The destruction of the Key bridge in Baltimore is a tragedy for the people killed and their families, and for the workers in the Port of Baltimore whose jobs are affected in at least the near term.
I think David Zipper is right that its effect on drivers will be negligible, as was found with the I-95 overpass collapse in Philadelphia not long ago, and the other I-95 overpass collapse in Connecticut you probably never heard about that happened a year or so earlier than that.
Getting the port open is much more important than getting the bridge back into service, in my opinion.
I hope the stories of the six dead men have some effect on our current anti-immigrant milieu, though that's probably too much to hope for. They represent exactly the mainstream story of immigrant workers today: people who do hard work, often in the middle of the night, invisibly.
I don't know that any of them were undocumented (everyone seems very careful not to comment on that) but it seems possible. From what I've read, at least several were men with families. They had been in the U.S. for more than a decade. Others were younger. But all were building American infrastructure, working so that people could drive that bridge every day without having to think about it.
CNN has information on five of the six men, and a little about their lives and families. I look forward to knowing more about them because their stories are important.
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