What it took to reopen one of the nation’s busiest ports

78 days after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after it was struck by a cargo ship, the Port of Baltimore is back in business.

The cleanup involved more than 2,000 people, 18 barges, 13 floating cranes, 10 excavators and 22 tugboats.

Today, On Point: What it took to reopen one of the nation’s busiest ports.

Hayes Gardner, enterprise writer at The Baltimore Sun. He’s been reporting on the bridge collapse and the port closure for months since it happened on March 26.

Jonathan Daniels, executive director of the Maryland Port Administration.

Colonel Estee Pinchasin, Baltimore District Commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Guess what? Sometimes things go right. Hard stuff gets done. No fuss. Just hard work. The competence ought to be celebrated, too. We spend too much time talking about negative things, don't we? So today, as an antidote to these doom scrolling times, we're going to talk about the coordination and effort that took place to clean up a massive disaster, and how the lessons from that success may be just as important as learning about the disaster that precipitated it.

NEWS BRIEF: The entire bridge, the entire Key Bridge in the harbor. I advise again, the entire Key Bridge has fallen into the harbor.

CHAKRABARTI: March 26th of this year, that was the 9-1-1 call made around 1:30 a.m. after the Dali, a massive container ship, crashed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge. Live video footage showed the 980 foot long, 158-foot-wide ship striking one of the bridge's piers.

The Key Bridge collapsed entirely. and instantly, killing six workers who'd been fixing potholes on the bridge's road above. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel wreckage were now in the waterway. The port of Baltimore, one of the nation's busiest, was forced to shut down and was not expected to reopen anytime soon.

WES MOORE: And I remember that morning, March 26th, the only certainty was uncertainty. And many said it would take multiple months. Some said even up to a year.

CHAKRABARTI: Maryland governor Wes Moore.

This team did the unimaginable by many. And instead of 11 months, he got this thing done in 11 weeks.

CHAKRABARTI: That was just last month, June 12th.

Governor Moore announced the reopening of the port of Baltimore.

MOORE: You hear that?

That's a beautiful sound.

CHAKRABARTI: Crews not only had to move the Dali from the Patapsco River, they also had to clear more than 50,000 tons of debris out of the water.

MOORE: We made today happen. This has been a remarkably complex operation, spanning multiple objectives, hundreds of assets. And thousands of people.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's what we're going to talk about today.

What it took to reopen one of the nation's busiest ports. And also, what comes next for bridge design. And a little bit more about what we know about why the Dali rammed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the first place. And we're going to start with Hayes Gardner. He's an enterprise writer at the Baltimore Sun.

He's been covering the Dali disaster and the cleanup of the port of Baltimore pretty much daily since the disaster happened. He joins us from Baltimore. Hayes, welcome to On Point.

HAYES GARDNER: Thanks, Meghna. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So first of all, take us back to the early morning in May. When and how did you first hear about this almost unimaginable disaster?

GARDNER: Sure. I think everyone in Baltimore remembers how they learned March 26th, about what happened. I, like most people, I was asleep I got a call at 3:45.

CHAKRABARTI: Hayes, you with us? Okay, sorry about that. Looks like your line was dropping out for a second there. I'm going to let you complete here in a second, but I want to apologize. I said the disaster in May, but you're right. It was March. But keep going. So tell us again where, you said everyone in Baltimore remembers where they were when they found out.

So where were you?

GARDNER: Yeah, so I was asleep, and I got a phone call from our sports editor in the middle of the night, and I was confused why he would be calling me. I texted him back and said, did you mean to call me? Of course, he called me back immediately. We discussed what had happened. He said they were gathering reporters to cover this, and for the rest of that day was a hectic blur, as we began to cover the event.

CHAKRABARTI: But, Hayes, let me just ask you when, okay, first of all, when you got the call from the sports editor, you were probably imagining, wait, did one of Baltimore's teams win something unexpectedly? But when you said, the bridge has collapsed, did you do a double take? Did you wonder if you were, like, it was too early in the morning, you didn't hear him properly?

