Justice Department reaches $100 million settlement with ship owner in Baltimore bridge collapse

The owner of the Dali container ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge earlier this year, collapsing the span and killing six people, has agreed to pay more than $100 million in damages to resolve a Justice Department lawsuit, authorities said Thursday.

The Justice Department announced the settlement agreement in a news release, saying that the ship’s owner, Grace Ocean Private Limited, and operator, Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., would pay $103 million in funds that would go to federal agencies affected by the collapse. Others, including the state of Maryland, are pursuing separate damages, the department said.

“This is a tremendous outcome that fully compensates the United States for the costs it incurred in responding to this disaster and holds the owner and operator of the DALI accountable,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said in a statement. “The prompt resolution of this matter also avoids the expense associated with litigating this complex case for potentially years.”

Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer called the settlement an “important milestone” in the legal case against Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine.

The Justice Department and U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland had filed a lawsuit against both entities on Sept. 18, seeking more than $100 million in damages that authorities said the U.S. government incurred in the aftermath of the Key Bridge collapse.

The lawsuit alleged that the Dali, a 984-foot Singapore-flagged cargo vessel, experienced mechanical, electrical and crew-related failures in the four minutes before it plowed into the bridge.

Four backstops meant to help control the ship as it experienced two blackouts - the propeller, rudder, anchor and bow thruster - failed to work in the critical moments before the crash, the Justice Department alleged.

Those failures could have been prevented had Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine not cut corners on known safety issues and hired an ill-trained staff, federal officials alleged.

The Justice Department’s detailed retelling of the Dali’s failures were repeated by a host of attorneys representing the dozens of other claimants who expect to seek damages against Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine, including two men who survived the collapse, the families of the six men who died, businesses and workers whose livelihood were impacted by the shuttered Port of Baltimore and state and local government officials.