Buttigieg: Rebuilding Bridge Won’t Be Quick, Easy, or Cheap

(Photo by KENT NISHIMURA/AFP via Getty Images)

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said on Wednesday that the reconstruction of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge “will not be quick or easy or cheap, but we will get it done.”

The bridge partially collapsed on Tuesday after a container ship collided with a support column early in the morning. Officials have said the crash appears to be accidental with no signs of foul play or intention.

“It is difficult to overstate the level of physical force that hit this bridge all at once,” Buttigieg told ABC News in an interview on Wednesday. “This is a vessel that was about 100,000 tons carrying its load, so 200 million pounds went into this bridge all at once, which is why you had that almost instant catastrophic result.”

He continued: “What we saw yesterday was just unimaginable in terms of the proportion of that ship, the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, going directly into the key support beam of that bridge.”

Buttigieg also noted that President Joe Biden has pledged to have the federal government pay to rebuild the bridge.

“The president made it very clear that every tool of the federal government needs to be available to Gov. Wes Moore as the state of Maryland leads the work on the bridge and the port,” Buttigieg said in a later interview. “We have to make sure that funding is not an obstacle and make sure we tear down any administrative barriers, too.”