Coffey Modica’s Michael Mezzacappa and Karl MacGibbon share more insights on the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse with the New York Post
By Melissa Koenig
A Baltimore Uber driver says she is lucky to be alive after a quick-thinking cop stopped her from crossing the Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday morning.
Gayle Fairman got a call at 1:16 a.m. to pick up a passenger from the Amazon facility in Sparrows Point and drop them off in the Brooklyn neighborhood of the Maryland city — just across the bridge, she told WBAL.
But it took a few minutes for the passenger to come out to the car, which Fairman now says may have saved their lives.
“In all honesty, if my passenger wasn’t a little late coming out to my car and getting in, we probably very well would have been on the bridge when it collapsed,” she said.
Fairman described how she was “right at the front of the line” to cross the bridge spanning the Patapsco River at around 1:30 a.m. when she was stopped by a police officer.
“I rolled down my window and asked him what was going on, and he said the bridge was gone,” she recounted to the local news station.
The Uber driver said she did not actually see the bridge collapse into the waters below because it was so dark out, and did not hear the sound of crashing metal because her windows were rolled up and her radio was on.
In fact, she didn’t fully understand what had happened until she saw videos posted to social media later that morning, showing a massive cargo ship striking the bridge and sending it tumbling into the river, WBAL reported.
Cops had only been alerted to the possibility of a crash about 90 seconds before, when they received a mayday call from the crew of the Singapore-based Dali ship.
“Hold all traffic on the Key Bridge,” one emergency dispatcher told officers around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to police radio traffic.
“There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering.”
Two cops who happened to be nearby responded, and stationed themselves at either end of the 1.6-mile span — stopping cars from crossing while the 130,000-ton Dali cargo vessel barreled out of control toward the bridge after apparently losing power.
The cops noted that a pothole repair crew was still on the bridge, apparently on a meal break.
But before they could warn them, the Dali collided with a support beam in the middle of the Patapsco River — causing the entire bridge to collapse within seconds — and throwing eight workers into the water.
Two were rescued from the frigid waters below hours later, and on Wednesday two bodies were recovered from a submerged truck.
The other workers at the scene are also presumed dead.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board will now scrutinize whether the 22 crew members on board the Dali acted reasonably in the moments leading up to the crash, according to Karl MacGibbon, director of Quality Assurance and Control at Coffey Modica and an expert on shipping cargo damage.
But attorney Michael Mezzacappa, another expert on property damage cases in the shipping industry, noted that the crew had to make a “split-second” decision as they started to lose control of the 984-foot vessel.
“I’m sure they did everything they could,” he told The Post, saying the crew and pilots likely had a conversation about what had to be done as the ship veered toward the bridge.
“There’s always going to be someone saying they would’ve done this or that differently,” Mezzacappa said, but “it really is premature to know what they were faced with.”
