The Untold Story Behind the Key Bridge Collapse in Baltimore

Before 10 a.m. on Tuesday, March 26, my phone blew up with at least five texts from friends and family, asking if I was okay, since my wife and I live in Baltimore.

I opened the news to see Baltimore was on the front pages of major news outlets like the New York Times: a bridge in the local area and suburbs, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, just collapsed after being struck by a container ship. It collapsed at 1:30 a.m. that day, and the horrifying video shows the ship striking a pillar and the bridge going down within seconds. I watched the video several times to see cars speeding rapidly across the bridge, hoping and praying they could get across before the bridge went down.

It seemed like a freak, once-in-a-lifetime accident. Although I appreciated friends and family reaching out, I felt guilty. My wife and I were very unaffected. We don’t live on that side of town, don’t commute on that bridge, and are almost entirely unaffected. The area, however, is very industrial, and at that hour, I said that it would have, unfortunately, been workers who were most impacted by the collapse of the bridge.

As more and more news and developments came out in the next few days, various outlets reported that eight workers were on the bridge at the time of its collapse. They were construction workers repairing potholes. Two were rescued very shortly after the collapse, but the other six are missing and presumed dead.

All six workers were immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. They were young to middle-aged Hispanic men, many of whom had wives, siblings, and families in the country. All six are presumed dead.

It seemed minor, then, that so many people were complaining about their commutes being longer. Some people I know have commutes that have extended over half an hour due to the collapse of the bridge, as traffic has had to re-route to other ways to get across the water. The impact of the closing of the Port of Baltimore to shipping, while also devastating, seemed minor.

These were six men who came to this country to make a better life for themselves and their families who died in a freak accident.

When I learned all six of the people who are presumed dead from the Francis Scott Key collapse were Hispanic immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras, I immediately thought of an incident from last year that similarly seemed like a freak accident.

Two drivers were driving over 100 miles per hour on a highway where the speed limit is only 55 miles per hour. The two got into a collision, and one car crashed through a construction barricade and into six construction workers, who were killed. The accident happened on I-695, the same expressway the Francis Scott Key Bridge is on, on March 21st of last year. One of the drivers was just sentenced to one and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to felony manslaughter. The other driver has her trial next month.

I have lived in Baltimore for the last five years, and 695, is infamous for dangerous drivers and frequent accidents. It is a beltway that circles the whole Baltimore area, with frequent exits and on-ramps. There are several times I have taken the expressway as one route to get to work, and theoretically, without traffic, it should be the fastest. Almost every time, there is an accident that makes me late, and I am usually extremely frustrated at the inconvenience until I see the severity of the accident that completely destroyed someone’s car.

Three of the six people who died in the 695 crash were Hispanic men.

I think we can all agree that fixing potholes at 1:30 a.m. on a bridge is an undesirable job. I would even say that fixing the road in broad daylight on such a dangerous road is an undesirable job. This is not to say there aren’t White or Black construction workers who die in these freak accidents, as White workers also died when cars were going over 100 miles per hour in a construction site.

But the line that’s often going around about the victims of the Key Bridge collapse is that immigrants do the jobs other people don’t want to do, and that’s very true. The six men who died on the bridge were repairing a bridge so people could have smooth rides home with their families in the morning.

With these two tragedies in such close proximity to each other, it seems like it’s just a very dangerous time to be a Hispanic construction worker in Baltimore or a construction worker in general.

No, no one expects a container ship to crash into a bridge and make it collapse. No one expects cars to be driving over 100 miles per hour and collide through a construction site.

But we would be remiss not to acknowledge the disproportionate impact of these freak accidents.

Despite my not being personally affected and living on the other side of I-695 as the Key Bridge, this accident hits very close to home.

I work in a school with a higher Hispanic population than the year before. Many of our Hispanic students are recent immigrants and English Language Learners, and I know enough Spanish to assist some of our students with their requests for help, as long as they speak slowly enough for me to understand. One kid came to me to ask if he could change his English class because he didn’t know any English, a request I relayed.

I have sat in classrooms trying to assist some of our students with disabilities and redirect them and explain concepts to them. In one instance, I noticed the table partner of one of my students seemed like he was on task and knew what was going on. I didn’t pay him much attention.

But as we switched to a new task, he struggled to follow along with the teacher’s directions. I tried to explain the directions to him, but he wasn’t following along with me either. I realized the student did not know a lot of English, and was completely lost, just copying the teacher’s writing on the board. I did my best to help this student too, but I did not know how to explain biology terms like “chloroplast” and “mitochondria’ in Spanish, so I was limited in telling the student “the teacher wants you to write this here” in Spanish. The teacher also did his best to Google Translate the slides into Spanish so the student understood.

However, I felt very bad for the student to feel completely lost in the lesson due to the language barrier.

No, I am not saying struggling through biology class because you don’t know English and fixing potholes at 1:30 a.m. are the same. Being killed by a collapsing bridge at 1:30 is not the same as sitting through class and not knowing the language.

But both are instances of how hard it is to be an immigrant in America, and in Baltimore County (the suburbs around Baltimore City), the Hispanic population has grown, according to the census, from 1.8% in 2000 to 7% in 2020. This has very much complicated the racial composition of the Baltimore area, which is often seen as within the White-Black binary.

My parents were immigrants on H1B visas back in 1995, and there were similar struggles with the language barrier. But my father went into scientific research, not construction, so that comparison also seems flimsy. I first learned English when I was four years old because I was sent back to China for two years. But learning the language at four is much easier than learning English at 15 to 16, too.

At the end of the day, I think this is a plea for all of us to be more understanding and compassionate of immigrants who do the jobs no one else wants to do, in search of a better life for themselves and their families. Obviously, I doubt this would soften Trump’s stance on immigration given his rhetoric of the past nine years, which is only escalating and getting more extreme.

No matter what your politics are, it’s hard to look away and not notice when Hispanic immigrants are the only ones who die when a bridge collapses like a house of cards. I commented to my friends that being on a bridge when it collapses is probably one of the worst ways to die, as well.

No, being more compassionate and understanding of our immigrants probably won’t stop the next freak accident like a container ship hitting a bridge or a car colliding through construction barriers. But awareness and compassion can make the experiences of our immigrants a little bit better.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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