Amid reporting about a past incident, the U.S. Coast Guard on Wednesday defended the safety record of the ship that crashed into a Baltimore bridge and collapsed it.
“Was this ship on the radar for the Coast Guard?” a reporter asked Coast Guard Rear Admiral Peter Gautier during the White House press briefing.“In terms of our examination, this particular ship had a fairly good safety record,” Gautier said.
The Dali, the ship that crashed into a support tier of Francis Scott Key Bridge in the Patapsco River, struck and damaged a quay at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges in Belgium in July 2016. Details of what led up to that incident are not confirmed.
“In terms of the history of the ship, again, I think this one incident that has been discussed within the media, I think we need to take that within context, in terms of what may or may not have happened with a different crew on board, different situation, different pilots.”
NTSB investigators in the United States, meanwhile, recovered the data recorder from the Dali and hope to release a timeline of how the ship lost power and crashed into the Baltimore bridge.
