[Baltimore Sun] When the Key Bridge fell, women rose up to play important roles in response, recovery
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Ninety-nine days after the Francis Scott Key Bridge fell, Robyn Bianchi’s job was finally complete.
On July 3, the assistant salvage master for New Jersey-based Donjon Marine lingered on a pier to watch a container ship pass through the channel where she had worked seven days a week, sometimes 18 hours a day, directing divers’ underwater efforts to cut and clear away the bridge’s wreckage.
The shipping channel was clear and the Port of Baltimore was open. The families of the six construction workers who died had some closure in the form of the men’s remains, some discovered underwater by Donjon divers. As Bianchi drove away from Baltimore, she felt a twinge of sadness.
“You put your whole life into a job for so long, three months, and it’s just over with. I kept looking in my rearview mirror and I was like, ‘All right, this is done. What’s next?’” she said.
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In the hours, days and weeks after the March 26 collapse, hundreds of people sprang into action to attack the logistical puzzle of removing the fallen bridge, offer relief for port workers who couldn’t work, and support families who had suddenly lost their fathers, sons and brothers.
Many were women — some, like Bianchi, working in male-dominated fields — who labored tirelessly behind the scenes to respond to an engineering, economic and human disaster with far-reaching consequences for the region.
When news reports about the bridge collapse began to emerge on the morning of March 26, Giuliana Valencia-Banks, Baltimore County’s chief of immigrant affairs, found she couldn’t stay away.
Giuliana Valencia-Banks is Baltimore County’s first immigrant affairs coordinator. Her job involves making county government more accessible to immigrants. (Baltimore Sun File)
As soon as she learned that there had been a construction crew on the bridge when the Dali struck it, Valencia-Banks left the education conference in Montgomery County where she had just arrived and drove back to Baltimore.
“I immediately knew: It’s immigrant workers. And then in my head, I started to spin about, ‘Well, who’s reached out to their families? Was it through an interpreter? Are they getting crisis mental health support?’” she said.
By 11:30 a.m., she was with the families and a team of FBI interpreters, calling bilingual mental health workers and faith leaders who could offer immediate support, and already thinking about the obstacles particular to immigrant families with lives defined by shifting legal realities.
Valencia-Banks, whose regular job involves making county government more accessible to immigrants, worries that a sense of humanity can be lost in those political debates. “We forget that immigrants aren’t just a workforce, that they’re somebody’s child, that they’re somebody’s parents, that they’re community members,” she said.
One of her first phone calls that morning was to Donna Marie Fallon Batkis, a Towson-based licensed clinical social worker familiar with the trauma and loss that can follow a disaster.
Donna Marie Fallon Batkis, LCSW-C, a bilingual therapist and social worker, was part of the team helping the families of the Key Bridge disaster victims immediately after the bridge collapse. (Barbara Haddock Taylor/Staff)
Batkis learned Spanish when she moved to Mexico in the 1980s, where she volunteered with children displaced by a devastating earthquake. After she became a therapist, she counseled parents in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting and advised first responders on dealing with people experiencing mental health crises following Hurricane Katrina.
She spent two long days with the immediate and extended families of the missing men who had gathered to await news from authorities. In addition to being able to communicate with them in Spanish, Batkis said she was attuned to the particular cultural needs of the family members, who originally came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
The lessons she’s learned helping strangers and her own family navigate personal tragedies kicked into gear.
“What people really need is just to be able to come to someone that’s going to just receive them, whether they’re crying or they’re stoic or they’re numb or all the above, because we live in such a ‘fix it’ community, society,” Batkis said. “There are things that cannot be fixed and this cannot be fixed.”
Other problems the families faced did have solutions, some requiring navigating the complexities of the U.S. immigration system’s bureaucracy.
Ama Frimpong-Houser, legal director at immigrant advocacy organization CASA, worked for months to secure the approval needed so dozens of the workers’ relatives could travel to grieve together in the United States or back in their home countries.
“It was a hugely difficult and complicated process,” she said, “because our immigration laws are pretty stringent, right? Pretty set, and there are very limited ways in which someone can come into the United States of America.”
Now Frimpong-Houser is providing legal support to the workers’ family members to remove the threat of deportation from the still-ongoing grieving process and the years of expected bridge-related litigation.
Ama Frimpong-Houser, CASA legal director, helped the families of the Key Bridge victims get permission to travel to attend funerals in the US. (Kenneth K. Lam/Staff)
“It is going to take so, so, so much longer for healing and resolution and for questions to be answered,” she said. “People need to be able to do that without thinking about whether ICE is going to come up tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, removing the fallen Key Bridge from the Patapsco River, freeing the entangled Dali and allowing ship traffic to resume was a massive undertaking, one that required smooth coordination among state, federal and local authorities, as well as private companies.
When Bianchi, who attended the U.S. Naval Academy, arrived at Unified Command to begin the salvage operation, she realized quickly that even rival companies were willing to put egos aside to deal with such a severe event. “If we try and attack this problem individually, we’re gonna fail,” she said.
Robyn Bianchi, an assistant salvage master and dive master, was a key part of the Key Bridge response. (Kevin Richardson/Staff)
Bianchi grew up fishing and diving with her dad and brother in Florida and always dreamed of a career as a diver. She joined Donjon Marine after serving in the Navy, including a stint in Bahrain. More recently, she returned to Maryland again to help free the 103-foot yacht the LoveBug, which capsized in July at the mouth of the West River.
Divers played a key role in extracting the Key Bridge wreckage from the bottom of the Patapsco in “bite-sized chunks,” Bianchi said. Often working in murky conditions, divers first surveyed where the bridge had fallen and its condition. Later, they placed diamond wire saws underwater to slice sections of debris so workers could use cranes to lift pieces up and carry them off in boats.
“This was a very, very large scale, massive salvage effort. I can’t compare it to anything I’ve been involved in,” she said.
The work to coordinate divers and lead the operations side of their efforts was grueling. Bianchi lost weight and lost sleep fretting over dive reports or a major lift planned for the next day, but she relished the challenge.
“I thrive in chaos,” Bianchi said. “I love to be in a situation where we have to do the impossible on the impossible timeline with a group of people and you just bring [them] together. There’s just something so satisfying about taking a challenge like that —that not a lot of people can do — and just learning and getting through it and getting the job done.”
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