There are still portions of the site that remain too unsafe for divers, Wallace and Parrott said. A wide berth has been given to the area around the ship itself. Some of the containers aboard are leaning precariously, creating a hazard, Wallace said.

“There’s a very strong possibility that they’re going to fall left off the ship,” he said.

As a safety measure, divers are also connected to lines that tether them to boats at the water’s surface, Parrott said. Those lines are wired for communication, so divers are in constant contact with the surface, Wallace added.

Parrott likened the sonar imagery divers are using to a flashlight in the woods. The light bounces back from trees, and there are dark spots behind them. If a body is hidden behind a metal object, it’s difficult to find, he said.

While the challenges are numerous, the crews on site do have some advantages. Many of the agencies involved have trained together in the past, Wallace said, doing practice dives in the Patapsco and elsewhere in the Chesapeake Bay.

“They’re not seeing each other for the first time,” Wallace said. “As an incident commander, you always look for that level of continuity, and we certainly had it today.”

Parrott said he has trained previously in the area around the Key Bridge, although never in the shipping channel. Typically, Baltimore’s dive teams are searching for cars or people who have fallen into the harbor, sometimes capsized boats, he said. The scale of the wreckage crews are now navigating, however, is unthinkable, he said.

“This is a once-in-a-career situation,” Parrott said.

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