Rescuers have given up hope of finding more survivors of the Baltimore bridge collapse. This is as efforts switched on Wednesday to begin looking for bodies of the missing. There are a lot of questions as to why a container ship collided into the span.
Search divers were calculated to return near dawn to the waters surrounding the ruins of the bridge in Baltimore Harbor to look for six missing workers who are now being presumed dead.
The disaster has forced the indefinite closure of the Port of Baltimore, previously one of busiest routes on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and created a traffic quagmire for Baltimore and the surrounding region.
As the odds of their survival of those missing persons dwindled, the search for the missing workers was suspended on Tuesday evening, 18 hours after they were thrown from the fallen Francis Scott Key Bridge into the cold waters at the mouth of the Patapsco River.
According to the Maryland State Police and U.S. Coast Guard officials remarked that diminished visibility and increasingly treacherous currents in the wreckage-strewn channel made renewed search efforts on the river too calamitous to continue overnight.
This was after rescuers had pulled two other workers from the water alive on Tuesday, and one of them has since been hospitalized.
The six presumed to have perished included workers from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, according to the Mexican Consulate in Washington.
Reports have said that all eight missing persons were part of a work crew repairing potholes on Key Bridge’s road surface when the Singapore-flagged container vessel Dali, bound for Sri Lanka from Baltimore, plowed into a support pylon of the bridge at about 1:30 a.m. (05:30 GMT).
Wes Moore, the Maryland Governor said at a Tuesday news briefing that the bridge was up to code with no known structural defects.
Officials have said that there has been no evidence of foul play.
