The shipping company Richard Schröder from Hamburg ordered a dry freighter from the Hamburg Norderwerft Köser & Meyer in 1955 . This launched the general cargo ship Erich Schröder on November 10, 1955 under construction number 818 . After the shipyard test drive from December 29, 1955, the ship was delivered to the shipping company on January 17, 1956. The Erich Schröder was designed as a three-island ship with an aft engine room and a central bridge structure. It had three hatches, the loading gear of which consisted of a 25-ton boom and ten 5-ton booms. In August 1962 the ship was transferred to the shipping company Richard Schröder KG in Hamburg and sold to Ocean Combustion Service NV in Rotterdam in February 1972.
Use as a waste incineration ship
From February 11, 1972, the Dutch company had the ship converted into an incineration ship for chemical waste at the KA van Brink shipyard in Rotterdam. The ship was equipped with tanks for the transport of the waste to be incinerated and two incinerators arranged on the aft ship, in which the waste was incinerated at temperatures of 1,300 to 1,400 degrees Celsius. On September 15, 1972, the shipyard delivered the completed ship to Vulcanus Shipping Pte. Ltd. in Singapore from which it set off as Vulcanus . The ship was managed by Ocean Combustion Service, the ship management was taken over by the renowned shipping company Deutsche Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft “Hansa” in Bremen. The ship was mainly used from Rotterdam in the North Sea, but also took on other missions. In 1977, Vulcanus disposed of over eight million liters of the defoliant Agent Orange from the Vietnam War in the South Pacific .
After the bankruptcy of DDG Hansa on August 18, 1980, Vulcanus continued to operate until 1983. In 1983, the ship received a completely new bow with facilities for the transport of chemical waste at the Jurong shipyard in Singapore. The old forecastle was scrapped from May 4, 1983 at Lien Ho Hsing Steel Enterprise Company in Kaohsiung. After the renovation, the ship was put back under the name Vulcanus I for waste incineration. Growing resistance from environmental associations led to the decision at the third North Sea Protection Conference of the North Sea countries in 1990 to legally prohibit waste incineration at sea on December 31, 1991. The decision was adopted by the OSPAR Commission on June 23, 1990 . The ship was then sold to the Danish shipping company Simonsen that same year.
Further career
The Rederiet MH Simonsen in Svendborg registered the ship in 1990 as Oragreen on the Simonsen Tankers in Nassau (Bahamas) and had it converted into a bunker tanker. The ship remained with Simonsen until 2004, on May 3, 2004 the Nigerian shipping company Kotram Nigeria in Lagos / Apapa took over the ship in Dakar (Senegal) and had it registered as Kotrando . Remarkably, the ship reappeared on September 27, 2005 with the old name Oragreen with a pirate attack off West Africa. In 2012 the Kotrando was finally reported as a total loss.
literature
Garbage incineration ship "Vulcanus" . In: Hansa - central body for shipping, shipbuilding, port . Vol. 111, No.7 April 1974, p.519/520 .
