Gerd Mærsk
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The Gerd Mærsk was a Danish oil tanker . The ship was known above all by the fact that it ran in January 1955 in the Elbe estuary due and after the barges was released again by about 7,000 tons of crude oil.
history
prehistory
The ship was built in 1950 at the Japanese shipyard Mitsui Shipbuilding & Engineering in Tamano. The owner was the Danish shipping group A / S Dampskibsselskabet Svendborg og Dampskibsselskabet af 1912 A / S, a company of AP Møller-Mærsk from Copenhagen. The tanker was almost 170 meters long and had a deadweight of 18,645 tons.
The Gerd Mærsk collided on June 21, 1951 at the exit of the Suez Canal with the American anchor berth John Chester Kendall , but only caused property damage.
Accident in the Elbe estuary
On January 16, 1955, the Gerd Mærsk was on a journey with crude oil to Hamburg. Below the lightship Elbe I , the tanker took an Elbe pilot on board who, due to the prevailing heavy snowstorm, advised to wait for the weather to improve at "buoy C" in the roadstead. Under the command of Captain Hjalmar Houmann, the loaded tanker needed several attempts before it anchored at “buoy 2” with four lengths of chain. Soon afterwards the German general cargo ship Kandelfels of the shipping company DDG Hansa anchored near the Danish tanker.
In the course of the night the tanker began to drive away at anchor in the direction of the Kandelfels . Contrary to the advice of the pilot, the port anchor still available was not thrown, and neither did anyone want to go to the Gerd Mærsk . Meanwhile, the wind picked up to hurricane strength and drove the tanker further towards the Scharhörn Reef. When the decision was finally made on board to haul in the anchor in order to be able to turn the ship better into the wind, the Gerd Mærsk was no longer able to get into safe deeper fairways. The tanker ran aground, breaking the rudder and leaking the stern.
The rescue operation
In the course of the morning of January 17, the ships Seefalke , Danzig , Goliath , Taucher Otto Wulff III and Alk, called for help, arrived at the distressed vessel , in whose stern the water that had penetrated was now six meters high. The tugs moored at the stern of the Danish tanker for the next six hours, but were initially unsuccessful due to the continued heavy weather. The following morning, part of the oil load on the Gerd Mærsk was pumped around in order to give the stern greater buoyancy, but even after that only a 23-degree turn of the base seat could be achieved. On the morning of January 19, the stern of the tanker was already about two and a half meters in the sand; Every hour about 70 cubic meters of water penetrated, which could just be kept under control with the available pump capacity. After the first oil tank of the heavily stressed ship leaked, the ship's council finally met on board the Gerd Mærsk and decided to pump part of the cargo overboard in order to prevent the ship from breaking apart, about 7,000 - 8,000 Tons of crude oil released. The tanker, worth the equivalent of around 24 million euros, was released around 8:00 p.m. with the help of a tug and was towed to Hamburg the following day with a remaining load of over 10,000 tons, where its load was unloaded and the damage repaired.
consequences
The leaked oil now covered an area of 1,600 square kilometers. The oil spill was fought with large numbers of ships and from the air in the days that followed. Among other things, chemical substances were used and attempts were made to set the oil on fire with added gasoline. None of the measures showed radical success. Pollution and bird deaths occurred in the affected coastal sections from the Elbe estuary, via the German islands of Amrum, Föhr and Sylt, the Danish islands of Rømø and Fanø to Esbjerg. The cleaning of the coastal sections cost several million DM.
What was remarkable about the accident was that the behavior of the released oil was the subject of a number of early scientific observations on movements of oil spills in the North Sea.
literature
- Schwabedissen, Tim: Stranded: Ship accidents off the North Sea coast . Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-7822-0893-5 .
Web links
- List of the Danish merchant fleet 1955 (Danish; PDF file; 2.53 MB)
Footnotes
- ↑ Blick in die Welt - Wochenschau, North Sea: Bird deaths due to oil spill after tank accident, 1955 (video, 1 minute) ( Memento from July 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ The plague of Sylt, Die Zeit, February 17, 1955
- ↑ Entry in New Scientist No. 3630 of October 31, 1963
- ↑ Tomczak, G .: Investigations with drift cards to determine the influence of the wind on surface currents . in Studies on Oceanography . Hamburg 1964, p. 129-139 .
- ↑ Heinrich Neumann: The drift of pollution on the surface of the North Sea ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on: Helgoländer scientific marine investigations 17, 81–93 (1968)
