The Justice Department filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Wednesday against the owner of the massive cargo ship that rammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in March.
DOJ lawyers said in a civil claim filed against Grace Ocean Private Limited in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland that they were seeking more than $100 million in damages to cover costs the federal government incurred responding to the catastrophic event.
Grace Ocean’s ship, called the Dali, plowed into the bridge on March 26 after losing power, causing the bridge’s partial collapse. The wreck resulted in the death of six construction workers who were on the bridge at the time of the incident.
“This tragedy was entirely avoidable,” the lawyers wrote in the civil claim.
During a call with reporters, Ben Mizer, a DOJ principal deputy associate attorney general, explained that in addition to the loss of life and structural damage, the bridge collapse shut down a key highway in Maryland and halted maritime activity for weeks in the Port of Baltimore, one of the country’s busiest shipping hubs.
The damages would compensate the federal government for what Mizer described as “Herculean efforts” by workers to clear the rubble and reopen the port.
Government workers removed “more than 50,000 tons of steel, concrete, and asphalt from the channel and from the Dali itself. While these efforts were underway, temporary channels were also cleared to start relieving the bottleneck at the Port of Baltimore and mitigating some of the economic devastation caused by the Dali,” Mizer said. “The work was complex, costly, time consuming, and, at times, dangerous.”
In addition to Grace Ocean, the lawsuit was also brought against Synergy Marine Private Limited, which operated the Dali. The two Singapore-based corporations filed a lawsuit soon after the bridge collapse in which they sought exoneration and asked that their liability for the incident be limited to $44 million.
DOJ lawyers detailed in the lawsuit the ship owner’s failures to maintain the vessel’s electrical and mechanical parts properly, which they say led to its power loss on the night of the incident.
There were “telltale signs of vibration problems” long before the ship entered the Fort McHenry Channel and crashed into the bridge, the lawyers said.
The shipowner and operator “jury-rigged” the Dali instead of eliminating the vibration problems, the lawyers said.
Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine “sent an ill-prepared crew on an abjectly unseaworthy vessel to navigate the United States’ waterways,” the lawyers wrote. “They did so to reap the benefit of conducting business in American ports. Yet they cut corners in ways that risked lives and infrastructure.”
The DOJ’s lawsuit will also seek an unspecified amount in punitive damages.
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The civil claim does not include money that the State of Maryland could seek from the ship’s owner and operator for the reconstruction of the bridge. It also is unrelated to the lawsuit family members of the six victims who died plan to bring. The six construction workers were all Latino immigrants, most of whom had lived in the country for years.
The Washington Examiner reached out to a Grace Ocean representative for comment.
