Manhattan (ship)
.jpg) The 1969 Manhattan in Port of Chester, Philadelphia
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The turbine tanker Manhattan is to date the largest merchant ship built in the United States . At the same time, after a renovation, it was the largest icebreaker in the world. In 1969 he became the first tanker to cross the Northwest Passage from the east coast of the United States to Alaska .
description
The ship was a super tanker converted into an icebreaker and had a length of 306.9 m with a displacement of 152,407 tons. Its turbines developed 43,000 hp. It was built in 1962 at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy , Massachusetts . The conversion was carried out on the Sun Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company , whereby the ship was divided into four parts and the bow was exchanged for a spoon icebreaker bow made of 38 mm thick steel - the spoon shape allows an icebreaker to slide onto the ice sheets and during the journey breaks this through its weight. The propellers and rudder systems already differed from other super tankers in the original delivery, because a two-screw system with double rudder was used.
Northwest Passage
After the ship left Chester , Pennsylvania on August 24, 1969, it hit ice for the first time on September 2 en route to Baffin Island . The tanker then took the northern route through the Viscount-Melville Sound on September 9 and reached the McClure Strait on September 11 . There the tanker hit an ice floe 20 m thick and around 1.6 km in diameter, which it broke at a speed of 10 knots. It was the thickest ice that had ever been cut by a ship. But when the ship reached the sheets of pack ice piled up by the wind, the limits were reached. The Manhattan got stuck and could only be freed by her small escort ships, the Canadian icebreakers John A. Macdonald and Louis S. St-Laurent and the US icebreakers Staten Island and Northwind, as well as thanks to the exploration by several helicopters. The tanker then reached Sachs Harbor on the southern route on September 15 and Prudhoe Bay , Alaska on September 19 , picked up a symbolic barrel of oil and set off on its way back. The tanker reached New York City on November 12th . The research trip, with a total cost of US $ 54 million, was supported by Humble Oil & Refining Co. ( Exxon / Esso) to find a transport route for the oil from the Prudhoe Bay oil field, discovered in 1968 . During the expedition, the Manhattan was commanded by Captain Roger A. Steward.
In April 1970 the ship was supposed to prove on a second voyage that a passage would also be possible in the arctic winter, but failed before Baffin Island and undertook some research tasks instead of the voyage to Alaska. As a result of the project, the oil transport by ship was no longer pursued and instead the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built from 1975 to 1977 .
The voyage raised the question of whether the Northwest Passage is Canadian territorial waters (Canadian position) or an international waterway or strait (US position (see law of the sea )). The climate change and the associated defrosting the ice currently has exacerbated the issue.
It was not until 2008 that a cargo ship, the Camilla Desgagnés , passed the Northwest Passage again. It served from Montreal , Canada, from settlements in the far northwest of Canada.
The Manhattan remained in service as a tanker until 1987 before she ran aground and sank on July 15, 1987 by Typhoon Thelma off Yosu in South Korea . On July 27, 1987, the ship was lifted. It was first sold to a scraper in Hong Kong and then resold to a Chinese demolition yard. On September 1, 1987, the ship left Yosu in tow and arrived in China a few days later for demolition.
literature
- Bern Keating, Tomas Sennett: Through the Northwest Passage for Oil . In: National Geographic Magazine . tape 137 , no. 3 , 1970.
- The First Arctic Tanker . ( Memento of March 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: Surveyor , magazine of the American Bureau of Shipping , summer 2005, pages 18–22 (PDF, 1.8 MB; English)
Web links
- Report on the SS Manhattan (English)
- Report on the Northwest Passage (english) ( not available page , search in web archives )
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Manhattan in the Miramar Ship Index (only for registered users)
- ↑ Construction list of the Bethlehem Steel Company, Quincy (English)
- ↑ Pictures of the conversion at Auke Visser's International Esso Tankers site (English)
- ^ Notification that Humble Oil & Refining Co. Will Merge Into Parent Corp., Exxon Corp., Effective 1/1/73. , on: nrc.gov, accessed August 24, 2018 (PDF, 61 kB)
- ^ First commercial ship sails through Northwest Passage ( April 1, 2014 memento on the Internet Archive ), Alaska Dispatch, September 7, 2010.
- ↑ Entry at Auke Visser's International Esso Tankers site (English)