship or on the bridge and of radio calls during the chaotic moments surrounding the crash.
It had begun as an utterly routine night for both crews, the construction workers on a midnight shift and the shipmates prepping and then steering their vessel out of the Baltimore port, bound eventually for Sri Lanka.
“We had just worked Sunday doing the same thing,” Davis, the highway inspector, told NTSB investigators.
They asked if he had seen the approaching ship, heading toward the span they were working on.
“We were not aware of any ship or anything,” Davis said. “We were just doing the work.”
Meanwhile, aboard the Dali, second officer Alan Babu was going through his usual pre-departure checks, checking such things as the steering gear and alarm panel.
“Yeah, everything was okay,” he told investigators during an interview on the ship a week later. “No alarms, nothing. No indications were there that part of time. Everything was working fine.
“So we cast off the dock,” Babu said.
At about 1:25 a.m., with the ship just over a half-mile from the bridge, electrical breakers that fed most of Dali’s equipment and lighting tripped, causing the first of what would be two blackouts, or power losses, according to the NTSB’s preliminary report.
“I heard like the first blackout, which is happening,” Babu said, and his first inclination was to head to the bridge to check the alarms. “As I was proceeding forward, I saw the bridge collapsing. [The ship] was colliding with this Francis Scott Key Bridge… I don’t know whether I should go forward because all the debris will be falling in front of me.”
The blackout stopped the steering pumps, the NTBS said, rendering the rudder immovable.
At the helm was Maragasseri Rajan, who told investigators, “The vessel is coming very smooth, there is not any problem at all.” Until the blackout, he said, when the “engine is off” and “the vessel is swinging starboard.”
Shortly before 1:25 a.m., according to a transcript of audio from within the ship and to other vessels and dispatchers, the “sound of multiple alarms activating at once” begins, and continues through the crash into and collapse of the bridge. What had been quotidian chatter on the ship, from noting a buoy up ahead to asking if someone wanted mineral water, coffee or tea, turned frantic.
At 1:26, a pilot trainee calls a dispatcher to “have them shut down the Bay Bridge.
“I just lost steering — not the Bay Bridge — the uh… Key Bridge,” he said.
The next few minutes are excruciating, with shouts, multiple expletives deleted on the transcript and calls to alert authorities of the impending disaster.
Just after 1:29 a.m., the trainee pilot makes the call:
“Coast Guard. Coast Guard. This is the Dali. We have a major problem. The Key Bridge is down. I repeat, the Key Bridge is down.”
Have a news tip? Contact Jean Marbella at jmarbella@baltsun.com, 410-332-6060, or @jeanmarbella.bsky.social.
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