GARDNER: Yeah, absolutely. I was confused. I didn't know what he meant by collapse. And I thought perhaps a piece of the bridge had been damaged or something. When you hear the word collapse in a bridge, you don't think what happened could actually happen. Given just the severity of it.

So I was confused, and I was still half asleep. So I was like, I must not be fully grasping this. My eyes were half closed as I'm hearing those words. And I quickly got on a call with other editors. And of course there was video of the incident going around. So almost within minutes you could see what had happened and that's when it dawns on you, Okay, this entire span has fallen into the water. But it took the video to really imprint on me what exactly had happened.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So we're much later in the show. We're going to talk a little bit more about what the NTSB has said so far in their preliminary report about why the Dali rammed the bridge. But we wanted to, we're delighted you could join us today because what, just about a week after the collapse happened, you actually were able to get on a U.S. Coast Guard boat, right? And saw the wreckage. So tell us, what did that look like? What did you see?

GARDNER: Sure. So that day I got on a Coast Guard boat from the cruise ship terminal here in Baltimore. So disasters require improvisation. And the cruise ship terminal had turned into this hub of activity for Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, etc.

And they're all bustling around while there's these tropical photos on the wall. So it's this bizarre juxtaposition. And I went on a Coast Guard boat. And the sheer size was hard to comprehend. Any container ship that's 1,000 feet long over 100,000 tons is hard to fathom, harder to fathom once you get close to it.

And we were, I think, probably 15 feet from it and seeing the containers shredded, they got through a paper shredder was, it was jarring to see. There were light poles sticking up from out of the water, there are bits of roadway, and then 2,000 feet from the ship, there's just huge pieces of bridge sticking out of the water, and cleaning it up, because at that point it had already been a key priority by authorities, was to clear the channel.

And in doing so seemed in my eyes at the time, it seemed insurmountable. Just the volume that needed to be cleared out. And I saw these two workers in a basket using a torch to cut up this piece of cement. And it was, this piece of cement was smaller than three feet by three feet, probably, not a huge piece of cement.

I was thinking, what's the point of that? That is so small compared to this entire operation. Like this will never get all done. But of course, the way to get it done is by small pieces. There's the joke, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. And so you have to do these little bitty pieces.

And then they pull up these huge pieces of bridge on several different occasions. So seeing it for myself firsthand was jarring. And I still think about all that wreckage and it's just the sheer size of it.

CHAKRABARTI: Honestly, what you're describing, Hayes, has disaster movie quality to it, right?

I'm just trying to imagine looking down in the water and seeing light poles sticking up out of the water and giant sections of roadway and mangled steel and, like you said, the shredded containers themselves, which is mind boggling. Can you remind us how big the bridge was while it was still standing in terms of the number of lanes it had on it, et cetera.

GARDNER: So the bridge is four, it's four lanes. And it's over a mile long, the whole thing, but what fell is about a little over 3,000 feet. I think it's over 2,500. I think it's over 3,000 feet. All fell at once and that's the main and includes that primary span where ships would go under, and it includes 2 other spans.

So it was, thousands of feet of roadway, 4 lanes of roadway on that, when we went out on the Coast Guard boat a week after, you could see a speed limit sign almost embedded into some roadway. I was upside down, but we could see the 55-speed limit sign. So you can see on a bridge just all mangled together and just strewn about in the Patapsco River.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. 3,000 feet of bridge. Okay. So then as we heard, that tape from Governor Moore just a couple of minutes ago, in the first days and weeks after the scope and scale of what the cleanup would have to accomplish was understood.

What were the initial estimates of how long it would take those thousands of tons of debris, to take that stuff out of the water?

GARDNER: Sure. So authorities were hesitant to put a timeline on it immediately, because each of these, when something like this happens, there's almost no precedent.

