BALTIMORE — For almost as long as the Francis Scott Key Bridge existed, Roy Plummer could see it from his kitchen window. If it had rained the night before, the bridge would shine in the morning when the sun rose to touch it.

When he was a senior in high school, his friend’s father got him a job helping with the bridge’s construction. On weekends, he and a classmate would make a few bucks on the Patapsco River, taking a motorboat to the concrete pylons supporting the bridge to check if the sump pumps had enough gasoline.

Early Tuesday morning, Plummer woke to the sound of his German shepherd growling. Blearily, he looked across the street to see that his neighbor had turned on her porch light. After checking his motion sensor lights, he went back to sleep.

Later that morning, when the sun had risen, his neighbor told him what had happened. Just before 1:30 a.m., a 984-foot cargo ship experiencing power and mechanical failures plowed into a support column for the 1.6-mile bridge, sending a small crew of construction workers tumbling into the frigid water below. Two people survived, but the bodies of two workers were recovered from the river on Wednesday. Four other workers are presumed dead.

Plummer’s voice became thick with emotion on Wednesday when he spoke about the workers who had died and their families. But on Tuesday, he said, he had also cried for the bridge.

“Because that’s us in Dundalk,” said Plummer, 68, the former maintenance supervisor for Dundalk High School. “The Key Bridge is us.”

Two days after the bridge’s collapse, residents of Dundalk and the nearby communities of Turner Station and Sparrows Point are mourning the workers who died – one of whom, Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, lived in Dundalk. They’re also fearful for what the future will hold for their many neighbors who work at the Port of Baltimore, one of the nation’s busiest ports, where vessel traffic is now suspended.

But in all the tragedy and uncertainty that has followed the collapse, longtime residents of the communities surrounding the bridge are grieving the loss of the structure itself, which has been a fixture in the Baltimore skyline for close to 50 years.

“It’s like losing your best friend,” said Shirley Gregory, president of the St. Helena Community Association, a neighborhood of about 1,000 houses that stands next to the port.

Gregory and her husband don’t know a Dundalk without the Key Bridge towering above – they moved to the area about 28 years ago. She used to drive it every day to the Maryland Department of Transportation office by BWI Airport, where she worked until 2013 before retiring.

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