The Dali was bound for Sri Lanka the day it instead struck and knocked over the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and now, nearly six months later, it will embark on another Asian voyage.
The 984-foot container ship, which has a gashed bow and is currently receiving repairs in Norfolk, Virginia, will sail directly to China “on or about September 17, 2024″ according to a letter filed in federal court by the Department of Justice’s civil division Wednesday. The letter states that the ship’s owner and manager have informed “claimants” of their intent to sail and that from Thursday through Sept. 14, the claimants will be able to “perform inspections and testing.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean the ship will actually set sail by mid-September. Both times the Dali was moved since the disaster — from the middle of the Patapsco River to the Port of Baltimore and then from Baltimore to Norfolk — it departed a few days later than initially expected.
The Dali had just left Baltimore in the early morning of March 26, anticipating a monthlong journey to Sri Lanka, when it lost power. Tugboats had helped the ship leave the port, but they were no longer attached to the vessel, and although pilots ordered an anchor drop as the ship headed toward a Key Bridge support, that last-ditch effort couldn’t alter the 100,000-ton vessel’s trajectory.
The ship plowed into the pier, toppling the bridge and killing six construction workers who had been fixing potholes on the span. Steel and roadway littered the Patapsco River, temporarily closing the shipping channel and necessitating a salvage that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
For nearly two months, the Dali sat in the Patapsco River, amid the cleanup, but after explosives were used to cut up a huge piece of bridge sitting atop the vessel, the ship was refloated and towed back to the Port of Baltimore in May. In June, the ship, escorted by four tugboats, made a slow, 23-hour trip to Norfolk.
By late August, the ship was nearly unrecognizable as all of its thousands of containers had been removed, according to footage from Norfolk TV station WTKR.
The ship’s owners declared “general average” after the calamity, an ancient maritime law that requires cargo owners to chip in on the cost of salvage before they can receive their cargo. The Dali was being chartered by Danish shipper Maersk at the time of the disaster, and Maersk spokesperson Kevin Doell told The Baltimore Sun in an email Wednesday that the shipper “has worked to achieve the release of its customers containers from the owner’s custody.”
The Dali’s Singaporean owner and manager — Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine, respectively — have sought to limit their liability in the bridge calamity, but claimants, including the City of Baltimore and, more recently, a small propane distributing company, have filed suit against them.
People with claims against the ship’s owner and manager have until Sept. 24 to file claims in federal court, but an email reviewed by The Baltimore Sun on Wednesday shows an effort to extend that deadline by four months.
Several law and maritime firms — which stated they were representing roughly $42 million in cargo that was aboard the Dali at the time of the crash — have informally requested to push the claims deadline to Jan. 24 so they have time to assess damage to the ship’s containers and cargo, according to the email.
“The majority of the containers were only discharged from the Dali at the end of August and a significant percentage of them will not be delivered to destination until after the current deadline for the lodging of claims against the limitation fund,” the group wrote.
The firms asked parties to the litigation to indicate by Monday whether they object to a January deadline. The group is also seeking voluntary agreement from the Dali’s owners, according to the email.
Asked why the ship is heading to China, Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine spokesperson Darrell Wilson declined to comment. However, shipping experts have long anticipated that the damaged vessel would ultimately receive its most extensive repairs overseas.
When the Ever Given — the 1,312-foot vessel that got stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021, stalling the international supply chain — needed repairs later that year, it received them in a dry dock in Qingdao, China.
Asked by The Baltimore Sun, Sal Mercogliano, a former merchant mariner who hosts the YouTube show “What’s Going On With Shipping?”, predicted that upon the Dali’s arrival in China, there would be an entirely new bow fabricated to replace the damaged one on the current ship.
“They will cut the bow off and put on a new one,” he said.