Bridges have collapsed before, but each one is different. So I was unsure on the timeline. I spoke to a couple of experts in clearing up disasters like this, who it ranged from at least a few months to several months or longer. So there was not a concrete estimate, but you knew it'd be at least a few months, perhaps several months.

So you knew it'd be a while but each one's different. So it could have taken much longer than that, it's just no one knew at first.

CHAKRABARTI: But to be frank, obviously the pressure was on from the start because the port got shut down because of this disaster, right? And as we said, the port of Baltimore is one of the nation's busiest, so you're talking about hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of commerce and jobs on the line.

GARDNER: Yes, exactly. So the governor and other leaders immediately named a few priorities. The first was to, it was to find the bodies of the six men who were killed on the bridge, but another priority was to reopen that shipping lane, and that was a priority from the beginning and to the beginning.

Even as the salvage was ongoing, open up temporary lanes for commercial ships because of the importance the Port of Baltimore is one of the busiest in the nation. It's the busiest in terms of bringing in cars And so it's integral to the region and nation's economy. So that was a key priority and, I'm employing so many people in the Baltimore areas.

So opening the port was, it was a clear priority from the beginning.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Today we are talking about, and yes, I'll say it, we are celebrating the effort and coordination and accomplishment it took to reopen the Port of Baltimore in just 11 weeks after that major disaster when the Dali Container Ship rammed into and collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

It was hard to believe 11 weeks ago that the cleanup would be complete, and yet it is. So we want to learn how that happened and celebrate competence for once in the media. So Hayes Gardner is with us today. He's Enterprise Writer at the Baltimore Sun. He's been covering the Dali and the Port of Baltimore pretty much since the day of the collapse back in March.

And joining us now is Colonel Estee Pinchasin, U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, Baltimore District Commander. Colonel Pinchasin, welcome to On Point.

COLONEL ESTEE PINCHASIN: Thank you. Thank you. Great to be with you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so first and foremost, Colonel, I'm sure that in your military experience, you've probably seen a lot, but when you first got word on March 26th that this major transportation, engineering, human disaster had happened, how'd you find out and what was one of the first things you did?

PINCHASIN: The way I found out was my mother-in-law called me. She is a very early bird, and she was the first one to call. It was quickly followed by phone calls from within our organization, but I did think it was funny that she was the first one to alert me super early in the morning. So I feel like maybe we have to hire her into our emergency operations ... your mother-in-law, for being on the ball.

PINCHASIN: She's amazing. Yes, she's on it. I knew right away when we were talking that would have an impact on our community. And then as the phone calls came in immediately after, the first thing we were doing was just making sure we had accountability of everybody, as were most organizations in the area.

I think that for us, for the Baltimore district, the Fort McHenry channel, the channel, the main shipping channel that comes into the port of Baltimore is one that we maintain all the time. We maintain that depth of 50 feet to bring traffic into the port of Baltimore. So we knew that was going to be the major part for us, but the overarching mission that we were going to be supporting was the search and rescue operation right away.

That was the number one priority.

CHAKRABARTI: And I'm glad both of you have mentioned that. Because yes, six people lost their lives while they were working on the bridge, 1:30 a.m. that morning. And it's important not to forget that. Now, Colonel, when you said that you, meaning the Army Corps, maintains the Fort McHenry Waterway.

Does that mean, tell me a little bit more about what responsibility that entails. What does it mean that you maintain it?

PINCHASIN: One of the key missions for the Corps of Engineers is maintaining federal navigation channels. You have lots of channels on different waterways throughout the United States, and there's a portion of them that are designated federal navigation channels that are char, that we're charged with maintaining.

The Baltimore District has about 90 channels that we maintain at a certain authorized depth. And so this channel in particular is authorized to be maintained where federal government is responsible for keeping it at that depth to enable traffic, to enable that type of shipping traffic into the port of Baltimore.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. So keeping the waterway at 50 feet deep constantly. Okay. Is it actually deeper than that or is it about that deep now?

