Over the past few months, Maria Gabriela Aldana has met with longshoremen, widows, first responders, social workers, government workers and business owners about the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by the Dali container ship in March.

Now, she’s shining a light on their stories.

The Baltimore Museum of Industry brought Aldana on as a consultant in the summer to lead an oral history and video component of a broader project about the real-world effects of the tragedy.

“There’s a sense of trauma that everyone describes,” said Aldana, who is a community artist, organizer, and the co-founding director of Art of Solidarity, a network of creatives. At the BMI, she’s working to keep their firsthand accounts alive.

“In telling their stories and being a conduit as a person who hears them, it’s not only an honor, but it’s a way to bridge people together,” she said.

Lately, one guiding question has developed in her mind: “What have we gained from losing the Key Bridge?”

Putting out a call in the spring for donated objects related to the bridge was the BMI’s first step in addressing the collapse. Its “Echoes from the Key Bridge” project has since grown, with the artifacts, oral histories and video footage becoming part of the museum’s permanent collection. Eventually, BMI Executive Director Anita Kassof wants to see it form the basis of a long-term exhibition and a curriculum for school children.

The museum hosted a panel event Tuesday to discuss the project and the catastrophe, more than half a year since the bridge collapse sent seven construction workers into the Patapsco River below, claiming the lives of six.

“We knew we had a role to play in documenting the story,” Kassof said. “It just felt like a very natural place for us to be, as a museum that sits pretty firmly at the intersection of work and history, to help the community interpret what this event meant and continues to mean.”

As with its project honoring workers at the Sparrows Point Bethlehem Steel mill, the BMI launched an initiative to collect the “real, everyday ephemera” — clothes, company badges and other personal items — linked to the bridge, Kassof said.

So far, the museum has mostly received donations of artwork, but said it’s likely to also get a piece of Key Bridge steel from the Maryland Department of Transportation.

An important focus of the BMI’s work has been forging relationships with the families of the Latino immigrant men who died and “giving voice to marginalized communities or people whose experiences don’t often make it into the history book,” Kassof said.

“When bad things happen, often the story that is told is about the terrible things that happen to people. And terrible things did happen to people,” said Becky Eisen, the associate vice president of marketing and public affairs at the Baltimore Community Foundation, which awarded the BMI $25,000 to support its collection of oral histories. “But I think that there’s a lot of power in creating a narrative around the empowered people.”

The BMI’s Key Bridge project has also received funding from Ports America Chesapeake and Steamship Trade Association of Baltimore Charitable Legacy Inc., plus the Baltimore National Heritage Area, according to a news release.

Aldana said the dozen-plus oral history participants could listen to and edit their stories, and the BMI offered honoraria.

“They are in charge of their stories. They are in complete control of how they tell their stories,” said Aldana, who was born in Nicaragua and moved to the U.S. with her family as a child seeking asylum.

Though most of the oral histories are in English, Aldana spoke Spanish with some interviewees, including two widows of the men who died. Aldana said they talked about their husbands and aspirations before the bridge collapsed, and the toll it has taken.

“It impacted the lives of these six, seven families, but also a community at large that identify themselves with these six men and their families,” said Catalina Rodriguez Lima, the founding director of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. She is on the advisory committee of the oral history project, which she contributed her own story to, and served as a “connector” to the families impacted by the collapse.

For Wendell Supreme Shannon, a Baltimore County longshoreman, artist and designer, reflecting on the collapse for the project was no easy feat.

“Replaying the incident definitely took an emotional toll,” he said. But as a Black man in Baltimore, Shannon said he doesn’t “have the opportunity to linger on emotions for too long.”

“My efforts have to be solution-oriented and action-based.”

Shannon, 34, worked at the port the day leading up to the collapse and worried about how to provide for his family after hearing about it.

Through the sale of his original art and prints, Shannon raised around $5,000 for fellow longshoremen. People gravitated toward his depictions of the port created years earlier.

“Art has always been a form of therapy for me,” said Shannon, a graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I painted my way through the bridge disaster.”

He recorded his oral history with Aldana at the BMI in late October, after joining the advisory committee.

Recently, Aldana began a new phase of the project with filmmaker Katie Simbala: taping five video documentaries to feature a mix of new faces and existing oral history participants.

Her hope is to finish the documentaries, each centered on a “main character,” around the collapse’s one-year anniversary. Kassof said the museum intends for “Echoes from the Key Bridge” to continue growing.

“This isn’t the end,” she said.