As the public continues to wonder what exactly caused the M/V Dali to strike the Key Bridge, taking six lives and changing our transportation history forever, the U.S. Justice Department puts the blame squarely on negligent actions by the ship’s operators.
Their message comes loud and clear in the form of a $100 million lawsuit against Grace Ocean Private Limited and Synergy Marine Private Limited, the Singaporean corporations that owned and operated the container ship.
The $100 million in damages include costs incurred to reopen access to the Port of Baltimore, a 2.5-month process that required a massive fleet of 18 barges, 22 tugboats, 13 floating cranes, 10 excavators, and four survey boats.
Dozens of federal, state, and local agencies worked to remove about 50,000 tons of steel, concrete, and asphalt from the channel and from atop the ship itself. Simultaneously, crews cleared a series of ever-increasing temporary channels to allow some traffic through and minimize the economic disaster.
Along with crippling of the water route to the Port of Baltimore, the loss of the bridge, a critical highway in our transportation infrastructure, continues to be felt by local commuters.
The civil claim was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
“With this civil claim, the Justice Department is working to ensure that the costs of clearing the channel and reopening the Port of Baltimore are borne by the companies that caused the crash, not by the American taxpayer,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
The $100 million does not include the cost of replacing the Key Bridge. The bridge was owned and maintained by the State of Maryland, and the state may file its own claim for those damages.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit also seeks punitive damages to deter the owner and operator of the Dali and other ship operators from cutting corners that lead to disaster in the future.
“This was an entirely avoidable catastrophe, resulting from a series of eminently foreseeable errors made by the owner and operator of the DALI,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
The lawsuit calls out several ways in which the owners and operators of the container ship failed to make it safe and seaworthy. First, there were documented “constant vibrations” above the engine room in the days leading up to the emergency, which caused loose circuitry that led to multiple power failures. Engineers noted the vibrations were so bad they were cracking equipment in the engine room and shaking loose cargo lashings.
You may remember the chilling livestream video of the moments before and during the ship’s impact on the bridge. You can see the Dali lose power twice. The second time, it didn’t come back on.
The lawsuit alleges that, to save money and work, the ship’s owners used a temporary flushing pump to fuel the ship’s diesel generators instead of a proper fuel pump. As stated in the lawsuit, “It
was not designed to recover automatically from a blackout, a critical safety feature of the proper
fuel pumps that the Dali should have been using.”
Then, two minutes before impact, the Maryland pilot gave an emergency order for the ship to release its port anchor in an effort to pull it away from the bridge. However, the lawsuit claims the Dali‘s anchor was not ready for immediate release in an emergency as required by law. The ship was half a ship’s length from the bridge by the time the anchor was dropped.
Finally, the civil claim reads, “While still waiting on the anchor, the pilot gave an order to apply full power to the bow thruster in a last-ditch attempt to push the ship away from the bridge. When nothing happened, the pilot was told the bow thruster was unavailable.”
The Justice Department sums up the series of failures this way:
“The owner and operator of the DALI were well aware of vibration issues on the vessel that could cause a power outage. But instead of taking necessary precautions, they did the opposite,” said Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer. “Out of negligence, mismanagement, and, at times, a desire to cut costs, they configured the ship’s electrical and mechanical systems in a way that prevented those systems from being able to quickly restore propulsion and steering after a power outage. As a result, when the DALI lost power, a cascading set of failures led to disaster.”
According to the Justice Department, the crew was ill-prepared, the vessel unseaworthy for U.S. waterways, and yet the ship’s owners still moved forward, cutting corners to conduct business in American ports.
The Coast Guard, which led the Unified Command that handled the cleanup and reopening of channels, voiced their support for the civil claim. Rear Admiral Laura M. Dickey, Deputy for Operations Capability and Policy of the U.S. Coast Guard, said, “We stand ready to support the Justice Department to ensure that those responsible for this tragedy pay the costs of reopening the Port.”
