Two crew members of a Mexican Navy sailing ship died on Saturday night when the ship drifted directly into the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge, smashing its masts and rigging.
There were 277 people on board the ship, the Cuauhtémoc, which was on a good will tour, and everyone is believed to be accounted for, a Fire Department official said.
Mayor Eric Adams said in a social media post after midnight that two people had died, and that the ship had lost power before the crash.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said on social media that the deceased were crew members on the Cuauhtémoc.
Mexican officials identified one of the dead as América Yamileth Sánchez Hernández, from the state of Veracruz. In a social media post, the state’s governor, Rocío Nahle, confirmed her death and sent condolences to her family. “Veracruz is with you,” she wrote.
At least 22 others were injured in the crash, including 11 who were in critical condition and nine in stable condition, the Mexican Navy said in a statement.
The ship had been docked at Pier 17 in Manhattan, just below the Brooklyn Bridge.
On Saturday night, it was supposed to head south and sail out of New York Harbor, with a stop on the Brooklyn waterfront to refuel before heading onward to Iceland.
Instead, at about 8:30 p.m., the Cuauhtémoc was apparently heading in the wrong direction, having never intended to sail under the Brooklyn Bridge, said a spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
At the moment of collision, according to videos verified by Reuters, two people who appeared to have been on the topmost rung of the mast could be seen swinging forward violently. In the immediate aftermath, the videos showed, some people were hanging from the wreckage by ropes, and others inched along on their bellies toward the center.
In other videos posted on social media, a tugboat could be seen near the Cuauhtémoc, which appeared to be moving backward, stern first, when it crashed.
The vessel lurched but stayed upright as it came to a stop at Brooklyn Bridge Park, according to social media video and images from the scene. Its masts appeared to be badly damaged.
At a news conference on Saturday, the authorities said the pilot who was assigned to navigate the Cuauhtémoc out of the channel had encountered “mechanical issues.” The National Transportation Safety Board will be doing a full investigation of the crash.
The commander of the Mexican Navy, Adm. Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles, said in a statement on Sunday that the uninjured cadets would continue their training and that the investigation into the crash would be carried out “with total transparency and responsibility.”
“We know that every sailing trip involves risks inherent to our seafaring vocation,” said Admiral Morales Ángeles.
Nick Corso, 23, was finishing dinner with friends at a restaurant nearby when they saw the ship heading toward them.
He thought at first that the vessel would clear the bridge, he said, but then “the top lights on the mast disappeared behind the bridge and I was like, Oh, it’s not going to make it.”
When the top of a mast hit the underside of the bridge, he said, “you could hear it snap.”
At Pier 16, where the injured were brought, a large crowd gathered by the waterfront, and emergency vehicles with lights flashing filled South Street. Periodically, emergency workers wheeled victims with neck braces on toward ambulances and loaded them in on gurneys. Whenever a new survivor appeared, the crowd broke into cheers and applause and chanted: “Mex-i-co! Mex-i-co!”
One woman with her head bandaged was pushed out on a gurney. She was weeping. Beside her walked two companions in white slacks and striped black-and-white tops. One had her left arm in a sling. The other had her head wrapped in white gauze.
One man’s nose and uniform were smeared in dark blood, and his chin was bandaged.
Not long after that, a man was wheeled out on a gurney. He gave a thumbs-up when he passed the crowd.
Octavio Muniz, 44, said he had come from his home in Newark to see the ship because he is from Mexico.
Mr. Muniz said he had watched in horror as the masts toppled. The crowd around him began to scream and cry.
“It was horrible,” he said at Pier 16. “It was so sad.”
After midnight, the vessel docked at Pier 36 behind a city sanitation depot, its broken masts visible from behind a row of police barricades blocking access to the slip.
Crew members in life jackets, striped shirts and white pants quickly leaped off to secure the ship with ropes, calling out instructions to one another in Spanish.
