Did warnings to get off the Key Bridge reach the construction crew fixing potholes?

BALTIMORE — The duty officer radioed to two fellow Maryland Transportation Authority Police officers working an extra-duty shift in Tuesday’s early morning hours. He needed one stationed on each side of the Francis Scott Key Bridge to block traffic.

“There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering,” the duty officer advised, according to archived radio transmissions reviewed by The Baltimore Sun. “Until they get that under control, we’ve gotta stop all traffic.”

Then, less than a minute later, he spoke again: “Is there a crew working on the bridge right now?”

There was. And, despite swift action to block the bridge’s highway traffic, almost certainly saving travelers’ lives, officers did not reach the construction crew in time for them to evacuate. Six of the seven-member crew, predominantly Hispanic men, are presumed dead — the human toll of the Key Bridge’s sudden collapse after the vessel struck it just before 1:30 a.m.

The time between the container ship Dali’s mayday and its foundation-shaking crash into one of the Key Bridge’s support piers was less than three minutes, leaving little time for life-preserving action. But one former construction worker said crew members likely could have hopped in a truck and sped off the 1.6-mile bridge if they’d been reached by phone or radio.

Among the many questions surrounding the catastrophe: Was the crew working on the bridge warned to get off in the best way possible?

There has been mixed information about how, or if, Maryland Transportation Authority Police reached the crew and a state inspector, also a contractor, who was stationed alongside the workers. That inspector survived, along with one crew member, officials have said.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who praised the transportation authority officers as heroic, said Wednesday that how exactly first responders sought to reach the crew is part of the investigation. The independent federal National Transportation Safety Board, which announced earlier this week it would probe for the cause of the strike and bridge collapse, is conducting interviews and gathering evidence.

Moore said he was told by a survivor that that person was warned “audibly.” Moore said that person said first responders on scene “were both able to move toward keeping additional cars from coming on the bridge and also begin notifying some of the workers on the bridge that they needed to move off.”

The survivor, Moore said, told him that as he “was moving off of the bridge, and literally saw the bridge fall right after he moved off, it was because it was a first responder who was telling him to move off the bridge.”

If one or more officers were calling out to crew as the bridge went down, it may have been in vain.

Cpl. Jim Kruszynski, the president of the union representing transportation authority officers, said Thursday he hadn’t heard that in his conversations with the three officers, who he said were “heroes” that morning. He doubted, given the distance from the crew’s work area to the base of the bridge, that the crew would have been able to see or hear anything from police.

“The bridge is huge. For the crew being up at the main stand, and traffic held at the base — I mean, it’s a long way away from each other,” he said. “There’s no, like, hand signals. You’re not going to see them by line of sight.”

Officers “definitely did not get up” onto the bridge, Kruszynski added. “Had they, they would’ve went into the water, also.”

The three officers, identified Thursday as Sgt. Paul Pastorek, Cpl. Jeremy Herbert and Officer Garry Kirts, were honored during the Baltimore Orioles’ opening day game. In a joint statement, the officers said “no amount of training could have prepared anyone for the events that took place on the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

“We were proud to carry out our duties as officers of this state to save the lives that we could, and we are grateful for the incredible amount of support from this community that we love so much,” it said.

Spokespeople for the transportation authority police did not immediately respond to questions Thursday about their expectations for communication between officers and the crews they’re stationed to help. A representative from the construction company, Brawner Builders, did not respond to a voicemail seeking comment.

It remains unclear what methods of communication were at the police and dispatchers’ disposal to contact either the construction crew or state inspector.

The archived radio communications show the duty officer suggesting, less than a minute before the crash, that officers “just make sure no one’s on the bridge right now.”

“Might want to notify whoever the foreman is,” the duty officer said, “see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily.”

An officer blocking Inner Loop traffic responded “10-4,” then added he would “run up on the bridge” once another officer arrived to take his place.

That never happened. Instead, a half minute later, a stunned-sounding first responder radioed: “The whole bridge just fell down. Start, start whoever. Everybody. The whole bridge just collapsed.”

John Huntzberry, a former Brawner employee who left in 2020, said he’d spent countless nights on the Key Bridge cutting out potholes and filling them in with new concrete. He knew the foreman of the lost crew, one of two men whose bodies were found Tuesday in a red pickup truck.

Huntzberry said he believes the state inspector would have called the crew with a warning, if he’d heard one, but that he didn’t know whether that happened. Describing the wind on the bridge and the potential for noise from loud tools, he speculated it was possible the pothole crew couldn’t hear any call, or that they were on a break in their trucks and missed it.

Had they heard about the ship’s issue when the pilot first called for help — NTSB investigators have said the ship’s pilot made a general radio call for nearby tugs’ assistance at 1:26 a.m. and reported the Dali had lost all power and was approaching the bridge at 1:27 a.m. — Huntzberry said he thought that would be enough time to escape the bridge.

“If you jump in a truck going 60 miles per hour on a bridge, it doesn’t take three minutes to get way down,” he said. “But … there’s a lot of factors in play there.”

Brawner is an efficient, safety-conscious company, Huntzberry said. They have safety plans in place for “the stuff that usually goes wrong,” namely distracted drivers or workplace accidents.

“There’s really no way to protect someone from a freak accident,” he said.

Bobby Knutson Jr., another former Brawner employee, too, said “the last thing we ever thought about was a boat.”

“We were always aware of traffic, and there was a lot of times where there was accidents, and people would either be under the influence, coming into lane closures, or just an accident in general, people not paying attention,” Knutson said. “Obviously, you think about falling, depending on what you’re doing.”

“But you never thought about boats,” he said.

Five construction workers and one inspector were killed last March, almost exactly a year before the Key Bridge collapse, in a separate high-profile incident also along the Baltimore Beltway, I-695. That high-speed crash led to scrutiny of Maryland’s highway work zone safety and proposed legislation this year to boost fines and add greater flexibility for installing work zone cameras.

The police present Tuesday were assigned to a construction detail, Kruszynski said, in place to assist with traffic as needed. Had they been on normal patrol, rather than that detail, it’s possible they could have taken minutes, not seconds, to close bridge traffic.

“There are people alive with their families today that would’ve perished, had they not stopped traffic, in seconds, without a second thought,” Kruszynski said. “The fact they were assigned to that detail is what made the difference. That, and their quick thinking.”

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