PINCHASIN: There are portions right now, especially as we had to dredge below that depth, to make sure we didn't leave any steel behind that. But within the port of Baltimore, all the features within the harbor where they're at, about 50 feet, there are areas that might be a little deeper if we had to create an area to prevent shoaling.

Sometimes there's a little bit of over depth that's dredged, but mainly where the depth is authorized at 50, that's where it's maintained. There are portions that are authorized at 42. There are other areas that have a different depth based on the traffic that they handle, and the needs of that particular inlet or waterway.

CHAKRABARTI: So now, along with Hayes' description, we're getting a clearer physical sense about the size of the cleanup that had to happen, right? Because as Hayes said, we're talking about 3,000-ish feet of bridge span that collapsed. And now, to a depth of 50 feet in the waterway, plus more, because of the dredging that had to do.

Colonel, can you describe to us then, you and your team, I presume, arrive at the scene. You also have the ship, right? The Dali, which is crippled and it's a hundred thousand tons, right? It's a massive cargo ship. How do you decide where you begin? After the search and rescue, where you begin a cleanup operation like this. Tell us that story.

PINCHASIN: I think it's important for the top I guess key to our success has been using the right people, getting the right tools and using the right group of people to help us get after this, salvage operations require very niche type of skill and experience and expertise.

And that is not a mission or the expertise of the Corps of Engineers, even though we are responsible for maintaining the channel. So we brought in the United States Navy's supervisor of salvage. And that was from day one. That was an immediate, on day one, within hours, we had the Navy salvage experts coming on in because of a preexisting interagency agreement that I think was critical to our success, to be able to have salvers on the site within hours, driving up from D. C. and Norfolk and down from New Jersey, to be able to join that team, create that team, immediately to start assessing and have the right people looking at this problem, I think was the foundation to the success.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then what did they, excuse me, Colonel.

What did they do? I'll just come out in a minute.

PINCHASIN: I want to nerd out with you a little bit here. Let's nerd out. Let's nerd out. So remember, on the first day, it was really a search and rescue operation, but you have to be able to do things in parallel. So while the Maryland Transportation Authority Police and Maryland State Police were teaming up with dive operations, the Corps of Engineers was supporting those operations with structural engineers that had urban search and rescue experience to be able to assess where the divers could go in and do that and conduct their operations safely.

It was very tricky to be able to send people into an area there that we haven't had an opportunity yet to study, and know that it's safe for the divers to go in, so we don't have any more casualties on the site. So you've got that going on while you have the salvers coming in to figure out, how are we going to go and attack this as the mission progresses?

We were very lucky that just down the river the Harry Nice bridge, if you remember, that whole construction operation was going on and that same contractor, Skanska, who was working on that bridge was on the scene for the state, and immediately produced a layout and an incredible, I guess a set of drawings that laid out the entire end of the bridge.

I wish I could show it to you so you could see the visual. It showed how the bridge used to be, where the spans fell in the ground, into the water, how it was laying on the riverbed, and what span was, how much span was located where, and what location. It really served as an orientation all the way through the entire operation.

That same drawing that we received on day one from Skanska, who became a part of this team, helped orient everybody as to the portion of their work.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Hold on here for just a second, colonel. Hayes, I know you're still there. I just want to remind you that I haven't forgotten about you, but let me continue the salvage nerdery with the colonel here for just a second, because when you talk about, so you had this incredible drawing, which I imagine was invaluable, right?

Because otherwise there would have to be considerable time spent doing soundings to figure out where all the debris was. You mentioned divers and salvers. Quickly, like what were the divers doing and how was the wreckage dragged out of the waterway?

PINCHASIN: So you have the different types of divers, your search and rescue divers ended up being your recovery divers on the second day.

