The state of Maryland is demanding that the owner and the operator of the ship that toppled the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March pay up.
In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Maryland leaders said the collapse of the bridge, which killed six workers, was going to end up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, from the rebuilding of the Key Bridge to the excess wear on roadways that have had to absorb all the traffic that would have used the crossing.
“We will not allow Marylanders to be left with the bill for the gross negligence, mismanagement and incompetence that caused this harm,” Maryland’s attorney general, Anthony G. Brown, said at a news conference.
The suit is the latest legal action against the ship’s owner, Grace Ocean Ltd., and its operator, Synergy Marine Group, and was filed on the deadline set by the court for such claims.
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department sued Grace Ocean and Synergy for more than $100 million to cover the costs to the federal government of the sprawling response operation. The federal suit gave a detailed account of what went wrong onboard the ship, describing a cascade of failures that it ascribed to faulty maintenance and “jury-rigged” fixes to longstanding problems.
The companies, both of which are based in Singapore, have argued in federal court that their liability for the crash should be limited to $44 million, a fraction of what is being sought in claims by the federal government, Maryland and families of some of the men killed in the collapse.
In an email on Tuesday, Darrell Wilson, a representative of Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine, referred to a statement that the firm released last week after the federal government filed its suit. In the statement, the company declined to comment on the litigation and said it was looking “forward to our day in court to set the record straight.”
A federal criminal investigation is ongoing. On Sunday, federal agents boarded a container ship in the Baltimore harbor that is also managed by Synergy, though the authorities have not disclosed why agents boarded the vessel.
The families of three men who were killed in the crash announced last week that they, too, were suing. The construction firm that employed these men also filed a lawsuit, as have several other companies that depend on port traffic for commerce. The city of Baltimore filed a lawsuit against Grace Ocean and Synergy in the spring.
The disaster began in the early hours of March 26 when the Dali, a container ship slightly longer than three football fields, lost power. It slammed into the Key Bridge, causing the bridge to collapse and killing six men who were repairing pavement on the roadway.
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 Patapsco River, which leads into the Port of Baltimore. The state’s lawsuit says that activity at the port brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local taxes and that port terminals accounted for roughly 20,000 jobs.
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