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By Richard Martin, The Baltimore Banner

On March 26, 2024, the cargo ship Dali lost power while leaving the Port of Baltimore and slammed into a critical support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It was 1:24 a.m., and within seconds the bridge crumpled into the cold Patapsco River, sending six construction workers working on the bridge to their death — and severing a major state highway and blocking one of America’s busiest ports. 

Before the sun came up, The Baltimore Banner was aggressively reporting on the catastrophe and its far-reaching implications — on The Banner’s social media pages, mobile app and website.

In the first hours, photographers and reporters documented the rescue effort. Data journalists created maps and assembled information on the Dali and its route from shipping logs and trackers. The audio dispatch from police and firefighters, along with the ship-tracking data, enabled The Banner to reconstruct the moments of impact for an examination of the disaster that published the very next day.

Meanwhile, the newsroom was already working to answer a bigger question. How could such a disaster happen? Reporters and editors dug through tens of thousands of Coast Guard records to come to an alarming discovery. Cargo ships such as the Dali had dangerously lost power at least 100 times while sailing in and out of the Port of Baltimore. These findings presented state officials with the critical question: Were they doing enough to protect Maryland’s bridges from the hazard?

Another key question The Banner sought to answer was how this disaster happened despite the longstanding practice of tugboats guiding ships in and out of the harbor. We found a lack of regulation on how and when tugs accompany a vessel , which involves navigating under two bridges. The Port Administration said the pilot and the ship’s captain have the discretion to decide when tugs peel off from a vessel.

The investigation into the pattern of ship blackouts framed the public conversation about the collapse and the need to further protect Maryland’s bridges. In response to our April 18 story, a member of the Coast Guard Office of Investigations and Casualty Analysis sent one of the Banner journalists this message: 

“The entire INV [investigative] staff here at CGHQ thought your article was outstanding. We’re sending the link to our 180 field IOs to validate that their work and data entry matters. I’m hoping they’ll be inspired by your efforts to conduct more risk analysis on a local level. We also need to modernize our public data delivery and we’re working with Salesforce to fulfill that objective. We need to be better. This incident highlights the urgency.”

More investigative angles emerged in those first few days, and in the weeks and months that followed. Among them:

Reporter Ben Conarck, who covered Surfside’s Champlain Towers South collapse with the Miami Herald in 2021, helped produce a story about whether bridge protection systems known as “dolphins” and “fenders” could have prevented the collapse. 

Banner reporters also found that the Key Bridge was one of about 17,000 bridges in the country characterized as having a “fracture critical” design, meaning if one portion sustained enough damage, the entire structure would collapse. The story was recently honored with the Excellence in Journalism Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The collapse of the Key Bridge also cut off a major north-south route for trucks carrying hazardous materials up and down the East Coast. A Banner investigation published in July 2024 found that instead of using the Interstate 695 Beltway around Baltimore, many hazmat trucks were now using Baltimore’s underwater tunnels, despite state law largely prohibiting them from doing so.

Our investigative work continues to this day, as we follow the NTSB investigation, the rebuilding effort and other angles. Recently, in April 2025, reporter Lee Sanderlin revealed how none of the $16 million in a fund raised after the disaster had gone to victims’ families. 

It’s worth noting that our coverage of the Key Bridge disaster came less than two years into The Banner’s existence, as our newsroom was still growing. We were nowhere near the 80-plus journalists we employ today, yet we knew such an historic event would require all hands on deck and a commitment to continue following the story well after national media was gone.

Pivoting quickly to investigative angles is something that has served me well in the past. As an assistant metro editor at the Los Angeles Times, I oversaw the coverage of a boat fire off the Santa Barbara coast in 2019 that killed 34 people. 

We were the first to report that the dive excursion boat Conception had limited escape routes, which made it difficult or impossible for those below deck to escape the blaze. We also learned through sources that there was no designated roving watch person, which was required by law and the boat’s own certification. Both were cited in the NTSB investigation and new regulations were enacted to address these deficiencies for similar boats. That work was recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. 

Years earlier, as the senior criminal justice editor at the Baltimore Sun, I oversaw coverage of the death of Freddie Gray and the citywide unrest that followed. Our investigative coverage, which included an examination of Gray’s 45-minute ride in the back of a police van, also won a 2015 IRE award and was also recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.

These stories prove that it’s never too early in a newsroom’s response to a major breaking news event to start asking the deeper questions that require a greater level of investigation to answer.

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