And at that point, you couldn't, it wasn't safe anymore. You had to start lifting wreckage to be able to get to them at that time. We did, we spent a few days and more than a few days really analyzing the wreckage, how it was laying on the bottom. So you had divers that were part of the salvage teams.

We did bring in the Coda Octopus through the Navy supervisor, salvage ... that helped us get 3D imagery of how the wreckage was laying and what made it so complex was that, and I guess we've described it this way before. There's so much stored energy inside the wreckage and to how it was bent, compressed, contorted, and mangled.

I always described it like a spring where if you pull a spring that's in tension and then you cut it, because that we knew we're going to have to break it up, but if you were to cut something that's under tension, it would snap. Now you have these massive steel trusses that are under tension, and you could see from above the water that there was so much force, that these were bent and misshapen that you know that there's a lot of tension under there.

We certainly didn't want to be dangerous. Thanks to the help of our salvers, we were able to see how the wreckage was laying on the bottom of the riverbed, you had portions that were just completely mangled and collapsed on itself within the roadbed. So the divers would have to be going down below to confirm whether something was connected or not.

They would literally be feeling whether or not a member, a steel member was connected. Would that have to be severed or was it able to be lifted? So there was another set of eyes to take you beyond the 3D imagery that we were getting under the surface.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, let me say, now we're getting to the nitty gritty, colonel. Because I hadn't even thought of the fact that lots of the steel wreckage could be in tension. In fact, I guess I think the presumption is the exact opposite, that when a bridge collapses, whatever tension forces were holding it up were immediately removed, released, but that is not the case. Because everything's been like re-bent once it hit the water and the bed underneath it.

Okay. Hayes, you wrote about this, because eventually, through the process that the colonel is describing, that 50,000 tons of steel was slowly but methodically removed from the water. What happened to it? I heard it got, a lot of it got recycled.

GARDNER: Yes, so it was great to hear the colonel's description.

The diving part always fascinates me, that it's so hard to see it at those depths that a lot of it was being guided by audio. But yes, that audio --

CHAKRABARTI: Sorry, audio meaning, like actually, like pinging audio?

GARDNER: The colonel could explain it better than me, but I believe the divers were being told where to look.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, I see.

PINCHASIN: Yeah so it's really hard to understand when you think of diving, you might think of gorgeous scuba diving with clear water, but that was not the case here. The divers only had one to two feet of visibility in front of them, if they were lucky. And what they were diving in were very dangerous and unforgiving conditions.

If you ever listen to the videos that have been posted. You hear a lot of clinking and those are, that steel that's hitting the divers' helmets. It's very dangerous. They were guided by operators up top, sitting on either barges or vessels up top on the surface, guiding their hands through in order to feel for connections and to really validate and confirm how the steel was laying.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

PINCHASIN: And they even had to do that, the divers were also involved in the salvage operations themselves. You had these massive steels trusses that you see above the water. And people might think that's all that it was, but underneath the surface, you had a tremendous amount of reinforced concrete, the roadbed, everything that was supporting from underneath, and that air, those items need also to be broken up.

The steel trusses themselves were cut up into several hundred-ton pieces. Those are those bite sized pieces that are several hundred tons each, if you can imagine. And when you look at the water and you see the truss laying there at the top, you have those cords. Those are the top cords of the truss.

You have the bottom cords of the truss that were actually buried in the mud.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, wow.

PINCHASIN: You had to get to those and to be able to cut those. You actually had to dig them out. And every single lift was engineered. And I can geek out a little for you, but they had to figure out how they were going to lift these, where they were going to cut them and how they were going to be able to successfully lift them out of the water without compromising the equipment that we had.

We brought in the Chesapeake 1000, or, known as the Chessie, and it's a 1,000-ton derrick crane, meaning it doesn't rotate.

CHAKRABARTI: Huh.

