The owner and the manager of the container ship that caused the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge have agreed to pay more than $100 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice accusing them of negligence and mismanagement.
Federal authorities last month accused the owner, Grace Ocean Private Ltd., and manager Synergy Marine Group of “jury-rigging” the ship, the Dali, and of having pursued cost-cutting measures that left the vessel vulnerable to the type of blackout that it experienced before crashing into the bridge earlier this year.
The Justice Department had sought to recover the money that the government spent to clear the bridge’s wreckage from the Patapsco River and reopen the Port of Baltimore.
“This resolution ensures that the costs of the federal government’s cleanup efforts in the Fort McHenry Channel are borne by Grace Ocean and Synergy and not the American taxpayer,” Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Grace Ocean and Synergy, both of which are based in Singapore, did not return a message seeking comment Thursday evening.
WJZ reported Friday that Darrell Wilson, a spokesman for the Dali’s owners, said in a statement, “The settlement strictly covers costs related to clearing the channel, which we would have been responsible for in any case, and is not indicative of any liability, which we expressly reject for the incident that led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”
The settlement does not affect the many other lawsuits including by Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and the state of Maryland — where damages could run into the billions, the news station reported.
“Grace Ocean and Synergy are prepared to vigorously defend themselves in the limitation of liability proceedings pending before the federal court in Baltimore and to establish that they were not responsible for the incident,” Wilson said in the owners’ statement.
A criminal investigation into the collapse remains ongoing. Last month, FBI agents raided the Dali’s sister ship when it was docked in Baltimore. Agents also raided the Dali in April.
A National Transportation Safety Board inquiry is also underway.
Other complaints, including from the victims’ family, remain against Synergy Marine and Grace Ocean.
The 984-foot container ship lost power multiple times after leaving the Port of Baltimore and slammed into a critical support pier of the Key Bridge in the early morning hours of March 26. The bridge collapsed within seconds, causing six bridge workers to plunge to their deaths. A seventh man was pulled from the water and survived.
The Dali experienced multiple power losses while docked in Baltimore, but did not report them to the Coast Guard, as required by U.S. regulations, according to the Justice Department’s lawsuit. The Dali’s captain did not disclose the power losses, nor the ship’s history of mechanical and electrical defects and other abnormalities to the Maryland pilot in charge of steering the ship out of Baltimore’s port and through the Chesapeake Bay.
The Justice Department alleged that investigators found an improperly rigged transformer aboard the Dali that had been repeatedly cracking from excessive vibrations, and that a backup system had been “recklessly disabled.” Recent inspections had found loose bolts, nuts and washers and broken electrical cable ties inside the transformers and switchboards.
The ship’s electrical equipment was so poor that one agency stopped electrical testing because of “safety concerns,” according to the government’s court filing.
Federal authorities had said four different means to help control the Dali in the event of an emergency broke down because of the ship’s poor condition, causing a “cascading series of failures.”
The night of the catastrophe, a Maryland-licensed pilot boarded the ship to guide it out of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal and was assured by the captain that the ship was in good working order. As it approached the Key Bridge, the ship lost power when a transformer tripped open.
When the Dali’s power went out, the ship should have automatically switched to a backup circuit system within a few seconds, restoring the ability to steer, according to the Department of Justice’s filing. But that didn’t happen because the automation feature had been “recklessly disabled,” and the ship’s engineers were left scrambling in the dark to reset the tripped circuit breakers.
The time it took to reset the breakers, about a minute, was critical, government lawyers wrote. At the time, the ship’s emergency generator should have automatically kicked on within 45 seconds as required by maritime regulations, but it took more than a minute for the emergency systems to power on, according to the court filing.
Investigators say the transformer and its breakers had “long suffered the effects of heavy vibrations, a well-known cause of transformer and electrical failure.”
“Instead of taking steps to eliminate the source of excessive vibrations, [the crew] jury-rigged their ship,” Justice Department lawyers wrote. “They retrofitted the transformer with anti-vibration braces, one of which had cracked over time, had been repaired with welds, and had cracked again. And they wedged a metal cargo hook between the transformer and a nearby steel beam, in a makeshift attempt to limit vibration.”
With impact with the bridge two minutes away, the Maryland pilot gave an emergency order for the Dali to release an anchor in hopes of pulling the vessel away from the bridge, authorities said.
But the Dali’s anchor was not ready for immediate release in an emergency, as required by law, and nothing happened, according to the court filing.
“By the time the ship finally dropped anchor, less than half a ship’s length from the bridge, it was too late to have any effect,” they wrote.
Even as the Dali’s engineers restored power after the first blackout, the ship did not have a working propeller because the main engine was still down. Had the engineers been able to restore the main engine, the ship’s pilot could have had time to slow down or steer, according to the court filing. Instead, a minute later, the Dali lost power a second time, again because of the company’s negligence, according to the Department of Justice.
The second power failure was caused because the wrong pump had been installed to fuel the diesel generators that make the ship’s electricity. Unlike a standard fuel pump, the ship was equipped with a “flushing” pump — something that is typically used temporarily for clearing out a pipeline when the crew switches between different types of fuel, according to the court filing.
It is not designed to recover automatically from a blackout, a “critical safety feature” that a proper fuel pump would have had, government lawyers said. With the flushing pump down, the ship’s engines couldn’t get enough fuel, causing the second blackout.
The government in court filings said Synergy, the company that managed the Dali, used the flushing pump “to save money.”
WJZ, a media partner of The Baltimore Banner, and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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