Maryland files its claim for damages over Key Bridge disaster
Maryland files its claim for damages over Key Bridge disaster
    Posted on 09/24/2024
BALTIMORE — The state of Maryland on Tuesday joined a chorus of victims’ families, businesses and others who say they were harmed in Baltimore’s Key Bridge collapse to ask a federal judge not to cap the liability of the ship’s owner and operator, arguing that those responsible should fully pay for the disaster’s catastrophic damage.

In documents filed in federal court on the final day to dispute a request to cap that liability at $43.6 million, the state attorney general’s office said that the government and residents of Maryland had suffered “tremendous costs and damages” since the Dali container ship — owned by Grace Ocean Private Limited and operated by Synergy Marine Pte Ltd — crashed into a critical support beam of the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, killing six people and collapsing the bridge.

Those losses include the “massive costs” of removing bridge debris from the Patapsco River and eventually replacing the span, which have been estimated at billions of dollars, as well as the disappearance of toll revenue and adverse impact on Maryland’s environment.

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“A bridge was destroyed, a port was closed, communities were shattered,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) said during a joint news conference in Baltimore with Gov. Wes Moore (D) to announce the filing. “That injustice, leaving Marylanders to pay for this tragedy, cannot and will not stand. The Dali was not fit to sail that morning.”

Moore read aloud each of the six victims’ names.

“Please hear me loud and clear. What happened in the early morning of March 26 should never have happened,” he said. “They should all be here right now. That’s why accountability matters.”

Their assertions that the Singapore-flagged Dali was unseaworthy — and that Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine knew that but let the massive vessel set sail anyway — mirror those made in recent filings by the Justice Department, the families of those killed or injured in the bridge’s collapse, local business owners and the city of Baltimore.

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The allegations come as part of a civil case in which the ship’s owner and operator asked a judge in U.S. District Court in Maryland to limit the amount of money they could be asked to pay in liabilities, proposing the $43.6 million cap.

Darrell Wilson, a spokesperson for Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine, declined to comment on the merits of the claim but said, “We do look forward to our day in court to set the record straight.”

Any party that wished to dispute that cap request in court had until Tuesday to do so. U.S. District Judge James Bredar will weigh the arguments and determine if the claimants sufficiently proved that Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine were negligent.

Tuesday’s filing by the state attorney general repeated many of the findings made public last week by the Justice Department, including that the Dali’s owner and operator prioritized profits over safety by cutting corners and using “Band-Aid” solutions for known safety issues on the ship.

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But the state went further than the Justice Department in its description of the Dali’s fuel pumps — which federal and state officials both alleged were improperly reconfigured in a way that caused some of the ship’s systems failures in the moments before the crash into the Key Bridge.

This “radical reconfiguration,” including replacing the proper supply and booster pumps with cheaper flushing pumps, was not reported to or approved by the vessel’s classification society, Nippon Kaiji Kyokai, known as Class NK, according to the attorney general’s court filing.

“As a direct and foreseeable result of the Petitioners’ reckless and grossly negligent decision to send the DALI to sea in a patently unseaworthy condition, the State of Maryland has and will continue to suffer tremendous costs and damages,” the attorney general’s office wrote in the filing.
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