The best way to install giant nails is with a giant hammer.

That’s a rudimentary way of putting it. But for hundreds of skinny, 220-foot rods to form the foundation of a new Francis Scott Key Bridge, contractors are deploying a 145-ton hammer that attaches to a crane sitting on a barge.

During a media tour of the floating construction site Wednesday, small portions of those rods, known as piles, stuck out above the Patapsco River. But, beneath the surface and 50 feet of water, the piles are solidly embedded within about 150 vertical feet of seabed.

Painted yellow and made by the engineering company Menck, the 50-foot-long hydraulic hammer doesn’t look much like a traditional hammer, but it functions as one.

“They lower it on top of the pile,” said Brian Wolfe, the Maryland Transportation Authority director of project development, “and they just pound it into the ground.”

It is one of many specialized pieces of massive machinery that crews are using to prepare for the roughly $2 billion Key Bridge rebuild.

The installed piles are first being strength-tested. If they pass muster, they could become the first foundational pieces of the new span.

A dozen piles weighing 170 tons each are being analyzed, but, ultimately, more than 400 piles will be driven into the riverbed to form the first layer of the bridge’s base.

Meanwhile, demolition of the old bridge is about halfway finished as crews take sawed-off concrete and steel to local recycling centers.

Overland demolition has been prioritized to allow for the construction of temporary trestles, built to provide workers access to the site.

It could be months, or longer, until the overwater portions of the old bridge are demolished, because their removal is less urgent.

Two cranes and at least six vessels — which include a custom barge made to precisely position the piles — form a two-acre construction area. During Wednesday’s tour by boat, MDTA chief engineer Jim Harkness highlighted the gigantic tools.

“That’s the largest rotating crane on the East Coast,” he said of the Weeks 533, “and that is sitting on a barge that’s more than a football field.”

The crane-barge has often played high-profile roles. It lifted the space shuttle Enterprise into a museum, retrieved the “Miracle on the Hudson” airplane in 2009 and assisted with Key Bridge cleanup last year.

It will remain in Baltimore as construction efforts ramp up in the coming months.

Meanwhile, engineers continue to design. The new cable-stayed span will have piers farther apart than the old bridge, along with rigid, protective fenders. However, it will not have artificial islands, known as “dolphins.”

“At this time we do not have dolphins for that, but the rigid fender protection exceeds and meets the current standards for AASHTO requirements,” Harkness said, referencing the federal bridge code.

The goal has long been to complete the bridge by October 2028. But state officials, including Harkness on Wednesday, have repeatedly said the cost and timeline of the project will soon be updated.

The National Transportation Safety Board has pegged Nov. 18 as the date for its formal meeting on the Key Bridge collapse, when it will discuss what went wrong on March 26, 2024, causing the Dali container ship to plow into the structure, toppling it and killing six construction workers.

That date remains on the body’s official calendar, but the federal government shutdown could postpone it.

An Oct. 7 event hosted by the safety board was delayed, and the NTSB’s stated shutdown plan includes canceled meetings as an example of shutdown activities.

An automatic reply from an NTSB spokesperson stated they were out of the office due to the shutdown.