Baltimore Key Bridge collapse updates: ‘No hope’ for missing men as search suspended

The six people who are unaccounted for after the Key Bridge collapse were part of a construction crew filling potholes on the bridge, said Paul Wiedefeld, the state’s transportation secretary.

Guatemala’s consulate in Maryland said two of the missing were citizens of the Central American nation.

Honduras’ deputy foreign affairs minister Antonio Garcia said that a Honduran citizen, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, was missing, the Associated Press reported.

Mexico’s Washington consulate said via social media X that citizens of that nation were also among the missing. It did not say how many.

A senior executive at the company that employed the workers said that the workers were presumed dead given the water’s depth and how much time had passed.

Jeffrey Pritzker, executive vice president of Brawner Builders, said the crew was working in the middle of the bridge when it came down.

“This was so completely unforeseen,” he said.“We don’t know what else to say. We take such great pride in safety, and we have cones and signs and lights and barriers and flaggers.”

Crew members onboard the cargo vessel “Dali” issued a mayday call moments before the crash took down the Francis Scott Key bridge, enabling authorities to limit vehicle traffic on the span, Maryland’s governor Wes Moore said.

As the vessel neared the bridge, puffs of black smoke could be seen as the lights flickered on and off. It struck one of the bridge’s supports, causing the structure to collapse like a toy, and a section of the span came to rest on the bow.

With the ship barreling toward the bridge at “a very, very rapid speed”, authorities had just enough time to stop cars from coming over the bridge, Mr Moore said.

“These people are heroes,” he said. “They saved lives last night.”

A major bridge that collapsed in Baltimore after getting hit by a ship is named for Francis Scott Key, who turned a wartime experience in the early 19th century into the poem that became the national anthem of the United States.

Key was a prominent attorney in the region during the first half of the 19th century. In September 1814, two years after the War of 1812 had started between the United States and the British, he was on a ship to negotiate an American prisoner’s release and witnessed a 25-hour British bombardment of Fort McHenry.

From his vantage point on the Patapsco River, the 35-year-old Key was able to see that the American flag stayed up through the hours of darkness and was still at the top of the fort when the morning came. He turned it into a poem.

“And the rocket’s red glare, the bomb bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,” as one of Key’s original lines says. The rockets and bombs later became plural.

The National Transportation Safety Board has said it is sending a team to investigate the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

Baltimore City Fire Chief James Wallace told CNN that authorities found three passenger vehicles, a cement truck and another vehicle submerged in the water, using infrared and side-scan sonar technology.

So far only two people have been rescued but six people who were conducting construction on the bridge are thought to be missing.

Dive teams are working to perform search missions.

At the time of the Dali crashing into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, harbor pilots were directing the ship, as customary when ships enter ports or canals.

None of the 23 crew members were injured.

US Coast Guard officials said that conditions for search divers were also treacherous, after calling off the search for six missing men.

The water temperature in the Patapsco River as well as debris from the bridge floating in the water all make recovery extremely challenging, according to one official.

“We do not want to injure any of these first responders in this recovery effort,” he said on Tuesday, adding that the jagged debris could easily puncture a diver’s airline.

Structural engineers will be brought in to help divers understand how to navigate the twisted metal of the bridge.

The search for six individuals who went missing after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed has been called off, after authorities said they are not expected to be found alive.

At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon an official said that though Coast Guard members would still be in the area, search efforts would now be entering “a different phase’>

“Based on the length of time that we’ve gone in this search the extensive search efforts that have gone into it, the water temperature, at this point we do not believe we are going to find these individuals alive,” the official said.

“The coast guard’s not going away, none of our partners are going away, but we’re just going to transition into a different phase.”

The men went missing after a ship collided with the bridge around 1am in Baltimore, Maryland. Two people were rescued from the water, with one in critical condition and the other rejecting medical attention. Officials said eight men were originally unaccounted for.