Tugboat captain describes responding to Baltimore bridge collapse, a year after deadly crash: "Surreal feeling"
One year after the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was hit by a massive cargo ship and collapsed, the first tugboat captain to respond to the scene is sharing what happened.
The deadly collapse killed six construction workers on March 26, 2024.
"As we got there, we … we realized there was no bridge left. The bridge had fallen," said David Jurs, a tugboat captain.
The tugboat had helped guide the Dali out of its berth in the Port of Baltimore and later raced back after the container ship lost power.
"Some days you do no jobs, some days you do 15," Jurs said. "Some days something like this happens, which is few and far between."
As the sun rose above the wreckage, reality set in for Jurs, a 43-year veteran of the Chesapeake Bay. He described the moment, saying, "It was a surreal feeling, like an out-of-body experience, it really was. Your mind wouldn't let you accept that it was gone after all these years."
Study reveals bridge vulnerabilities
A new study compiled by Johns Hopkins University and led by Dr. Michael Shields shows vulnerabilities among U.S. bridges.
"It (Francis Scott Key Bridge) wasn't an aberration," Shields said. "No, it was not an aberration at all."
Engineers scoured through hundreds of millions of data points to analyze the traffic under 200 bridges nationwide. Among the most vulnerable is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, just 20 miles south of where the Key Bridge once stood.
"It's a very very high traffic area. One of the most highly trafficked shipping channels in the nation," Shields said.
The study found several bridges are likely to be hit by a ship within about 20 years, with few protections or barriers around their piers.
"If you look at the top 10 bridges in our list, most of them have an expectation of once, less than once every 50 years," Shields said. "When you put all of that together, you start to realize that we should expect these events every five years or so."
Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended that 68 bridges across 19 states built before 1991 be evaluated with a "vulnerability assessment." According to the NTSB, the Maryland Transportation Authority failed to conduct the assessment that would have outlined previously known structural risks to the bridge. However, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore deflected blame on the owners and operators of the Dali following the release of the NTSB report.
"The Federal Highway Administration and the federal government had claimed, and continue to state, that the Key Bridge was not the issue," Moore said. "The issue, and I was speaking with the former transportation secretary about it, was that we had a ship the size of three football fields, that when you have a ship at that size moving at that speed, and what he told me was, 'There wasn't a bridge in the country that could have taken that impact.'"
The Dali lost power multiple times within 12 hours before crashing into the bridge.
Future of bridge safety
Compounding the problem are massive ships and congestion at the nation's largest ports, along with the U.S. supply chain outpacing bridge design.
"When the Key Bridge was designed and built in the 1970s, it was seeing ships that were much, much smaller," Shields said.
In his role, Jurs has witnessed this challenge and said the next generation of tug boaters will continue to tackle the issue when day breaks over the new Francis Scott Key Bridge.
"The ships keep getting bigger and the tugboats keep getting bigger also to handle them," Jurs said. "Nobody really sees what's happening in our industry, unless something like this happens, catastrophic, unfortunately. But we're out there at every port in the country, in the world has tugboats – 24/7 – running when you're sleeping."
The new Francis Scott Key Bridge is scheduled for completion in 2028. Maryland state officials say the new bridge will have modern safeguards and be built nearly 50 feet higher, granting taller ships access to the Port of Baltimore, which Shields told CBS News comes with an even greater risk.
