A first boat used the temporary navigation corridor opened among the rubble of the Baltimore bridge on Monday to allow ships considered “essential” to pass, port authorities announced.
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A tugboat pushing a fuel barge intended to refuel planes at Dover Air Force Base, a U.S. Army airbase in the state of Delaware, passed through the corridor at 3 p.m. local time Monday (7 p.m. GMT), becoming the first ship to travel since the bridge collapsed on March 26.
In a press release, the various national authorities, the State of Maryland and Baltimore, had previously indicated that this corridor constituted the first step towards a gradual resumption of maritime traffic in the port of the northeastern United States, l one of the main ones in the country.
This passage, however, is not wide enough, for the moment, to allow the navigation of large ships and is primarily intended for vessels “involved in operations” of clearance and rescue.
It measures 3.4 meters deep and 80 meters wide.
“It won’t be wide enough for container ships to pass through. Work is underway to gradually open the passage to more ships, but we do not have a timetable for this,” Carmen Caver, a coast guard spokesperson, told AFP.
A second navigation corridor should be accessible “in the coming days,” assured Maryland Governor Wes Moore during a press conference.
These two routes “will help us to have more ships around the collapse site”, he added.
The announcement follows the launch, on Sunday, of the clearance of the elements of the bridge, a complex operation which required the cutting and moving of a first section, weighing “around 200 tonnes”.
The White House also announced Monday that US President Joe Biden, campaigning for his re-election against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, will visit the site on Friday.
At the beginning of last week, a container ship sank into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, on the American east coast, in the middle of the night. The bridge collapsed and six workers who were working on the structure died or are missing and considered dead.
The governor of Maryland highlighted the difficulty of the operation to recover the bodies which have not yet been found in “water so murky and full of debris that divers cannot see more than a meter in front of them” .
The boat is still stuck in place, under debris from the bridge, blocking maritime transport in one of the country’s busiest ports.