Kaz Daughtry, the deputy mayor for public safety, passed through the barricades shortly before 1:30 a.m. and confirmed to reporters that people were still on board the ship, waiting to learn where they’d be spending the night and the coming days.
“We’re still trying to figure that out,” Mr. Daughtry said over the thump of music coming from a crowded party boat docked one slip over. He said the city’s priority was to “take care” of a group of people on the ship he called “good soldiers.”
Asked how long the ship would stay docked in New York, he said, “As long as necessary.”
A Mexican Navy official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give interviews said on Sunday that the Cuauhtémoc would go through an inspection process and that the ship’s fate would not be determined until a technical report was available.
The ship — a steel-hulled, three-masted barque, about 300 feet long — was built in Bilbao, Spain, in 1981 and then acquired by the Mexican government the following year to use as a training ship at its Heroic Naval Military School. Last year it won the Boston Teapot Trophy, an annual international award given to the sail training vessel that covers the greatest distance within five days.
At Pier 36 on Sunday morning, the regal ship, with its green trimmed hull and gilded masts, sat in the East River, a firm breeze rocking its disabled mast. Just before 10 a.m., a group of wounded sailors, including a man in an arm sling and another with his head bandaged in white gauze, emerged from the back of a white transport van to board once again. Bystanders tried to catch glimpses of the ship from behind police barricades.
Roque Anaya, 42, had traveled with his family from Rhode Island to New York City on Friday to see the ship he had learned about in school as a child in Hidalgo, Mexico. He had boarded for a tour, snapped photos with his family and spoken with the mariners making the voyage.
The Anaya family returned to the site of the crash on Sunday to check on the ship’s status.
“It’s a little heartbreaking,” said Jessica Anaya, his daughter, while holding back tears. “We came for this.”
“A lot of things are going through my mind right now: Will it stay here, will it go back to Mexico,” said Mr. Anaya. “They’ll have to fix it.”
The Mexican Navy said in a statement that the Cuauhtémoc had set sail on April 6 from Acapulco on a mission with the goal of “exalting the seafaring spirit, strengthening naval education and carrying the Mexican people’s message of peace and good will to the seas and ports of the world.”
The vessel had planned to spend 254 days away making calls in New York; Kingston, Jamaica; Havana; Reykjavik, Iceland; Aberdeen, Scotland; Avilés, Spain; Bridgetown, Barbados; and London.
The tour stopped abruptly in New York, where the authorities promised an investigation into the episode. Government infrastructure documents show the bridge has a navigational clearance of 127 feet. The Cuauhtémoc’s masts were roughly 160 feet tall.
After the crash, all lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge were briefly closed in both directions, the city’s emergency management notification system reported. Ydanis Rodriguez, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, said that the span was being inspected, but it appeared as though “there was not any major damage to the bridge.”
The Brooklyn Bridge, which took 14 years to build, was the city’s first suspension bridge. Since its construction over 140 years ago, the monolithic connector has become a quintessential part of New York City, tying together Brooklyn to Manhattan. It is as recognizable a symbol of New York as the Empire State Building.
This is not the first tall ship to strike the Brooklyn Bridge.
In 1921, for instance, the steel mainmast of the six-masted schooner Edward J. Lawrence struck the bridge as the ship was being towed beneath the central span. More than a decade later, a freighter struck a steel girder on the bridge, damaging three of the ship’s four masts. The captain blamed what he characterized as an abnormally high tide. In 1986, a 520-foot freighter from South Korea scraped the underside of the bridge, destroying one of the ship’s radars.
Nate Schweber James Wagner, Sean Piccoli, Cassidy Jensen, Adeel Hassan, Yan Zhuang, Wesley Parnell and Amelia Nierenberg contributed reporting.
Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times, following years of criminal justice and police reporting.
Shayla Colon is a reporter covering New York City and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Mexico City, covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Andrew Keh covers New York City and the surrounding region for The Times.
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