PINCHASIN: The largest on the East Coast, but you still have the limits of the angles that you have to be able to take that. So there was a lot of pre rigging that had to happen where the chains themselves would be rigged up to other cranes and then moved over onto the Chesapeake and it was lifted very slowly.

I know we talk a lot about the divers. I feel like we have to give a huge shout out to our crane operators who are lifting these loads, who can feel how the load is reacting. I also think that it was new to me, salvage was new to me completely and understanding how it's planned and how with each layer that's lifted.

You go back and reassess to see how, what the next step is. How did the load react after you just pulled stuff out? One of the most challenging portions was like I mentioned, digging out the bottom cord and they literally had to cut through like a window within the truss in order to lower a salvage bucket to the bottom of the riverbed.

And dig out the wreckage that was sitting on top of that bottom cord in order to then lower a diamond wire saw. down to that bottom cord that was guided by divers to put it in place, the divers go back up, and then that allows the diamond wire saw for several hours to cut, make a cut of that bottom cord.

CHAKRABARTI: Colonel, hang on here for just a second.

Just have 15 seconds before we have to get to our next break. Hayes, when we come back, I do want to hear about what happened to all that steel, and then we're going to talk about what's it going to take to rebuild the bridge. So all of that in a moment. This is On Point.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Hayes, I did want to let you, give you a chance to tell this really interesting story of when all that debris was hauled out in the methodical and careful manner that the colonel had been describing, it all, where did the steel debris go and what happened to it?

GARDNER: A huge piece of bridge would get pulled from the water, might weigh several hundred tons, and you can't just toss that in the recycling. But you can put it on a barge and transport it to this nearby logistics hub at 5 acres of land, just it was being unused.

So that was converted into kind of the scrap yard for all of this deal and all this wreckage. So it would be barged over, which wasn't very far from that hub, you could see the bridge site. So it was not far at all. It would be lifted off by crane. That piece of bridge would be on to these open acres, and then crews would just cut up those pieces of bridge.

Spread across acres was just tons. Literally tons of steel and debris, and it was cut into smaller, more manageable pieces so that they could then be transported via truck to recycling center elsewhere. So it was a several step process to get a huge piece of bridge into smaller pieces so that it could then be recycled.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's a positive outcome for some of the materials that were pulled out of the waterway. But not all of it could be recycled, right? I can't imagine what the concrete and other materials had the same positive fate.

GARDNER: Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what was done with all of it. I know what they could recycle, but I'm not sure of the specifics.

CHAKRABARTI: Colonel, do you know?

PINCHASIN: Yeah, the operation at the salvage yard was truly heroic behind the scenes. It wasn't just getting it out of the water. They were able to use the concrete, break it up and use it for sub base. They were able to take a lot of that material and be able to take it out.

Besides just cutting up into four to five foot pieces. It was amazing how that was not a holdup. They were able to process that material at that salvage yard, that was set up by the state's contractor, Skanska. And I think one of the most amazing aspects of that is how safely it was conducted. It was like a machine.

And I think we take those kinds of things for granted. Everyone is focused on the water, not realizing that the entire process went on beyond that.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I don't know if this is an appropriate analogy, but it brings to mind the long and careful process during the cleanup of 9/11, that not only was there the Ground Zero site, but then of course there was also all the work that had to go into transporting the materials away from the site and going through it, et cetera.

Really careful and caring work, which I know people don't often associate with engineering or salvage tasks, but I will. One more quick question to you, Colonel, about the environmental health of the waterway, because there was already, I think, if I remember correctly from Hayes's reporting, the site where the Dali struck, not only, obviously, was there the bridge pier, but there was a natural gas pipeline, I believe, in the riverbed below it, and now there's all this debris that had to be taken out.

Has there been an assessment of the environmental health of the waterway now?

PINCHASIN: Yes, ma'am. The Unified Command, one of our goals when we established ourselves was making sure that we limited any environmental impacts that could possibly occur. One of the first things that happened was that we boomed the Dali all the way around. Despite even though we didn't have any breaches of the hull and no environmental hazard on the site when that occurred, we still wanted to make sure just to have that around the ship, just in case.

