Olympic Bravery
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The new ship Olympic Bravery was an oil tanker that stranded on January 24, 1976 on its maiden voyage , after having covered only around 35 nautical miles on its own, on the coast of the island of Ouessant (Ushant) near the village of Kergadou and was completely lost.
history
The Olympic Bravery was launched on August 11, 1975 at the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire under hull number P25 and completed on January 21, 1976. The client was the Monte-Carlo- based tanker shipping company Olympic Maritime , which was part of the legacy of the Greek tanker king Aristotle Onassis , who died in 1975 .
While the majority of the new tankers were launched at the height of the tank crisis at the respective shipyards, the Olympic Bravery was to be brought to Norway . In the morning at 5.30 a.m. on January 23, 1976, the ship, which was sailing under the Liberian flag, began its test voyages under the command of Captain Efstratios Tsioros, after which the crossing from Brest to its berth in Farsund should follow. After a series of previous machine problems and seven blackouts in a row, the propulsion system finally failed completely on the morning of the following day and the Olympic Bravery began to drift towards the island of Ouessant. An attempt was made to anchor the ship, but the anchor broke and the ship ended up stranded on the rocky coast of Brittany at eight in the morning .
After it was not possible to get the ship back onto the open water with salvage tugs , a more extensive salvage contract was not signed until March 12th. But the very next day the ship broke in two due to the steadily deteriorating weather, whereupon about 1,200 tons of the bunkered fuel oil got into the sea. The French army tried to clean up the polluted coast, killing four helicopter crews. Finally, on May 2nd, the 400 tons of heavy fuel oil remaining in the bunker tanks were heated and pumped out.
The remaining wreck was sold to the scrap dealer Braganti from Marseilles for demolition, but remained in place at 48 ° 28 ′ 12 ″ N , 5 ° 6 ′ 36 ″ W as it could no longer be recovered .
Aftermath
At the beginning of 1976, after surviving the 1973 oil crisis and the reopening of the Suez Canal , there were already almost 400 unemployed tankers of this size around the world, which had previously been built especially with a view to the oil transport routes changed by the Six Day War . The Olympic Bravery was already ordered in 1970/71, when it was not foreseeable how quickly this market segment would collapse after 1973. Olympic Maritime SA later received the insured sum of 50 million US dollars from the ship insurer Lloyd's of London , the largest sum ever paid out in such a case. On the one hand, that was about 15 million more than it had cost to build the ship, but on the other, at least 25 to 30 million dollars more than the ship was worth at the time of its delivery. "The superfluous tanker had been turned into liquid money", judged the magazine "Der Spiegel" in 1978. In seafaring circles this was commented behind the hand with the remark "Onassis at his best", because behind the shipping company Olympic Maritime stood a holding company of 1975 deceased major shipowner Aristotle Socrates Onassis. The company, under the leadership of the former Exxon manager Louis Anderson, used the insurance money paid out by Olympic Bravery a little later to purchase two comparable oil tankers, with which a renewed increase in freight rates was awaited.
literature
- Norman Hooke: Modern Shipping Disasters 1963–1987 . Lloyd's of London Press, London 1989, ISBN 1-85044-211-8 .
- Jochen Brennecke: History of Shipping . Sigloch Edition, Künzelsau 1981, ISBN 3-8003-0169-5 (delivery: Stürtz Verlag, Würzburg).
- Calculated risk . In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 1978, p. 78-98 ( online ).
Web links
- Page with the history of the wreck
- TV news clip on YouTube (French)
- TV news clip on YouTube (French)
- Pictures of the stranded Olympic Bravery ( Memento from February 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive )