Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges on Tuesday against the operators and an employee of the Dali, the foreign-flagged cargo ship that toppled Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge and killed six workers two years ago.
The Department of Justice said Synergy Marine in Singapore, Synergy Maritime in India and Radhakrishnan Karthik Nair, 47, an Indian national who worked as the Dali’s technical superintendent, improperly reconfigured how the ship supplied power to its generators.
The Justice Department charged the companies and Mr. Nair with conspiracy, willfully failing to immediately notify the Coast Guard of a hazardous condition, obstruction of an agency proceeding and making false statements.
The three defendants are accused of lying to National Transportation Safety Board investigators about making the design changes, which prosecutors said caused the ship to suffer a blackout and ram into the Key Bridge. Six members of a construction crew were killed in the crash.
Synergy Marine and Synergy Maritime face additional charges of violating the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act and the Refuse Act in connection with the pollutants that leaked from damaged shipping containers into the Patapsco River, prosecutors said.
“The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge was a preventable tragedy of enormous consequence,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.
“This indictment is a critical step toward holding accountable those whose reckless disregard for maritime safety regulations caused this disaster,” Mr. Blanche said. “Six construction workers lost their lives, critical infrastructure was destroyed, pollutants were released into the Patapsco River and Chesapeake Bay, and the economic damage now exceeds five billion dollars.”
Court documents said the Dali lost power twice in less than five minutes early on March 26, 2024, putting the ship on a crash course with the Key Bridge.
Prosecutors said the ship had systems in place to recover from sudden outages, but the ship’s crew altered the vessel’s functioning so it instead relied on a flushing pump to restart two of its four generators.
The flushing pump was not designed to automatically kick back on following a blackout, prosecutors said, so the crew needed to manually restart the pump after the initial outage.
Court documents said that if the Dali had used its proper fuel supply pumps, it would have regained power and avoided the bridge. But without the flushing pump, the 900-foot cargo ship suffered a second blackout and drifted into one of the Key Bridge’s support beams.
“The indictment reveals a pattern of deception and egregious violations that led to the unsafe operation of the Dali, which recklessly endangered the public and resulted in the ship striking the bridge,” said Jimmy Paul, special agent in charge of the FBI Baltimore field office.
Six members of a road crew filling potholes on the span were killed in the crash. Rescue teams were able to pull two surviving members of the construction crew from the wreckage.
Debris from the bridge clogged the main shipping channel into the Port of Baltimore and halted all commercial activity at the harbor for nearly three months.
The Key Bridge is expected to be rebuilt by 2030 — two years after it was originally estimated to be completed. Costs for the new bridge are between $4.3 billion and $5.2 billion.
