The Justice Department announced yesterday that Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine, the Singaporean corporations that owned and operated the Dali containership, have agreed to pay $102m to resolve a civil claim brought by the US five weeks ago for costs borne in responding to the catastrophic collapse seven months ago of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.

A host of other court cases surrounding this year’s most high-profile shipping accident are ongoing. Yesterday’s settlement does not include any damages for the reconstruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The state of Maryland built, owned, maintained, and operated the bridge, and attorneys on the state’s behalf filed their own claim for those damages.

“Nearly seven months after one of the worst transportation disasters in recent memory, which claimed six lives and caused untold damage, we have reached an important milestone with today’s settlement,” said principal deputy associate attorney general Benjamin Mizer.

Shipmanager Synergy stated: “The settlement strictly covers costs related to clearing the channel, which we would have been responsible for in any case, and is not indicative of any liability, which we expressly reject for the incident that led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. No punitive damages have been imposed as part of settlement.”

The settlement is only a small part of the massive legal claims the owners and operators face for the allision of the containership. Other cases include suits filed by the city of Baltimore, the state of Maryland, and families of the victims plus a number of businesses who lost money from the supply chain chaos that followed the Dali accident.

“Grace Ocean and Synergy are prepared to vigorously defend themselves in the limitation of liability proceedings pending before the federal court in Baltimore and to establish that they were not responsible for the incident,” a spokesperson for Synergy told Splash.

While Grace Ocean and Synergy have sought to cap their liabilities from this year’s most famous shipping accident to just $43.67m, Maryland’s attorney general, Anthony Brown, has said he will seek a far higher figure in damages. Reconstruction of the bridge alone is expected to cost more than $1bn.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in May released a preliminary report into the Dali’s fatal allision with Baltimore’s largest bridge.

The vessel, on charter to Maersk, experienced electrical blackouts about 10 hours before leaving the Port of Baltimore and again shortly before it slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the early hours of March 26 with the thousands of tons of the fallen bridge then wedging themselves onto the vessel’s prow.

The Dali departed US waters last month and is making its way to a ship repair base in Fujian province in China, scheduled to arrive on November 8.