BALTIMORE — The duty officer radioed to two fellow Maryland Transportation Authority Police officers working an extra-duty shift in Tuesday’s early morning hours. He needed one stationed on each side of the Francis Scott Key Bridge to block traffic.

“There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering,” the duty officer advised, according to archived radio transmissions reviewed by The Baltimore Sun. “Until they get that under control, we’ve gotta stop all traffic.”

Then, less than a minute later, he spoke again: “Is there a crew working on the bridge right now?”

There was. And, despite swift action to block the bridge’s highway traffic, almost certainly saving travelers’ lives, officers did not reach the construction crew in time for them to evacuate. Six of the seven-member crew, predominantly Hispanic men, are presumed dead — the human toll of the Key Bridge’s sudden collapse after the vessel struck it just before 1:30 a.m.

The time between the container ship Dali’s mayday and its foundation-shaking crash into one of the Key Bridge’s support piers was less than three minutes, leaving little time for life-preserving action. But one former construction worker said crew members likely could have hopped in a truck and sped off the 1.6-mile bridge if they’d been reached by phone or radio.

Among the many questions surrounding the catastrophe: Was the crew working on the bridge warned to get off in the best way possible?

There has been mixed information about how, or if, Maryland Transportation Authority Police reached the crew and a state inspector, also a contractor, who was stationed alongside the workers. That inspector survived, along with one crew member, officials have said.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who praised the transportation authority officers as heroic, said Wednesday that how exactly first responders sought to reach the crew is part of the investigation. The independent federal National Transportation Safety Board, which announced earlier this week it would probe for the cause of the strike and bridge collapse, is conducting interviews and gathering evidence.

Moore said he was told by a survivor that that person was warned “audibly.” Moore said that person said first responders on scene “were both able to move toward keeping additional cars from coming on the bridge and also begin notifying some of the workers on the bridge that they needed to move off.”

The survivor, Moore said, told him that as he “was moving off of the bridge, and literally saw the bridge fall right after he moved off, it was because it was a first responder who was telling him to move off the bridge.”

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