Baltimore bridge collapse ship owner agrees to pay $102 million for cleanup

WASHINGTON — The owner and manager of the cargo ship that caused the death The Baltimore Bridge Collapse agreed to pay more than $102 million in cleanup costs to settle a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, officials said Thursday.

The settlement does not cover any damages for the reconstruction of the bridge, officials said in a news release announcing the settlement. That construction project could cost nearly $2 billion. The state of Maryland filed its own claim for damages, among others.

The settlement comes a month after the Justice Department sued the ship’s owner, Grace Ocean Private Ltd., and manager Synergy Marine Group, both based in Singapore, seeking to recover funds from the cleanup.

The Justice Department claimed that the electrical and mechanical systems on the ship, the Dali, were improperly maintainedcausing it to lose power and veer off course before hitting a support column on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March. The ship was en route from Baltimore to Sri Lanka when steering failed due to loss of power.

Six men on a road crew filling potholes during a night shift have died. Cleanup crews worked around the clock searching for bodies and removing thousands of tons of damaged steel and broken concrete from the bottom of the Patapsco River. Dali was stranded amid the wreckage for nearly two months, with collapsed steel trusses draped over the ship’s damaged bow.

“This resolution ensures that the costs of the federal government’s cleanup efforts in the Fort McHenry Channel are borne by Grace Ocean and Synergy and not by American taxpayers,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said in a statement.

The collapse jolted merchant shipping traffic through the port of Baltimore and put many local peasants out of work before the canal. it was fully opened in June. It disrupted shipping routes on the East Coast, as the port is one of the busiest in the country, especially for machinery and farm equipment.

Grace Ocean and Synergy filed a court petition just days after the collapse, seeking to limits their legal liability in what could become the most expensive maritime accident case in history.

Court records show lawyers for both sides said in a joint filing Thursday that they had reached a settlement agreement and asked to dismiss the Justice Department’s request for $103 million in cleanup costs.

The claim is one of many filed in a sprawling liability case that will ultimately determine how much the ship’s owner and manager will owe for their role in the disaster. The other claims are still pending. They were filed on behalf of victims’ families, companies whose businesses suffered as a result of the collapse, municipal entities and more.

FBI agents boarded the ship in April amid a criminal investigation into the circumstances leading up to the crash.

When filed last month, the Justice Department’s civil suit provided the most detailed description yet of the cascading series of failures that left Dali’s pilots and crew helpless in the face of looming disaster. The complaint pointed to “excessive vibration” on the ship, which lawyers called “a well-known cause of transformer and electrical failure.” Instead of dealing with the source of the excessive vibrations, the crew members “manipulated” the ship, the complaint alleges.

He also noticed equipment cracked in the engine room and pieces of cargo shook. The ship’s electrical equipment was in such poor condition that an independent agency halted further electrical tests because of safety concerns, according to the lawsuit.