An aerial view of the cargo ship Dali after it bumped into and collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, 2024 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

An aerial view of the cargo ship Dali after it bumped into and collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, 2024 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Days after an enormous container ship slammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, inflicting the construction to crash into the slim waterway, clearing particles from the channel in order that maritime site visitors can resume is an pressing precedence.

“It has to be done very quickly,” says David Von Schmidt, a naval architect and engineer. “The regional, if not the national economy, cannot afford any longer than that.”

The probably first step will probably be ensuring that the Dali, the practically 1,000-foot container ship that smashed into the bridge early Tuesday morning, would not do any extra injury, in accordance with Captain John Konrad, CEO of gCaptain, an internet site that tracks the delivery business.

Before eradicating the ship, “They’ll get a salvage company in to secure the ship and make sure hazardous materials … [don’t leak] from the containers, no fires, that sort of thing,” Konrad says.

The subsequent step is eradicating “the tangled bridge debris,” he says. “Then you got to probably drag the bottom again to make sure you don’t have any debris that’s going to cause a problem.”

Von Schmidt says he assumes that the main focus will probably be on “completely clearing the center span so that there’s no restriction in navigation, because right now with that debris, it’s restricted navigation.”

That means transferring in massive floating cranes and sending down divers, he says. But first survey boats might want to “map out a grid of the bottom to find where all the debris is” and make a plan for elimination, he says.

That means scanning the underside, Konrad says. “Right now, the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers is running a couple sonar boats to get a general idea,” he says. “That’s going to take time. And once they do that, they’re going to have to send divers down with welding, cutting torches, cut sections out, and then they’re going to have to bring in a crane barge.”

Removing particles might be carried out in phases to hurry up the method, Von Schmidt says. “They might open the channel up in phases specific to the displacement of the vessels,” he says. So, shallower draft vessels can be allowed to transit earlier than the deeper draft ones that might snag particles on the underside.

How lengthy will all that take? “It’s weeks and months to remove the debris and reopen the shipping channel,” Benjamin Schafer, a professor of civil and techniques engineering at Johns Hopkins University, instructed member station WYPR. “I’d be shocked if it’s weeks, but I don’t think it’d take a year.”

Von Schmidt is a little more optimistic a few timeframe. “What level of traffic? That remains to be seen,” he says. “I think it’s very possible that traffic moves in two plus weeks. Possibly, he says, “it will be extensive open for site visitors shortly after that.”