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The director of a Baltimore ministry heard a loud boom in the wee hours of Tuesday and figured it was thunder. Then he woke up, turned on the radio and learned that the noise had been the sound of a catastrophe — the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-maryland/" target=_blank>crash of a ship</a> into a bridge that involved merchant sailors he had seen just hours earlier.

Andrew Middleton, director of the local Apostleship of the Sea, texted a seafarer aboard the 985-foot container ship Dali.

“Is everyone on board safe?” he asked at 6:03 a.m.

Five minutes later, the crew member replied.

Their exchange is the first publicly reported communication from a mariner aboard the vessel, which lost power and slammed into the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/2024/03/26/francis-scott-key-bridge-history-baltimore/" target=_blank>Francis Scott Key Bridge</a> about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday. Middleton’s account also provides new insight into the path of the cargo ship before the crash, which <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/how-key-bridge-collapsed-baltimore/" target=_blank>destroyed the bridge</a> — rising to 185 feet above the Patapsco River at its peak — and left at least <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/victims-baltimore-key-bridge-collapse/" target=_blank>six people missing</a> and two injured.

“The words that ‘the Key Bridge is gone’ — it still shakes us,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) said Tuesday morning.

Just before the disaster, crew members aboard the Dali alerted authorities that the vessel had lost power, which prompted a rushed effort by authorities to halt vehicle traffic and evacuate people from the bridge. That <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/26/baltimore-bridge-collapse-key-ship-crash/" target=_blank>“mayday” warning is credited with saving numerous lives</a>, Moore said, but it came too late to save workers who were repairing potholes on the span.

The Dali left the Panama Canal on March 13, arrived in New York on March 19, then traveled to Norfolk on Friday, according to the ship-tracking website VesselFinder.com. It arrived Saturday in Baltimore.

Although the Dali’s trip from Panama to the Chesapeake Bay appeared uneventful, records show the nine-year-old ship has had problems related to propulsion in the past.

In June, inspectors at the port of San Antonio, Chile, discovered a problem categorized as relating to “Propulsion and auxiliary machinery,” according to the Tokyo MOU, an intergovernmental shipping regulator in the Asia-Pacific region.

The issue was classified in the subcategory of “Gauges, thermometers, etc,” but no additional details of the deficiency were provided. The problem was not serious enough to warrant detaining the ship, according to the records, and the Dali was found to have no outstanding deficiencies after a follow-up inspection later that day.

Basil Karatzas, chief executive of Karatzas Marine Advisors &amp; Co., said he suspected that the Baltimore disaster followed a halt in the supply of fuel to the Dali’s engine. “If there was any malfunction of gauges and thermometers looping back to the engine, [that] may have caused or contributed to the accident,” Karatzas said.

The ship — about 157 feet wide and longer than three football fields, according to MarineTraffic.com — stayed in Baltimore for three days.

On Monday, while the ship was docked, Middleton said, he drove its captain and a crew member to shop at a Walmart. In the car, Middleton said, the captain told him about the vessel’s upcoming journey to Sri Lanka — explaining that it would take about a month, because the ship would be traveling around the southern tip of Africa to avoid the Suez Canal and Red Sea, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been attacking ships.

“They were going out of their way to ensure their own safety,” said Middleton, whose ministry provides services for seafarers when they arrive at the port.

Employees of the ministry transport crew members to local establishments and provide counseling to those on board, who are often far from home and dealing with the strains of life at sea.

Before he left them Monday afternoon, Middleton prayed with the captain and crew member.

“God bless these gentlemen,” he prayed. “Have a safe voyage.”

The Dali left about 12:44 a.m. Tuesday and was expected to arrive at the Sri Lankan port city of Colombo on April 22, a journey of 27 days.

But then it lost power as it neared the Key Bridge. Thick black smoke began to appear from the ship’s port funnel, video showed. The lights turned off, then on, then off again. The vessel was traveling at eight knots, which Moore called “a very, very rapid speed.”

At 1:27 a.m., as the darkened ship was illuminated by city lights on either side of the harbor, members of the Maryland Transportation Authority police scrambled to respond to the ship’s “mayday.”

“Hold all traffic on the Key Bridge,” one voice said over the transportation authority police radio, according to records from Broadcastify, an open-source audio streaming service. “There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering.”

Others on the radio announced they were on their way to the bridge or already holding traffic.

Then, one voice asked whether there were workers on the bridge.

“You might want to notify whoever the foreman is to see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily,” another voice said over the radio.

At 1:28 a.m. — less than a minute after the first warning — the Dali struck one of the bridge’s piers.

