Mexican Navy sailing ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge, killing 2 crew members

New York: A Mexican navy sailing ship on a goodwill tour drifted directly into the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday night, smashing its masts and rigging and killing two crew members.

There were 277 people on board the ship, the Cuauhtémoc, at the time of the crash, and everyone is believed to be accounted for, a New York Fire Department official said.

New York Mayor Eric Adams said in a social media post after midnight that two people had died, and that the ship had lost power before the crash.

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said on social media that the two people who died were crew members on the Cuauhtémoc.

At least 22 others were injured in the crash, including 11 who were in critical condition and nine in stable condition, the Mexican navy said in a statement.

The ship had been docked at Pier 17 in Manhattan, just below the Brooklyn Bridge.

On Saturday night, it was supposed to head south and sail out of New York Harbor, with a stop on the Brooklyn waterfront to refuel before heading onward to Iceland.

Instead, about 8:30 p.m., the Cuauhtémoc was apparently headed in the wrong direction, never intending to sail under the Brooklyn Bridge, said a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Emergency Management.

In videos posted on social media, a tugboat could be seen near the Cuauhtémoc, which appeared to be moving backward, stern first, when it crashed.

The vessel lurched but stayed upright as it came to a stop at Brooklyn Bridge Park, according to social media video and images from the scene. Its masts appeared to be badly damaged.

At a news conference Saturday, authorities said the pilot who was assigned to navigate the Cuauhtémoc out of the channel experienced “mechanical issues.” The National Transportation Safety Board will be doing a full investigation of the crash.

Nick Corso, 23, was finishing dinner with friends at a restaurant nearby when they saw the ship heading toward them.

He thought at first that the vessel would clear the bridge, he said, but then “the top lights on the mast disappeared behind the bridge and I was like, oh, it’s not going to make it.”

When the top of a mast hit the underside of the bridge, he said, “you could hear it snap.”

At Pier 16, where the injured were brought, a large crowd gathered by the waterfront, and emergency vehicles with lights flashing filled South Street. Periodically, emergency workers wheeled victims with neck braces on toward ambulances and loaded them in on gurneys. Whenever a new survivor appeared, the crowd broke into cheers and applause and chanted: “Mex-i-co! Mex-i-co!”

One woman with her head bandaged was pushed out on a gurney. She was weeping. Beside her walked two companions in white slacks and striped black-and-white tops. One had her left arm in a sling. The other had her head wrapped in white gauze.

One man’s nose and uniform were smeared in dark blood and his chin was bandaged.

Not long after that, a man was wheeled out on a gurney. He held his thumbs in the air when he passed the crowd.

Octavio Muniz, 44, said he had come from his home in Newark, New Jersey, specifically to see the ship because he is from Mexico.

Muniz said he had watched in horror as the masts toppled. The crowd around him began to scream and cry.

“It was horrible,” he said at Pier 16. “It was so sad.”

After midnight, the vessel docked at Pier 36 behind a city sanitation depot, its broken masts visible from behind a row of police barricades blocking access to the slip.

Crew members in life jackets, striped shirts and white pants quickly leaped off to secure the ship with ropes, calling out instructions to one another in Spanish.

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry passed through the barricades shortly before 1:30 a.m. and confirmed to reporters that people were still on board the ship, waiting to learn where they’d be spending the night and the coming days.

“We’re still trying to figure that out,” Daughtry said over the thump of music coming from a crowded party boat docked one slip over. He said the city’s priority was to “take care” of a group of people on the ship he called “good soldiers.”

Asked how long the ship would stay docked in New York, he said, “As long as necessary.”

The Cuauhtémoc is used to train seamen, captains and officers at Mexico’s Heroic Naval Military School, according to a news release from one of its cruises. It is a steel-hulled three-masted barque launched in 1982, about 300 feet long.

The Mexican navy said in a statement that the Cuauhtémoc had set sail April 6 from Acapulco on a mission with the goal of “exalting the seafaring spirit, strengthening naval education, and carrying the Mexican people’s message of peace and goodwill to the seas and ports of the world.”

It had planned to spend 254 days away making calls in New York; Kingston, Jamaica; Havana; Reykjavik, Iceland; Aberdeen, Scotland; Avilés, Spain; Bridgetown, Barbados; and London.

The tour stopped abruptly in New York, where authorities promised an investigation into the episode. Government infrastructure documents show the bridge has a navigational clearance of 127 feet. The Cuauhtémoc’s masts were roughly 160 feet tall.

After the crash, all lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge were briefly closed in both directions, the city’s emergency management notification system reported. Ydanis Rodriguez, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, said that the span was being inspected, but “information is there was not any major damage to the bridge.”

The Brooklyn Bridge, which took 14 years to build, was the city’s first suspension bridge. Since its triumphant construction over 140 years ago, the monolithic connector has become a quintessential part of New York City, tying Brooklyn to Manhattan. It is as recognisable a symbol of New York as the Empire State Building.

This is not the first tall ship to strike the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1921, for instance, the steel mainmast of the six-masted schooner, Edward J. Lawrence, struck the bridge as the ship was being towed beneath the central span. More than a decade later, a freighter struck a steel girder on the bridge, damaging three of the ship’s four masts. The captain blamed what he characterised as an abnormally high tide. In 1986, a 520-foot freighter from South Korea scraped the underside of the bridge, destroying one of the ship’s radars.