Before dawn on March 26 last year, Mike Singer stared at his glowing laptop. On his living room wall, a photo showed the Key Bridge at sunset. On his screen, the landmark plummeted into darkness.

It was a moment that would define 2024 for Baltimore. And it was captured by a livestream camera perched at a hidden spot in Anne Arundel County’s Riviera Beach. The clip spread fast. News stations aired it. Strangers shared it. It went viral.

But, without Singer, the world wouldn’t have been able to see with their own eyes the horrifying, instantaneous bridge collapse.

Singer is the founder of the Baltimore & Chesapeake Bay Ship Watchers, a Facebook group where maritime enthusiasts have been tracking the comings and goings of ships through the Port of Baltimore since 2017. In 2022, he teamed up with StreamTime Live to set up a livestream on Youtube, so fellow ship watchers could tune in, anytime, from anywhere.

Each night before logging off, Singer would pan the camera toward the Key Bridge. Most days, only a few dozen people watched. But starting in the early morning hours of March 26, 2024, ten thousand people tuned in.

Singer’s stream became a window into the wreckage, which left six construction workers dead and blocked the shipping channel to the Port of Baltimore for months.

That was just the start, Singer said.

After the collapse, the group grew by several thousand to over 16,000 members from around the world. Now there’s a website, a podcast, even merch. Every day, the group members post updates on the port, the bridge rebuild — and most of all, the Dali.

The Baltimore Banner spoke with several of them about why they keep their eyes glued to the 984-foot cargo ship, which sailed out of Baltimore in late June and returned to regular business earlier this year.

For Singer, a year on, the answer is simple.

“It took away what framed our city,” he said.

“A lot of people don’t want it to come back,” he added. “I don’t want it to come back.”

Born and raised in Southwest Baltimore, Singer has always seen the city as a ship-watching town, where folks know a bulk carrier from a container ship, and the port is named for Helen Delich Bentley, a local journalist and politician who reported on the harbor.

Singer, 59, got into it after buying a house on the water and becoming intrigued by all the ships passing by.

“I have it bad,” Singer said of ship watching. “And it’s not only me. There are a lot of people who are fascinated with this.”

Dali watching from Atlanta

Jonathan Deitch, who lives in a suburb of Atlanta, is an information technology specialist by day. But always, on a separate screen, he watches the Port of Baltimore hundreds of miles away.

For hours at a time, he tracks the ships coming in and out of the harbor using the livestream and a combination of online tools like Marine Traffic and VesselFinder.

And once or twice a day, he checks in on the Dali. He followed it as it drifted past the tip of South Africa, saw it disappear for weeks into a shipyard in China. Most recently, it’s back in service, sailing from Chile to China.

Deitch, 55, never paid much attention to ships before. But ever since he saw the livestream footage of the Key Bridge collapse, he’s been hooked.

He joined Singer’s Facebook group, started watching the livestream every day — and before long, he knew the rhythms of Baltimore maritime shipping: the routes vessels take, the ports they favor.

He has spent hours studying the Dali, learning that it was built in 2015 with a sister ship called Cezanne, both named for famous painters.

To Deitch, it felt like cruel poetry: the Dali, named for the painter of melting clocks and bent realities, displaying the Key Bridge’s twisted remains across its bow for weeks, like something pulled from the artist’s canvases.

More than anything, Deitch said, he looks forward to chatting with other Baltimore & Chesapeake Bay Ship Watchers in the livestream’s feed — a constant flow of now-familiar usernames and harbor updates.

“The funniest thing in all of this is that I discovered Mike and I knew each other 30 years ago,” Deitch said.

In a much earlier era of the internet, Singer and Deitch both frequented a pinball message board, a Usenet group called rec.games.pinball.

Just two guys, swapping posts about flippers and bumpers, never imagining they’d reconnect decades later, their screens filled not with high scores, but with a bridge collapsing into the bay.

From rubble to rise

For Norman Fogle, 76, ship watching just made sense.

A lifelong Marylander, a former U.S. Coast Guardsman, and an IT professional, it was like all his interests met in one place.

He stumbled onto the Baltimore & Chesapeake Bay Ship Watchers Facebook group about five years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and pretty much never left.

Before long, his home office in Beltsville looked like a command center. Five monitors blinked with the livestream and vessel traffic. Two Baltimore Harbor maps stretched across his left wall, marked with yarn and pushpins to track key ships and landmarks.

Weeks before the Key Bridge collapsed, Fogle became a moderator for the group’s livestream. That meant spending hours every day running the chat and pivoting the camera to track the port’s most recent shipments.

Still, it wasn’t until the bridge came down that his wife, Kathy, started watching with him. They added a red pushpin to the map — marking the spot where the bridge used to stretch across the water.

Kathy Fogle, 73, had suffered a stroke seven years prior, slowing her speech and limiting how far she could move. Married for more than 50 years, the Fogles had a life busy with travel, grandkids and running a day care. Neither is the type to spend time idly.

They’ve filled it with ship watching. At their kitchen table, Kathy Fogle follows the livestream on her iPad, while her husband plots new longitudes and latitudes onto a harbor map.

Together, they saw the cranes lift twisted steel, the barges carry away debris, the port slowly flicker back to life. And finally, they watched the Dali float out of the Patapsco River.

Even now, with the Dali long gone, Kathy Fogle still tunes in. She likes the quiet chirps of the birds in the background of the camera. The cruise ships that glide past. The way the harbor keeps moving.

Since the collapse, Norman Fogle said, the livestream has changed, too. It kept crashing in the immediate aftermath from so much traffic. So the community stepped up, crowdfunding a new 4K high-resolution camera.

Now, with two cameras, the plan is to keep one on the port’s daily happenings and the other fixed on the Key Bridge site once rebuilding begins.

There’s talk of stitching together a yearslong time-lapse from rubble to rise.