A commuter who drove over Baltimore's ill-fated Francis Scott Key Bridge on the way to his second job says he "probably wouldn't be here" if he'd delayed the trip by a even a minute.

Larry DeSantis was headed to Herman's Bakery in Dundalk, Maryland, early on March 26 when he crossed the span.

Moments later, DeSantis said, he got a chilling phone call from his other workplace.

"Someone called me like maybe two minutes later and said, 'Where are you at?' That was my other job calling," he told CNN for a report Monday.

"I said I just went over the bridge, and they said 'Well, you know, the bridge just collapsed.'"

DeSantis said he considered himself "very lucky."

"If I had stopped and talked to somebody, my co-worker for a minute, I probably wouldn't be here today," he said.

Video recorded by a traffic camera during the five minutes before the bridge collapsed shows a vehicle that could be DeSantis' truck, followed by a tractor-trailer cab that he said he passed on the span, according to CNN.

DeSantis didn't hear the bridge crash down behind him because he was listening to the radio while commuting between jobs, he told the Baltimore Banner.

Six construction workers are presumed to have been killed in the catastrophe, with only two bodies recovered to date.

Two survivors were pulled from the water after the container ship Dali lost power and smashed into a bridge column around 1:30 a.m., sending its steel trusses and roadway crumbling onto the freighter and into the Patapsco River.

Meanwhile, officials said the Coast Guard was preparing a temporary, alternate channel for commercially essential vessels to bypass the scene and get to and from the shuttered, economically vital Port of Baltimore, according to the Associated Press.

Crews have started removing wrecked steel and concrete, with dive teams surveying parts of the bridge and checking the ship on Sunday.

Workers in lifts also used torches to cut away parts of the trusses protruding from the water.

The port ranks as the ninth-busiest in the nation but has been No. 1 in handling cars and light trucks for the past 13 years, with nearly 800,000 vehicles passing through last year.