Urgent search and rescue at the Baltimore bridge faces difficult conditions

The urgent 18-hour search for people believed to have plunged into the cold waters beneath Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge on Tuesday was complicated by perilous conditions, as the steel wreckage created obstacles for rescuers and low temperatures gave victims a short window for survival.

The water’s swift current, murkiness and 50-foot depth — plus a lack of certainty about just how many cars or people could have been caught in the collapse — handed emergency responders a monumental task, authorities and disaster response experts said.

The sweeping response that unfolded Tuesday on the Patapsco River, involving military and emergency boats, aircraft and equipment, was made more fraught by a ticking clock. After hours searching, authorities said Tuesday night that the risk to rescuers had become too great and too much time had passed to find alive the six people missing.

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“We’re going away from the search-and-rescue portion to a recovery operation,” Maryland State Police Col. Roland L. Butler said at a news conference. “The changing conditions out there have made it dangerous for the first responders, the divers in the water.”

The desperate effort had been ongoing since the collapse of the bridge about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday after being struck by a freighter. Two survivors were pulled from the water immediately afterward. Six others, part of a construction crew on the bridge, were presumed dead by late Tuesday.

From the start, the mission was difficult.

In the dark hours after the collapse, low visibility and water temperatures in the 40s made the effort immediately challenging, authorities said.

Finding people on the water’s surface during the night is “a bit like a needle in a haystack,” said Rebecca Rouse, the associate program director for emergency and security studies at Tulane University. “Folks who are submerged, or vehicles or pieces of the bridge, that’s going to be even more challenging.”

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The dawn revealed a large expanse to cover and the bridge’s collapsed latticework in the way. By late morning, the likelihood that anyone submerged in water had survived was low, experts said, but a possibility remained of people trapped in air pockets or in wreckage. Authorities had not yet determined how many cars might have fallen from the bridge.

Searchers were in the air and on the water, with Coast Guard response boat crews, an 87-foot patrol boat and the Army Corps of Engineers looking on and below the surface, along with crews from other agencies, authorities said Tuesday. They were using sonar to search underwater and had detected at least five vehicles by morning, Baltimore Fire Chief James Wallace said.

Underwater drones showed twisted metal and debris that made it unsafe for at least some divers to go down, according to a post on X by Prince George’s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks, whose county police dive unit was standing by at the scene. Experts said the collapsed structure posed risks to responders searching the surface and divers underwater.

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“It’s a very dangerous situation with all of the steel wreckage from the bridge in the water,” Mark H. Buzby, former administrator of the United States Maritime Administration, said midday. “I’m sure the water visibility is quite poor, so it’s a highly risky area to be operating in.”

By evening, when 150 to 200 rescue personnel remained on the scene, the conditions had prevented some divers from entering the water and required those who did to use caution, said Kevin Cartwright, a spokesman for the Baltimore City Fire Department.

“With all of that steel collapsing around the columns, it’s still unsafe,” he said, adding, “It’s a challenge. … Those waters are deep, the visibility is low, and it’s cold.”

Any divers would have probably risked injury and struggled with visibility, said Ryan Dilkey, the director of the Eckerd College Search and Rescue Team in St. Petersburg, Fla. The team responded when the Sunshine Skyway Bridge collapsed after being struck by a 19,734-ton freighter in 1980.

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“When you say river, I think murky water — and that to me is visibility of inches, not feet,” Dilkey said Tuesday of Patapsco River. “[Rescuers] are basically feeling with their arms, hands and their own body.”

That danger was what led authorities to call off the search after determining that anyone missing could no longer be found alive, Butler said at the evening news conference.

“The last thing we want to do is put divers in the water with changing currents, low temperatures, very poor visibility and so much metal and other unknown objects in the water,” he said. “All it takes is one object to strike an individual, and all of a sudden, we have one first responder trying to recover another first responder.”

He said divers would begin trying Wednesday morning to search for the bodies of the six missing. Though authorities could not rule out the possibility that additional cars fell, they had no information that any were on the bridge at the time of the collapse, Butler said.

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In bridge collapses, survivability depends on a range of factors, Dilkey said, including whether a person was inside a vehicle and at what speed the vehicle was traveling. With the bridge about 185 feet above, cars were probably “moving at a speed where contact with the water below is a grave danger,” he said.

At water temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees, a person can “lose consciousness in 30 to 60 minutes, and can likely swim only 7 to 40 minutes before exhaustion and die [within] 1 to 3 hours even with flotation,” according to John A. Downing, director of Minnesota’s Sea Grant program.

“In that water, people have a very finite amount of time that [they] could be saved. It has to be immediate rescue,” said Sal Mercogliano, a maritime historian at Campbell University in North Carolina.

The Coast Guard generally performs calculations to determine the probability of survival in the water temperature when mounting a rescue effort, said Kyle McAvoy, a maritime safety consultant with Robson Forensic and a retired Coast Guard captain. Incident commanders decide when to change an effort from search-and-rescue to recovery, and later move to longer-term goals, like removing debris and reopening the port.

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“The investigation is going to be very complicated,” said McAvoy. “It’s a daunting task.”

The overall effort to haul all the debris out of the water is likely to take weeks, experts said.

Investigators will have to catalogue everything that is collected, which could be complicated by the tide pushing things around underwater.

Debris could wash up on nearby beaches over the next few days, and any human remains that are not recovered could float to the surface in the next week or two, Buzby said.

Removing the wreckage will entail getting pieces of the bridge off the ship before the ship can be moved to a safe berth and ensuring that no dangerous debris is left on the riverbed. That will require bringing in cranes and large salvage equipment to haul out wreckage, said Mercogliano.

“You’re talking about weeks, if not months,” he said. “You’re going to have to remove the entire bridge structure from the main shipping channel.”

Rouse of Tulane University said she would expect authorities to use underwater mapping technology to find all vehicles, remove the cars and attempt to recover bodies.

“You wouldn’t leave them down there,” she said. “Our culture is, we don’t just have folks in a watery grave. We would go in and recover any folks.”

Kim Bellware, Tim Craig, Jason Samenow and Danny Nguyen contributed to this report.

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