The Dali cargo ship is set to be refloated Monday morning, the Key Bridge Response Unified Command announced Saturday afternoon.
After sitting stuck in the Patapsco River following its March 26 crash into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the vessel is scheduled to leave its position at high tide Monday morning around 5:24 a.m. after being prepped for the journey to a local marine terminal around 2 a.m. The entire process to move the ship is estimated to take about 21 hours, according to a Unified Command news release.
The sequence of preparation activities for the ship to undergo before the transit is scheduled to start 18 hours beforehand Sunday.
During those 18 hours, the crews will release anchors and mooring lines currently attached to the ship, de-ballast some or all of the 1.25 million gallons of water pumped onto the ship to compensate for the weight removed from it last Monday and be inspected for any remaining obstructions that may have been missed by dive survey teams.
Once the ship is free, up to five tugboats will shuttle it 2.5 miles to a nearby terminal, pushing it at about a mile per hour.
Clearing the Dali from the bridge area is key to reopening the river’s main 50-foot-deep, 700-foot-wide shipping channel, which has been closed since the late March crash and is expected to be reopened by the end of the month.
The announcement of the refloating date follows a major step in the process that occurred last Monday when crews used explosives to break apart a section of the bridge that was weighing down the top of the ship’s bow. The ship has been dormant in position with crews onboard for more than 50 days.
After the Dali’s journey to the terminal, crews will remove more wreckage from the bow and some of the roughly 4,500 containers on board. It will then undergo various inspections by entities including the National Transportation Safety Board, which will attempt to gather more information about what led to the crash.
