Trapped vessels start moving out of Baltimore after bridge collapse

(Reuters) - The Port of Baltimore opened a temporary channel on Monday, freeing some tugs and barges that had been trapped by last week's bridge collapse, but officials said wider restoration of commercial shipping remained frustrated by unyielding conditions.

Baltimore's shipping channel has been blocked since a fully loaded container ship lost power and collided with a support column of the Francis Scott Key Bridge last Tuesday, killing six road workers and causing the highway bridge to tumble into the Patapsco River.

A recovery team led by the U.S. Coast Guard and the state of Maryland aims to quickly reopen the port, the largest in the U.S. for "roll-on, roll-off" vehicle imports and exports of farm and construction equipment.

But first it must free the cargo vessel, Dali, stuck under steel bridge debris with 4,000 containers and a 21-member crew stranded aboard since the accident.

To illustrate the task ahead, officials said recovery workers needed 10 hours to cut free and remove a 200-ton piece of debris -- what they called "a relatively small lift."

"We're talking about something that is almost the size of the Statue of Liberty," Gov. Wes Moore told a news conference. "The scale of this project, to be clear, is enormous. And even the smallest [tasks] are huge."

Beneath the surface, the job is even more complicated than originally imagined, said U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Shannon Gilreath, as the twisted steel is obscured by murky waters darkened by the volume of debris.

"These girders are essentially tangled together, intertwined, making it very difficult to figure out where you need to potentially cut so that we can make that into more manageable sizes to lift them from the water," Gilreath told the same news