“Once again, Baltimore has lost,” Mayor Brandon Scott (Democrat) said in an interview. “And once again, Baltimore has proven the world wrong.”
The disruption from the March 26 bridge collapse cost the Baltimore region’s economy about $1.2 billion, said Anirban Basu, an economist at Baltimore-based consulting firm Sage Policy Group. That figure takes into account the sharp drop in port activity immediately after the disaster, the more moderate losses from the reduced volume of goods moving through the smaller waterways, and the costs of clearing the channels.
Getting to this point hasn’t been easy: multiple layers of government and the private sector worked together to pull off a massive cleanup and prevent a prolonged supply chain nightmare.
“If we work together, we can actually accomplish big things,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) said in an interview Friday, adding that early estimates had suggested it would take six months to a year to fully restore the waterway. It ended up taking just 11 weeks.
Scott said she had hugged Moore and mourned at Fort Armistead Park in the early hours of the disaster, but never expected the park to reopen so quickly.
He praised the collaborative effort, which included Moore, President Biden, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard and officials from federal, state, county and city governments.
Scott said there was no isolation after the bridge collapse, in contrast to past disasters such as after Hurricane Katrina, when then-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin “had to beg the federal government for help.”
“When you talk about so-called political animals, people become very territorial. They are very focused on how this is going to affect them,” he said. they“But in this case, no one stepped up to serve their own interests,” Scott said. “This is probably the first time in American history that that hasn’t happened.”
Instead, the Army Corps of Engineers used an existing agreement with the Navy’s Salvage and Diving Division, which specializes in responding to emergencies at sea, to bring in huge barges, cranes and teams of specialized contractors to remove the 100 million-pound remains of the bridge from Patapsco.
Crews surveyed the dangerous underwater conditions and began removing the remains of the bridge on March 30. Along with the Coast Guard, specialized divers and other salvage workers from Maryland achieved a series of significant accomplishments in rapid succession: they opened temporary or limited access to shallow-draft vessels and then to larger ships; they used a series of controlled explosions to free the container ship Dali from the destroyed bridge, allowing the channel to be partially reopened to larger vessels; and on June 4, they pulled the last large steel section of the bridge from the water. The state hopes to rebuild the bridge by 2028.
Darius Irani, chief economist at the Towson University Institute for Regional Economic Research, said the overall economic impact has not been as severe as initially feared. He said the announcement that the entire canal would soon reopen was a “light at the end of the tunnel” for many businesses. But transportation issues caused by the loss of the bridge will continue to cause logistical disruptions, Irani said.
Maryland officials said as of early June that the state’s worker retention program had saved more than 3,000 jobs through grants to businesses that pledged not to lay off employees for two months, but that the employment impact of the disaster was still unknown.
Maryland’s latest April jobs report showed port jobs, which are classified as part of the transportation, warehousing and public works sector, fell by 1,000 jobs. State officials said some of those losses may have since been recovered through job retention programs. Overall, Maryland added 7,800 jobs that month.
White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Killian said President Biden has directed administration officials to “use all tools” to speed up the reopening and has been briefed on efforts by senior leaders of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard.
Killian, who has led White House coordination since the bridge collapse, said the full reopening of the waterway “shows what we can accomplish when we pull together all our resources at the federal level, state level and local level and do it well.”
The impact of the reopening will be felt across the nation’s economy and far beyond U.S. borders.
It becomes possible The company will fully resume operations transporting large volumes of cars, tractors, containers and bulk materials such as coal through Baltimore, just as it did before the Dali lost power and veered off course.
Many large ships had already started returning since authorities moved the Dali into port on May 20 and opened the 400-foot-wide restricted waterway to a depth of 50 feet.
Maryland port officials said Monday’s full reopening, originally scheduled for the end of May but delayed because of the complex work of cutting and removing the final sections of the bridge, would speed up the port’s recovery.
Officials said two-way traffic is once again open on the fully functioning channel and that extra safety measures put in place when it was narrower than usual have been lifted. Recovery officials said in a statement that crews will be examining and removing the iron debris “below the 50-foot mud line to ensure it does not impact future dredging operations.”
“Baltimore is back,” said Maryland Port Authority Executive Director Jonathan Daniels. “Whatever the cargo, whatever the movement, whatever the schedule, our terminal operators are ready to welcome those vessels. And the workforce is ready.” The port remains fully open for commercial activity, just as it was before the incident.”
But logistics experts say it will take time for businesses to return to Baltimore, and some may never return.
Port advocates argue that all the reasons that made Dali attractive before the disaster still apply, including the vastness of the local market it serves. They point out that the contents of 70 percent of the containers that come into the port are consumed within 70 miles and that the port serves as a gateway to the upper Midwest and beyond.
But Daniels also acknowledged the pressure from competitors.
“We don’t want a temporary change to lead to a long-term decision that a different gateway would be better,” Daniels said. He predicted a full recovery would come by 2025.
Companies like Mitsubishi Motors North America offer hope.
Baltimore is a key hub for Mitsubishi Motors, which produces cars in Japan and Thailand. After the Dali accident, Mitsubishi had to divert some of its vehicles to the port of Wilmington, Delaware, and truck them to a company facility at the Port of Baltimore, where they could be fitted with accessories such as floor mats and stripes.
Mitsubishi began moving ships back to its normal facilities on May 25. “We expect to be able to resume operations essentially where we left off,” company spokesman Jeremy Barnes said.
Cargo loading and unloading work is up compared to the weeks after the Dali crash but remains sluggish.
Scott Cowan, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 333 in the Port of Baltimore, said that at its worst, between 1,900 and 2,000 of the union’s 2,400 members were unemployed.
“We have over 50 per cent of our employees back at work, so we’re moving in the right direction,” Cowan said.
The increase in activity has exacerbated an already-present congestion problem.
Dan Ryan, Mazda’s vice president of government and public affairs, said it was always “our intention and hope” to remain at port as long as the waterway could reopen soon. Still, the lack of a key bridge is causing delays getting trucks to port and back to dealerships, he said.
The strait has now been reopened but the bridge has been removed, and it is unclear to what extent the resumed maritime traffic will worsen road traffic.
“That’s definitely an open question for us,” Ryan said.