We did make sure to inert the natural gas pipeline with coordination through BGE and also the overhead power lines, if you couldn't add any more variables to the situation, but that, the environmental monitoring that occurred, that, the environment that the workers were working in, it was always a big factor in how we were progressing with the operations and very glad that was all contained.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Colonel Estee Pinchasin with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Baltimore District Commander. Colonel, I can't thank you enough for joining us and for indulging me in the salvage and engineering nerdery, and thank you for you and your team's work in coordinating this massive cleanup.

PINCHASIN: Thanks for having us.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to bring Jonathan Daniels into the conversation now. He's executive director of the Maryland Port Administration and also joining us from Baltimore. Jonathan Daniels, welcome to you.

JONATHAN DANIELS: Meghna, great to be here with you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so the cleanup cost $100 million plus, but how does that compare to the cost of lost commerce, even over this rapid 11 weeks that it took to get the port fully reopened?

DANIELS: Yeah, I think what we can look at, and as the colonel spoke about, and I cannot say enough for the collaboration that occurred with the Unified Command, while so many people pointed to this type of cleanup could take up to a year. And in fact, governor Moore did a great job in indicating what could have taken 11 months, was actually completed in 11 weeks.

The impact has been significant. When, the evening of the 25th, people had their shifts, they were ready to come into work the next morning and through this catastrophic event, all of a sudden, all those shifts are done. The men and women of our longshore crew which handle the cargo, the truckers that move the cargo inside the port and outside to their end destination, those jobs all of a sudden were done.

And so there was an immediacy of this event that impacted about 8,000 people that worked inside and around the gates of the Port of Baltimore. So this was a catastrophic event that immediately shut down the waterway while the port was still open and moving some cargo out. That had already been discharged at the port.

The majority of the activities at the port were ceased. And because of that, the immediate economic impact was extremely significant. This is a port that generates about $70 billion of annual economic impact.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

DANIELS: And within that, so you're looking at just basic math of about $190 million a day of impact.

CHAKRABARTI: Were you worried about long term, were you worried about long term loss of business because the container ships that would have gone into the port of Baltimore while it was closed, they had to go somewhere else and there could have been a permanent shift to those other ports?

DANIELS: We could have, and it's still something that we worry about.

My counterparts down in Virginia, in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Wilmington and as far away as Georgia, just shows that the way in which the supply chain works is extremely nimble and allowed for that cargo to find gateways into the United States at other ports.

But the longer that the channel was closed, we knew that there could be a long term impact on business and the amount of cargo that would be coming back. We spoke with stakeholders on a weekly basis, made sure that they understood the information from the unified command that would allow them the opportunity to make their business decisions.

And the one thing that we did ask of them is when the channel opens up, please bring your cargo back. And thus far, those promises that they made to come back have been kept. There's still a little bit of a lag on import cargo and especially from our Asian trade lanes. But other than that, we've seen significant rebounding.

A lot of our business has rebounded to nearly 100%. But it is something that we still fear as that cargo elsewhere, that we're just not going to be able to bring that back.

CHAKRABARTI: But just to check me on this, because I think I remember Hayes saying that a significant portion of the import cargo, since it was coming from Asia, was a major part of the business that is done at the port of Baltimore.

So is that a concern that you haven't had that 100% rebound?

DANIELS: No, it is, in conversations with the shipping lines and with the cargo owners, all of them have indicated it was just a matter of time before they were comfortable enough to set up bookings onto those ships. And making sure that they would not be delayed coming back into the channel and into the port.

So those conversations were ongoing. It's a long voyage from the Far East to get through to Baltimore. That's 40 to 50 days length of time. So we knew that there would be, and that we were comfortable with the type of lag that we were going to have. We feel that probably in the middle of July, we will start to see the imports and exports balance out, but the lines just needed to feel comfortable, that the channel was going to be open.

