Justice Department Files $100 Million Claim in Fatal Baltimore Bridge Collapse

The crash of the Dali into the Francis Scott Key Bridge killed six people. The federal government says the owner and the operator were “grossly negligent” and “reckless.”

The U.S. Justice Department filed a legal claim on Wednesday against the owner and operator of the container ship that collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge last March, killing six workers and paralyzing the Port of Baltimore for weeks.

The lawsuit asserts that the companies’ actions leading up to the catastrophe were “outrageous, grossly negligent, willful, wanton, and reckless.”

The government is seeking more than $100 million in damages to cover the costs of the sprawling emergency response to the disaster and the federal aid to port employees who were put out of work.

“Those costs should be borne by the shipowner and operator, not the American taxpayer,” said Benjamin Mizer, the department’s third-ranking official, who oversees the civil division among others. He added that the department would be seeking punitive damages as well, “to try to keep this type of conduct from ever happening again.”

The action on Wednesday did not name an amount for the punitive damages the department was seeking.

Filed in federal court in Maryland, the Justice Department’s action lays out in detail what investigators have learned about the ship’s short and catastrophic journey that night, describing a cascade of failures onboard and multiple points when the disaster could have been prevented.

Because of poor maintenance or “jury-rigged” fixes to serious problems aboard the ship, known as the Dali, “none of the four means available to help control the Dali — her propeller, rudder, anchor, or bow thruster — worked when they were needed to avert or even mitigate this disaster,” the suit asserts.

The Dali is registered in Singapore and owned by Grace Ocean Ltd. and managed by Synergy Marine Group, both of which are based in Singapore.

The companies — referred to as petitioners in the legal papers — had said their liability for the incident should be limited to no more than $44 million. The case is governed by a federal law that allows shipowners to cap their liability from an accident if they can show they did not know about defects beforehand. But the Justice Department contends that the owner and operator knew the Dali was not fit to sail.

“This accident happened because of the careless and grossly negligent decisions made by Grace Ocean and Synergy, who recklessly chose to send an unseaworthy vessel to navigate a critical waterway and ignore the risks to American lives and the nation’s infrastructure,” Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Chetan Patil said Wednesday on a call with reporters.

Shipping experts said they also saw evidence of negligence.

“There appear both material and operational conditions and circumstances within the owner’s and crew’s control where they were not following regulations and law to provide safe sailing conditions,” Jonathan Page, a professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan, said in an email.

Darrell Wilson, a representative of Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine, said Wednesday in an email that the government’s action was anticipated, given the Sept. 24 deadline for filing such claims.

“The owner and manager will have no further comment on the merits of any claim at this time, but we do look forward to our day in court to set the record straight,” he added.

Justice Department officials said they could not comment on the status of a separate federal criminal investigation into the crash.

The Dali, as long as the height of the Eiffel Tower, lost power and slammed into the Key Bridge on March 26, causing the bridge to collapse and killing six men who were repairing pavement on the bridge.

On Tuesday, the families of three of the men who were killed announced that they, too, were suing the owner of the Dali.

The ship became stuck in the twisted wreckage as the bridge fell into the Patapsco River, blocking access to the Port of Baltimore, one of the busiest on the East Coast. An enormous cleanup effort was begun, involving dozens of barges, tugboats, excavators, floating cranes and even explosives. Some 50,000 tons of debris had to be cleared from the river.

Temporary shipping channels were soon reopened to some vessels, and in May, after enough wreckage was removed, the Dali was dislodged and made the two-and-a-half-mile trip back upriver to the terminal it had left two months before. The badly damaged ship was later moved to a shipyard in Norfolk for repairs.

The main shipping route, the 700-foot-wide Fort McHenry Federal Channel, was not fully cleared until June. And rebuilding the bridge will take much longer. State officials have said that it would take four years to reconstruct the Key Bridge at a cost of up to $1.9 billion.

A Justice Department official said Wednesday that the state of Maryland would attempt to recoup the cost of rebuilding the bridge through legal actions.

In its court filings, the Justice Department has attempted to lay out the fullest official explanation yet of why the Dali lost control. The account goes beyond a preliminary report in May from the National Transportation Safety Board.

The first critical malfunction was a loss of power to the ships’s steering and propulsion systems, caused when circuit breakers in an electrical transformer tripped open. The suit contends that the breakers opened because “excessive vibration” had caused “a loss of electrical continuity through control circuitry.”

According to the suit, engineers and previous crew members had warned the ship’s operator that heavy and constant vibrations of the ship had been shaking onboard cargo loose and cracking equipment in the engine room. Such vibrations, the suit says, are “a well-known cause of transformer and electrical failure.”

Instead of addressing the cause of those vibrations, the suit alleges, the owner and operator of the ship had fitted the transformer with “anti-vibration braces,” one of which had cracked several times. In a “makeshift attempt to limit vibration,” a metal cargo hook was wedged between the transformer and a steel beam.

“The evidence shows that excessive vibration was a longstanding problem on the ship, which Grace Ocean and Synergy sought to remedy with makeshift aftermarket fixes that fell well short of appropriate standards,” Mr. Patil said.

The suit contends that there were other critical failures as well.

A second transformer failed to immediately come on line, according to the suit, because it and the first transformer had been set for manual activation rather than automatic, which the suit called an “inexplicable failure.”

Once power was restored on the ship, the pilot quickly ordered the crew to steer between the pillars of the Key Bridge. But the Dali then lost power a second time, the government argues, because the ship was using the wrong kind of pump to send fuel to its generators.

Two minutes before hitting the bridge, the pilot ordered the release of one of the ship’s anchors, but because this anchor “was not ready for immediate release in an emergency, as required by law, nothing happened.” Soon after that, the ship hit the bridge.

Richard Burke, a professor emeritus of naval architecture and marine engineering at SUNY Maritime College in New York, said the government’s account appeared to be credible. Its description of what went wrong with the transformers and the pumps was “pretty damning,” he said.

The ship was headed for Sri Lanka at the time of the crash with around 4,700 containers on board, as well as 1.5 million gallons of fuel and lubricant oil. None of the 21 members of the crew, most of whom were Indian citizens, were injured in the crash; neither were two pilots who were aboard at the time.