An officer replied that he would drive onto the bridge and notify the workers after another officer arrived to keep the traffic blocked. But the bridge had already been hit.

About 20 seconds later, a voice shouted over the radio, “The whole bridge just fell down!”

The Dali was traveling under the flag of Singapore. Singapore’s Maritime Port Authority said Tuesday that it was investigating the collision and providing “full cooperation” to the U.S. Coast Guard. The authority, which regulates marine services in Singapore, said there were 22 crew members on board at the time of the crash.

The <a href="https://ships.jobmarineman.com/dali-9697428/" target="_blank">registered</a> <a href="https://ships.jobmarineman.com/dali-9697428/" target="_blank">owner</a> of the ship is Singapore-based Grace Ocean Pte Ltd., and it is managed by Synergy Marine Group. Neither company immediately responded to a request for comment from The Washington Post. An official from Grace Ocean told the global shipping news website <a href="https://www.tradewindsnews.com/casualties/several-missing-after-container-ship-destroys-bridge-in-baltimore/2-1-1617658" target="_blank">TradeWinds </a>that the company is “working with the ship’s technical manager Synergy Marine to determine what happened.”

News accounts indicate that reported problems with the Dali date to 2016. That year, the Dali struck a stone wall at the Belgium port of Antwerp as it was unmooring and leaving the port. The ship sustained “hull damage impairing seaworthiness,” according to Equasis, a maritime data service created by European authorities. VesselFinder, a maritime monitoring service, reported that no one was injured and no cargo was spilled. The ship was detained in Antwerp for necessary repairs.

About three months after the Antwerp collision, the Dali was sold by its Greek owner, Oceanbulk Maritime, to Grace Ocean, a Singapore-based shipping company .

Synergy Marine Group has been involved in at least three incidents since 2018 that led to the deaths of crew members, according to investigation records from transportation safety agencies and government statements.

In 2018, a technician onboard a vessel managed by Synergy was killed when a personnel elevator malfunctioned, according to authorities in Australia, where the vessel was registered.

Required “safety barriers” were not put in place before the technician began his work, and “aspects of the supervision and communications throughout the task were ineffective,” said an investigation report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

In 2019, an officer on a Synergy-registered vessel was reported missing. An investigation by authorities in Singapore found that the officer had probably fallen overboard while working alone on a lifeboat and that it was “probable” he was not wearing a personal flotation device. And last year, a tanker partly managed by Synergy collided with a dredger off the coast of the Philippines, killing two seafarers: a Filipino national and a Chinese national, according to Philippine Coast Guard officials.

On Tuesday evening in Baltimore, the Dali was still sitting in the water, surrounded by remnants of the once 1.6-mile-long bridge. Dive teams cautiously searched for victims Tuesday afternoon, hampered by rough waters, piles of silt in the Patapsco River and the twisted wreckage of the submerged bridge.

Rebecca Tan, Sarah Cahlan, Tim Craig and Gregory S. Schneider contributed to this report.

A previous version of this article described Grace Ocean, the owner of the Dali, as a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co., based on information from shipping data services. Mitsui says that Grace Ocean is not its subsidiary, though records reviewed by The Post show that the two firms have a longstanding business relationship. This article has been updated.

Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting, finalist (part of a team), 2020

Brown University, B.A.

Emily Davies is a reporter covering crime and criminal justice in Washington, D.C. She started at The Washington Post as an intern in June 2019.

Emily Davies

Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post's breaking news coverage of Virginia Tech shooting, 2008

Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post's investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, 2022

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University of Notre Dame, BA in English and American Studies

Tom Jackman has been covering criminal justice for The Washington Post since 1998 and anchors the True Crime blog. He previously covered crime and courts for the Kansas City Star.

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Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting, 2016

Society of Professional Journalists Award for public service, 2016

Online News Association Award for topical reporting, 2016

Peabody Awards finalist, 2016

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University of Cambridge, BA

City University of London, PG Dip

Jon Swaine joined The Washington Post's investigative team in 2019. He previously worked as a senior reporter for The Guardian, and as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph.

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2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

2021 Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Award

 2020 Webby Award for Longform Video Documentary

Northwestern University, BS in Journalism

Joyce Sohyun Lee is a video reporter for The Washington Post's Visual Forensics team. Before joining the Post, she worked as an associate video producer for Time magazine.

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Crew on board Dali all survived bridge crash ‘by God’s grace’

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Crew aboard Dali all survived bridge crash ‘by God’s grace’

A director of a Baltimore ministry was in touch with those aboard the Dali after their ship crashed