The obstructions were going to be gone before they made that investment, taking bookings and bringing that cargo in. But we feel very fortunate with the amount of time that it took, being so short at 11 weeks. And again, the lines have only indicated to us that the bookings are being made and that cargo is returning and will continue to return to the port of Baltimore.

CHAKRABARTI: And just super quickly, Jonathan, does that mean the 8,000 workers you were talking about before are all back to work?

DANIELS: They're not back to work as of yet. The amount of vessels that we have coming in are almost back to pre-incident levels. It's just the amount of cargo per vessel. So you're just not seeing the length of time that they're on the dock as of yet.

But we are in a good position right now. The roll on, roll off cargo that we're known for, number one in autos and light trucks. The majority of that cargo has returned and that's the type of cargo that brings the most employment opportunities. So we're very pleased to be able to see that cruise is 100% back.

So that's been good to see. It's been on the container side that we have been lagging, but that was to be expected.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Jonathan Daniels, executive director of the Maryland port administration. Thank you so much for giving us that update.

DANIELS: Great to be here. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: All right, Hayes, we've got a couple of minutes left and I want to wrap up with you about what's the work that still needs to be done in the future, because while the port may be up and running and headed in the right direction, there's still no bridge, right? And you've written really important articles about how, look, from the 1980s, a warning had been sounded by federal authorities that certain bridges might be very vulnerable to devastating outcomes if there's a ship strike.

So now that a new bridge has to be rebuilt, what are we looking at in terms of timeline, in terms of cost, in terms of designing a bridge that hopefully could withstand something like this ever happening again. And of course, no one wants it to happen again. But now it's been proven that it could.

GARDNER: It's a longer timeline. It will take, the current expectation is that the new bridge could be open by October 2028. That's the plan. A little over 4 years, the state of Maryland is currently reviewing proposals from prospective builders, and will select one by the end of the summer.

And then will get to work and it's expected to cost about $1.7 billion. And for the federal highway, it's typically paid for with 90% federal funds and 10% state funds, but President Joe Biden has said the federal government will 100% fund this rebuild. So it's expected to be federally paid for, open by 2028, but the federal government will seek to get some of that money back via insurance, bridge insurance.

Or ongoing litigation.

CHAKRABARTI: Of course, there's a election between now and 2028, so we'll see. But we're talking about, what, a $2 billion construction, potentially.

GARDNER: Yes. Yes. And the design of it is, some details have been revealed. It's expected to be a four-lane bridge like the old one was.

The type of bridge is not yet known. Many people expect it to be a cable stayed bridge, which has been a more popular model in recent years. And one advantage of that is a cable stayed bridge you, your two main support peers that are on the outside of the main channel, where ships would go through, can be farther apart and the farther apart those two peers, those two supports are from each other, lowers the chance of a ship strike.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's one possible bridge design they'll use. But to note, the Dali did strike that pier head on. It was a freak accident and the NTSB is probably going to take a couple more years to get its final report out. But I just wanted you to take 30 seconds to talk about the fact that you reported that in 1981, Dali's shipwreck. And in 1983, there were a couple of federal reports that came out that said, Hey, states need to evaluate the integrity of bridges that are near ports where ever-growing container ships were passing through to see if they could withstand something like that.

You say that didn't happen. Does that mean that the Key Bridge was never evaluated for that?

GARDNER: Yeah, there was never, so in 1981 after a bridge in Tampa was knocked down in a similar incident, there was a national push for all these bridges to be analyzed. And the key bridges never studied for this exact situation, which was true of most bridges across the country.

They were never analyzed because it happens so rarely. And so now the NTSB is urging bridge owners to analyze their bridge for this exact scenario, for a ship strike. So the one more thing is that the Coast Guard has launched a board of inquiry into port infrastructure.