The investigation into the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore will move quickly to address whether the impact that brought the bridge down was deliberate, CNN’s senior law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe said.
“It starts with that video [of the collapse], and you can’t look at that video without asking, how could this happen?” McCabe said.
“We don’t want to suggest that this was an intentional act, but it’s of course something that the investigators on the ground who are trying to understand how this horrible disaster took place are going to want to consider.”
The Patapsco River is also a “heavily trafficked commercial shipping area which only increases your questions about, why did it happen to this ship when so many ships pass through that same space safely, probably hundreds of times a day,” McCabe said.
Investigators would begin by piecing together a “complete timeline of who was on the boat – who was in what positions, who was actually piloting the boat, and who had access to the controls that could have steered or directed the vessel.”
McCabe said investigators would also look into the crew’s “training experience, whether or not they’ve been involved in any prior incidents on this boat or any other boats, and they are going to want to know about their conduct leading up to the event, whether they had the required amount of rest.”
The investigation would also likely look into the ship’s service record, “whether or not it’s ever had any issues in the past relating to its control or direction … and, in terms of its course, was this something that happened suddenly as they approached the bridge or was it an errant course they had been set upon some minutes or even hours before.”
Those questions did not inherently imply responsibility, McCabe said, but were “the sorts of generalised questions that investigators are going to be asking to get an understanding of what was happening on that boat in the moments leading up to this event.”
Source Agencies
