The owner and manager of the container ship that caused the Francis Scott Key Bridge to collapse have agreed to pay more than $100 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing them of negligence and mismanagement.

Federal authorities last month accused the owner, Grace Ocean Private Ltd., and manager Synergy Marine Group of “rigging” the vessel, Dali, and taking cost-cutting measures that left the vessel vulnerable to the type of outage he experienced before crashing into the bridge earlier this year.

The Justice Department sought to recoup the money the government spent to clean up the wreckage of the Patapsco River Bridge and reopen the Port of Baltimore.

“This resolution ensures that the costs of the federal government’s cleanup efforts in the Fort McHenry Channel are borne by Grace Ocean and Synergy and not by American taxpayers,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said in a statement.

A spokesman for Synergy and Grace Ocean, both based in Singapore, did not return a message seeking comment Thursday night.

A criminal investigation into the crash remains ongoing. Last month, FBI agents searched Dali’s sister ship when it docked in Baltimore. Agents also raided Dali in April.

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board is also ongoing.

Other complaints, including from the victims’ families, remain against Synergy Marine and Grace Ocean.

The 984-foot container ship lost power several times after leaving Baltimore Harbor and struck a critical pier of the Key Bridge in the early morning hours of March 26. The bridge collapsed within seconds, sending six bridge workers plunging to their level. deaths. A seventh man was pulled from the water and survived.

The Dali suffered multiple power losses while docked in Baltimore but failed to report them to the Coast Guard as required by U.S. regulations, according to the Justice Department lawsuit. The Dali’s captain did not disclose the power losses, nor the ship’s history of mechanical and electrical faults and other anomalies to the Maryland pilot tasked with steering the ship out of Baltimore Harbor and through the Chesapeake Bay.

The Justice Department said investigators found an improperly installed transformer aboard the Dali that repeatedly broke due to excessive vibration and that a backup system was “recklessly disabled.” Recent inspections have they found loose bolts, nuts and washers and broken electrical cable ties inside transformers and switchboards.

The ship’s electrical equipment was so weak that an agency halted electrical testing because of “safety concerns,” according to the government filing.

Federal authorities said four different means to help control the Dali in an emergency failed because of the ship’s poor condition, causing a “cascading series of failures.”

On the night of the disaster, a Maryland-licensed pilot boarded the ship to guide it out of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal and was assured by the captain that the ship was in good working order. As it neared the Bridge of Keys, the ship lost power when a transformer opened.

When Dali’s power went out, the craft should have automatically switched to a backup circuit system within seconds, restoring the ability to drive, according to the Justice Department filing. But that didn’t happen because the automation function was “recklessly disabled” and the ship’s engineers were left to fumble in the dark to reset the tripped switches.

The time it took to reset the switches, about a minute, was critical, government lawyers wrote. At the time, the ship’s emergency generator should have started automatically within 45 seconds, according to maritime regulations, but it took more than a minute for the emergency systems to activate, according to the court filing.

Investigators say the transformer and its switches “had long been suffering the effects of heavy vibration, a well-known cause of transformer and electrical failure.”

“Instead of taking steps to eliminate the source of excessive vibration, (the crew) jury-rigged their ship,” Justice Department attorneys wrote. “They mounted the transformer with anti-vibration braces, one of which cracked over time, was repaired with welds, and cracked again. And they fixed a metal cargo hook between the transformer and a nearby steel beam in a makeshift attempt to limit the vibrations.”

With impact with the bridge two minutes away, the pilot of the Maryland gave an emergency order for Dali to release an anchor in hopes of getting the ship off the bridge, authorities said.

But Dali’s anchor was not ready for immediate emergency release, as required by law, and nothing happened, according to the court filing.

“When the ship finally dropped anchor, less than half the ship’s length from the bridge, it was too late to have any effect,” they wrote.

Even though Dali’s engineers restored power after the first blackout, the ship did not have a working propeller because the main engine was still shut down. If engineers had been able to restore the main engine, the ship’s pilot would have had time to slow down or live, according to the court filing. Instead, a minute later, Dali lost power a second time, again due to the company’s negligence, according to the Justice Department.

The second blackout was caused by the wrong pump being installed to power the diesel generators that produce the ship’s electricity. As opposed to a standard fuel pump, the ship was equipped with a “flush” pump — something that is typically used temporarily to clean a pipeline when the crew switches between different types of fuel, according to the court filing.

It is not designed to automatically recover from a power outage, a “safety-critical feature” that a proper fuel pump would have, government lawyers said. With the wash pump off, the ship’s engines could not get enough fuel, causing the second outage.

The government said in court filings that Synergy, the company that managed Dali, used the wash pump “to save money.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.