The Dali ship, without an accent on the i, is one of the thousands of container ships that permanently link ports around the world. 80% of world trade moves by ship and the shipping company Maersk is one of the main protagonists in this business. The Dali, a ship that operates for this company, has lost its anonymity today in Baltimore. It so happens that today was not her first accident: already in 2016, in her first year, the boat collided stern against the Antwerp dock from which she was going to depart.
The Danish shipping company has just over half a thousand container ships operating between 130 cities around the planet. Among them, Baltimore, United States. One of the lines that touch this port is operated regularly by the Dali: it runs for several months. It goes from Asia to the East Coast of the United States and back, long voyages with a 300-meter-long container ship that has capacity for up to 10,000 TEUS.
TEUS are the unit of measurement for a standardized container, rectangular metal boxes 6.1 meters long, 2.4 meters wide and 2.6 meters high. Except for a particular product or material, practically everything is transported inside these crates and from any place to another, as is the case of the ship that crashed this morning in the most important city in Maryland.
Uniting Asia with America, the Dali started the year 2024 in the Persian Gulf area, setting sail from Oman. Days later she passed through Tanjung Pelepas, a huge maritime terminal for container ships in Malaysia. In February she made four stops in China (Yantian, Xiamen, Ningbo, Shanghai) and one in South Korea, in Busan. In each of these ports she made stops of between one and two days to be able to load or unload containers at each terminal.
Busan was the last Asian port it touched before sailing, now non-stop, to the Panama Canal. She set sail from China on February 22 and arrived at the entrance to the Panama Canal on the Pacific Ocean side on March 13. She transited the locks and Gatun Lake throughout that day. Upon reaching the Atlantic or Caribbean side, the Dali headed directly to the American east coast to comply with the plan planned by Maersk: dock at three ports in the states of New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland.
Newark was the first, where it was unloading containers from the 19th to the 21st. On March 22, it did the same in Maryland and last Saturday, the 23rd, it entered the port of Baltimore along the usual route for all ships that arrive in the city. : going up the Patapsco River from the Chesapeake Bay, which led him to pass under the Francis Scott Key Bridge, also known in the area as the Key Bridge or Beltway Bridge, over which Highway 695 passes, which avoids a huge detour through the interior.
Little did the Dali crew imagine that, three days later, the bridge they had just crossed would end up being part of their lives. Nor in Baltimore could one imagine that that almost anonymous ship, one of the many container ships that enter its port every week, which became famous for being the co-star of the HBO series ‘The Wire’ (2002-2008), It was also going to become the history of the city.
And after leaving Baltimore bound for Colombo, in Sri Lanka, the Dali collided after half an hour with one of the structures on which the two and a half kilometer metal bridge rests. Instead of passing through the central point of the Key, a navigation channel for this type of ship, the container ship diverted its trajectory to starboard, hitting a fundamental support point of the bridge.
The trip, which was going to last almost a month, since an uninterrupted navigation was scheduled from March 26 to April 22, was abruptly interrupted in the first hour, still in Patapsco waters. The ship, flying the Singapore flag, was immediately stopped in front of a huge bridge that had just been demolished in an accident that is now the history of the city of Baltimore: March 26, 2024 will go down as the day a container ship destroyed the main bridge. Baltimore Bridge, in service since March 1977.
This March 26, 2024 is not the first accident of this ship. The Dali also had an incident in Europe. She was during her first year of service, covering a leg of the voyage between the ports of Antwerp, Belgium and Bremerhaven, Germany, on July 11, 2016.
During the departure operation from the Belgian port, the Dali, which at that time was flying the flag of the Marshall Islands and was registered in the port of Majuro, crashed stern into the dock from which it was undocking. The hit and subsequent friction between ship and dock broke part of the port structure and also affected the hull of the ship. On that occasion, no damage was reported beyond the materials.
The ship had to be repaired to be able to continue sailing, as did the dock, on which rehabilitation work had to be carried out on the edge, the reinforced concrete pieces, built on site, that close the upper external end of the dock to serve to close the esplanades, achieve the correct alignment of the dock and fix the bollards where the boats moor.
