Boskalis Annual Report 2018

44

SMIT SALVAGE PULLS OUT ALL THE STOPS AFTER FIRE ON ENORMOUS VESSEL

“A gigantic vessel, a gigantic fire and a gigantic job”. That is how global operations manager Thijs van der Jagt described the salvage operation on the Maersk Honam. A devastating fire broke out in the three front holds in March 2018. The firefighting and salvage challenge was daunting and SMIT Salvage also had its work cut out to deal with the aftermath of the disaster.

With a length of 350 meters, a width of 53 meters and a cargo capacity of 15,282 TEU, the Maersk Honam, which was built in 2017, is one of the world’s largest container vessels. It was on its way to Europe from Asia in early March with 7,860 containers (12,400 TEU) on board, when Maersk informed us that a large fre had broken out in one of the three holds towards the bows of the vessel. The Honam was in the Arabian Sea, 1,660 kilometers southeast of the port of Salalah in Oman, and 1,500 kilometers southwest of Mumbai, when the fre broke out. Almost all the containers at the front of the ship had been melted by the flames, and the accommodation behind the containers and the bridge had also been damaged by the fre. “Immediately after getting the call, we sent a ten-man team from Singapore to Mumbai and chartered a vessel to take them to the Honam, a fve-day journey. At the same time, we sent a salvage team from Rotterdam and Cape Town to Salalah,” Van der Jagt said. The salvage team consisted of more than thirty specialists, including fve maritime frefghters, a maritime chemist and a medic. A container vessel was mobilized from Salalah as a transport and accommodation vessel for the team. A vessel with frefghting equipment was mobilized by the Indian coastguard which immediately started to work with remote instructions from the salvage team.