This article originally appeared in InsiderNJ.
Several weeks before the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse workplace mass casualty event, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) announced with great fanfare the state owned marine terminals in the Port of Baltimore had set a new record for handling incoming foreign cargo worth $80 billion in 2023.
“The Port of Baltimore is the best port in the nation and one of the largest economic generators in Maryland,” Moore proclaimed. “Together, we aren’t just breaking records — we are creating jobs, growing our economy, and building new pathways to opportunity.”
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The 45-year-old up-and-coming Democratic Party star’s press release touted the deep waters of Port of Baltimore’s ability to handle larger and larger container ships including the Evergreen Ever Max that can accommodate 15,000 20-foot containers.
“The arrival of ships of this size continues to demonstrate Baltimore’s capabilities of handling supersized vessels, including its ultra-large Neo-Panamax cranes and deep channel,” according to the promotional press release.
In the early morning hours of March 26, that changed in a flash.
The Dali, a Singaporean cargo ship with no propulsion except inertia, tried to pass under the Francis Scott Key Bridge on the cheap without a tug escort. It slammed into a bridge support and brought a huge chunk of the 1.6 mile span down on itself — along with a half-dozen immigrant workers who had been doing a non-union paving job on the bridge. The collision also caused the breach of dozens of shipping containers worth of hazardous materials that poured their contents into the Patapsco River.
The bodies of four of the construction workers have yet to be recovered from the water. The maritime and construction workforces by the nature of their sectors are largely invisible to the billions of consumers who rely on them. As we speed by on the highway, their work is often remote and isolated from the society that so relies on it.
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Such was the circumstance of the immigrants on a non-union paving job working overnight out on a bridge spanning the vast expanse of the Patapsco River that’s like a belt cinching the Port of Baltimore waist. In life you can’t get more nearly invisible than that. In death, well, it’s probably only your family that will know you are missing.
And for non-union contractors that very precarity of immigrant workers due to their ambiguous legal status makes them easy pickings and very profitable to employ. Should they die on the job, well, there’s always a GoFundMe page or leaving no trace at all — if the contractor properly manages the narrative.
Unions matter
Multiple studies have documented that union worksites are safer thanks to better training and accountability. As for the minimal crewing on the Dali, that’s an international maritime standard.
Roland “Rex” Rexha is the secretary-treasurer of the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association. Established in 1875, it’s the oldest maritime trade union in the U.S., representing licensed deck and engine officers. Rexha says the Dali disaster highlights the downside of not having ships escorted by tug boats until they are out on the open sea away from critical infrastructure — as well as the risks created with building larger and larger vessels while using automation as justification for reducing crew size, and the wide variance between U.S. maritime safety standards and the rest of the world.
“As for having tug assistance when they are going under a bridge, these are changes of policy where we defer to what the mandatory policies are of the individual port; what they deem is the safest way to operate,” Rexha says. “I think in all ports there’s going to be a revisiting of how we operate and what’s the safest way to move vessels out into safe water. When you are talking about a large cruise ship or a cargo ship like this one, if they are out of the harbor and they lose power they are not going to hit anything, they are in the middle of the ocean. But as they are operating in local waters that’s where you have to be really diligent.”
That Moore’s pre-Dali disaster press release about the record port volumes reads very much like the self-congratulatory tone of the press releases regularly issued by Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
However, beyond all of that regional self-promotion, is the hard, cold, steel reality that when governments and their authorities own and operate ports, as well as the surrounding transportation infrastructure, they are the ultimate responsible party for maintaining occupational health and safety for the tens of thousands of workers in and around these complexes.
Floating flame nightmare
And when something goes tragically wrong, as it did on July 5 in Newark, N.J., when a fire broke out in Newark aboard the Grande Costa D’Avorio, claiming the lives of firefighters Augusto Acabou, 45, and Wayne Brooks Jr., 49, it’s not just the ship’s owner that needs to be held accountable. The operator of the marine facility, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is controlled by the Governors of both states, does, too.
While the fire alarm was sounded at 9:30 p.m., inexplicably the formal request for mutual aid from New York’s FDNY, which has the nation’s most robust marine firefighting capability, did not come until after midnight the next day.
During the joint board of inquiry convened by the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Board earlier this year, it became clear during the testimony of Newark Fire Department Deputy Chief Alfonse Carlucci, that the Newark Fire Department firefighters were poorly equipped and had not even the most rudimentary knowledge of how to fight a vessel fire.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s policy of leaving the responsibility for responding to maritime fires at its facilities to a financially stressed municipal fire department such as Newark was revealed as a complete unmitigated disaster that cost the lives of two of Newark’s bravest — and a traumatic moral injury to the scores of other first responders who were sent to do a job for which that they lacked the basic tools or training.
A clearly shaken Carlucci conceded that when he was handed the floor plan of the ill-fated ship, he was completely incapable of understanding it, much less in a position to use it to devise a strategy for fighting the fire that killed two of his men and injured several others. He said it was routine or a “little normal” to not have proper fire equipment — Newark’s two fireboats were non-operational.
