A total of 87 containers fell overboard in bad weather – salvage operation continues
A loaded cargo ship, described by salvage workers as a ‘lame, dying, beast’, is still clinging to a reef off the New Zealand coast, two months after running aground in the middle of the night on the captain’s birthday.
Cracked down the middle, listing 21 degrees and piled high with goods containers, the 47,230-tonne Rena creaks and groans as steel plates in its fractured hull grind against each other with the sea’s constant swell, continuing to defy weeks of predictions that the vessel is about to break up.
A salvage team is painstakingly removing the containers, which have hung over the edge, teetering in a gravity-defying manner since the ship hit the reef on October 5. Their progress is reported in a daily bulletin, which most recently confirmed that the Rena remains fragile, but intact.
The job is highly dangerous. The 40-man salvage team from Dutch company Svitzer dice with death as they clamber at dizzying heights over the containers, attaching them to a crane to be hoisted onto an adjacent boat and taken ashore.
The Liberian-registered Rena, manned by a 25-man Filipino crew, ran onto the Astrolabe Reef, 22 kilometres off the east coast city of Tauranga, in the early hours of October 5.
The crew have gone home, all except the captain and his navigation officer, who both face criminal charges that could put them behind bars.
The salvors did not start removing the ship’s cargo of 1,368 containers – 554 of them piled high and strapped together on deck – until November 16, after siphoning off tonnes of heavy fuel oil, which had already spilled to create New Zealand’s worst ever marine environmental disaster.
A total of 87 containers fell overboard in bad weather, including some of the 121 holding nearly 3,000 tonnes of perishable foodstuffs.
Many were washed up on the coast or broke up on the rocks of nearby Motiti Island, spilling a motley mess of blocks of butter, hamburger patties, sausage rolls, household furniture, deer hides and other exports.
‘Rotting sealife, rancid butter and oil combined into a putrid stench that is almost indescribable and totally unforgettable,’ wrote journalist Karla Akuhata, whose family is among Motiti’s 20 Maori residents and helped with the clean-up of what they called their paradise island.
It could have been worse, as 32 containers hold chemicals and other goods declared dangerous. Some have ferrosilicon, which emits flammable gas in contact with water, and 21 contain cryolite, a by-product from an aluminium smelter said to be toxic if inhaled in its dry powered form but low-risk when dissolved.
More than 160 containers have now been lifted off the ship, but it is a delicate and time-consuming job. With more than 1,100 to go, it will be months before they are all removed. That is, if the ship can hold together that long – which seems improbable.
But Captain Rick Hunter from the tanker Awanuia, which pumped off more than 1,000 tons of oil, said it was a marvel the 21-year-old, 236-metre Rena was still there after only ‘hanging on by a thread’ for weeks.
‘Something is stronger in that ship than we really realised,’ he said, echoing the words of a newspaper columnist who wrote, ‘What a brave and stoic old girl she is.’
Officials hold their breath every time the wind picks up and the sea swells, as do 8,000 volunteers who have helped scoop up nearly 1,000 tons of oil-polluted waste from the coastline, mourn the deaths of more than 2,000 seabirds, and want to enjoy the beaches, after the summer officially began on Thursday.
The reef is a traditional fishing ground for the Maori tribes of Motiti, who are now barred from collecting seafood for fear of oil contamination.
But Hunter, who had weeks to observe the reef from close up, had good news for them.
‘The reef itself wasn’t damaged,’ he said. ‘It might have taken a knock on the nose but the environment was thriving as far as I could see – fish all around, seals, whales, life at sea was just going on.’
Source: M&C
