The Untold Story Behind The Key Bridge Collapse in Baltimore

Immigrants do the jobs other people don’t want to do

Ryan Fan
Corporate Underbelly

--

Photo from Patorjk on Wikipedia Commons — CC BY 4.0

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…

--

--

Ryan Fan
Corporate Underbelly

Believer, Baltimore City IEP Chair, and 2:39 marathon runner. Diehard fan of “The Wire.”