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There’s been no explanation as to why there was such a lag time in engaging the FDNY although there are conflicting unconfirmed accounts that FDNY personnel were on the scene prior to the formal request for mutual aid. But Carlucci told the Coast Guard panel that once the FDNY marine unit arrived, hours into the deadly fire, he was “taught quite a lot” by the FDNY on how to fight a ship-based fire.
With a bit of amazement in his voice, he made the FDNY marine response sound like the calvary had arrived with the manpower, equipment and experience needed to fight a fire that killed two of his men. He described the vast volume of water that was projected from the large FDNY fireboat that was capable of cooling the deck of the ship that had been so hot it melted the boots of the Newark firefighters earlier in the response.
It’s just heartbreaking to have to listen to and transcribe such testimony. The official neglect that arguably extends to Trenton, Albany and Washington reflects a callous disregard for a fire service upon which an already vulnerable community relies on and as it turns out, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. Coast Guard probe into the Newark fire and the Dali disaster are ongoing. But holding entities like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Maryland Port Administration, and the Maryland Department of Transportation accountable can be a real political challenge.
Repeat offender?
Consider the mass casualty event in March 2023 on I-695 in Maryland when another six immigrant workers on a non-union work crew were killed after two racing vehicles obliterated their inadequately signed work zone. Lost in the horrific crash: Rolando Ruiz, 46; Carlos Orlando, 43; Jose Armando Escobar, 52; Mahlon Simmons III, 31; Mahlon Simmons II, 52; and Sybil Lee Dimaggio, 46.
The state’s own Maryland Occupational Safety and Health cited the Maryland DOT’s State Highway Administration for a “serious” violation — failing to post basic but essential traffic control signs approaching the construction zone that would alert passing motorists that highway work crews would be coming in and out of the zone. No monetary fine was imposed.
As for the private contractor, the federal OSHA levied a $3,000 fine which the notice of violation described as “contested.”
Patrick Moran is the president of AFSCME’s Council 3, which represents over 40,000 public sector workers in Maryland that include job titles that do highway and road repair. He says the lack of accountability for the I-695 failures by the state agency and contractor is “disheartening and disrespectful to the families of the people that lost their lives.”
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“It just tells you how upside down all of this stuff is in terms of contracting out work in terms of health and safety and how that’s valued and calculated,” Moran said. The union leader said the injury to workers and their families is compounded by the reality that the exploitative non-union business model that plays on the ambiguity of immigrant workers legal status is being funded by taxpayers.
Moran continued: “What we see is that there is little consideration given to health and safety and we have seen in construction, in all sorts of facets — roads or buildings in Maryland — it’s all left to the bottom line and the race to the bottom leaving it to whomever can build it cheapest and health and safety as well as worker safety be damned.”
What could go wrong?
In the Dali disaster, perhaps there could be a review of the absurdity of having the massive cargo ship operated by just some 20 crew members and of having the ill-fated vessel sail out to sea under such an essential and vulnerable asset without a tug escort. No doubt, the same industry lobbyists and multinationals that so effectively persuade regulators to water down labor standards in the first place, know the drill and will hunker down and spread around some campaign cash to try and blur any oversight.
In both Newark and Baltimore, it will take months if not a couple of years for official answers, the kind that holds responsible parties accountable and institutes reforms and new regulations that could save lives and protect the environment. Meanwhile, as we have seen with other workplace mass casualty events, the meat grinder of global commerce grinds on because here in America workers in general, and immigrants in particular, are all too often considered expendable.
In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore, Murphy in New Jersey and Hochul in New York offered their support to the a ”people of Maryland in any way,” directing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey “to further evaluate all available resources to minimize supply chain disruptions.”
“We have seen over the past several years that indefinite port closures can impact national and global supply chains, which hurt everyday consumers the hardest,” the two Democrats wrote.
You would think for all the campaign cash and union votes they have gotten in the past, they could have referenced workplace safety or even a phrase to uplift the immigrant workers and their families to make them less invisible.
After Dali, New York City Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi did a "it can’t happen here," telling reporters the Port of New York’s “own bridge infrastructure is some of the most highly monitored infrastructure in the nation. So, that and also the coordination with vessels and our bridge communication is highly sophisticated.”
Joshi continued: “We want New Yorkers to rest assured that the right precautions are in place to ensure that our infrastructure is safe and remains safe and how it interacts with both trucks and ships that both hit bridges occasionally. We have the right protections in place.”
As we all know even “the most highly monitored infrastructure” can fall prey to complacency as did the Port Authority’s George Washington Bridge on the Sept. 11th anniversary in 2013 when a rogue element of the bi-state agency’s police force and then-Gov. Chris Christie partisans deliberately snarled bridge traffic for a few days.
Legislative hearings and three failed federal criminal prosecutions later and the public was left with more questions than answers about the conduct of not just public employees but law enforcement officers as well who were not acting in the public interest.
A list of “un-indicted conspirators” that was assembled by the Department of Justice as part of the prosecution was never publicly released. Then U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman fought such a release in court and one of the conspirators that was not indicted sued to block a federal judge from releasing the list to the news media who had gone to court to make the names public.
Infrastructure and accountability?
It appears the bigger the asset in question the more likely there won’t be any and if there is, it will come so long after the actual sequence of events that prompted the inquiry no one is likely to notice.
(Anja Slibar for The 19th)