US federal safety investigators recovered the black box from the freight ship that crashed into a Baltimore bridge, the agency chief said on Wednesday (Mar 27) as rescuers looked for the remains of six workers missing in the bridge collapse.

A highway team also will be looking at the twisted remains of the Francis Scott Key bridge as they try to determine how and why a container ship smashed into a pillar of the 2.6 km span in early morning darkness on Tuesday.

Investigators from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recovered the data recorder after boarding the ship late on Tuesday, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said. They will interview the ship’s crew, she said.

The disaster forced the indefinite closure of the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest on the US Eastern Seaboard, and created a traffic quagmire for Baltimore and the surrounding region.

Rescuers pulled two construction workers from the water alive on Tuesday. One was hospitalised. The six presumed to have perished included immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, said the Mexican Consulate in Washington.

A construction company employee who said he laboured alongside the six men missing said many of his co-workers were migrants working to support their relatives.

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“We’re low-income families,” said Jesus Campos, who has worked at the construction company, Brawner Builders, for about eight months. “Our relatives are waiting for our help back in our home countries.”

The men worked for Brawner, a contractor based in Baltimore County, a senior executive at the company said on Tuesday. The executive, Jeffrey Pritzker, and the Coast Guard said that all the missing workers were presumed dead, given how long it had been since the collapse.

“They were wonderful family people,” Pritzker said, before describing the victims’ survivors. “Spouses, children.” He added, “It’s just a very, very bad day.”

Officials said the eight were part of a work crew repairing potholes on the road surface when the Singapore-flagged container vessel Dali, leaving Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka, ploughed into a support pylon.

The US Coast Guard said it was looking for their bodies 18 hours after they were thrown from the bridge into the frigid waters at the mouth of the Patapsco River.

Divers resumed their search in the 50-foot-deep waters surrounding the twisted ruins.

“We do not believe that we’re going to find any of these individuals alive,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath said at a briefing.

Maryland State Police and US Coast Guard officials said diminished visibility and increasingly treacherous currents in the wreckage-strewn channel made continued search efforts on the river too risky to continue overnight.

A trestled section of the bridge almost immediately crumpled into the water, sending vehicles and workers into the river.

The 289 m ship had reported a loss of propulsion shortly before impact and dropped anchor to slow the vessel, giving transportation authorities time to halt traffic on the bridge before the crash. That move likely prevented a higher death toll, authorities said.

It was unclear whether authorities also tried to alert the work crew ahead of the impact.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore said at a Tuesday news briefing the bridge was up to code with no known structural issues. There was no evidence of foul play, officials said.

The Baltimore wreck drew attention to the vessel’s safety record. The same ship was involved in an incident in the port of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2016, hitting a quay as it tried to exit the North Sea container terminal.

An inspection in 2023 carried out in Chile found “propulsion and auxiliary machinery” deficiencies, according to data on the public Equasis website, which provides information on ships.

But Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority said in a statement that the vessel passed two separate foreign-port inspections in June and September 2023. It said a faulty fuel pressure gauge was rectified before the vessel departed the port following its June 2023 inspection.

Video footage on social media showed the vessel slamming into the 47-year-old Key Bridge in darkness, the headlights of vehicles visible on the span as it crashed into the water and the ship caught fire.

All 22 crew members on the ship, owned by Grace Ocean, were accounted for, its management company, Synergy Marine, reported.

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said closure of the port would have a “major and protracted impact on supply chains.” The Port of Baltimore handles more automobile freight than any other US port – more than 750,000 vehicles in 2022, according to port data, as well as container and bulk cargo ranging from sugar to coal.

Still, economists and logistics experts said they doubted the port closure would unleash a major US supply chain crisis or major spike in the price of goods, due to ample capacity at rival shipping hubs along the Eastern Seaboard.

The loss of the bridge also snarled roadways across Baltimore, forcing motorists onto two other congested harbour crossings and raising the spectre of nightmarish daily commutes and regional traffic detours for months or even years to come.

The bridge, named for the author of the Star-Spangled Banner, carries about 31,000 vehicles across the harbor daily and serves as the main route for motorists between New York and Washington seeking to avoid downtown Baltimore. It opened in 1977.

Tuesday’s disaster may be the worst US bridge collapse since 2007, when the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis plunged into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people. REUTERS, NYTIMES