Cold comfort for Smolninsky crew
Posted on | February 1, 2010 | 1 Comment
Mariners of a certain age might recall the terrible accidents which sometimes took place in Arctic waters, when storms and excessively low temperatures caused a build up of ice on the superstructures of ships causing a dangerous loss of stability.
Fishing boats were particularly prone and there were some heart-rending losses off the north coast of Iceland in the late 1960s, with whole crews drowned after they had lost their battle with the accretion of tons of frozen spray.
Better designed ships, but perhaps more importantly, very much better weather forecasts, now keep masters and skippers better informed of the conditions which may lead to ice-build up. Which is quite important, as there is an actual increase in the number of ships which are heading up into these extreme latitudes each year.
This is nothing whatever to do with global warming, but everything to do with the search for energy and precious metals in parts of the world which have been in the past, at least for creatures other than polar bears, marginal.
But last week there was a reminder of these old terrors from the other side of Russia, from the Sea of Okhotsk, where a reefer serving the fishing fleets became first disabled, then badly iced in the terrible conditions which prevailed. Heavy seas, extreme low temperatures, and a howling gale are nothing unusual in this inhospitable region, but the position of the 31 people aboard became grave as the weight of ice on the ship’s topside saw her assume a 30 degree list.
Desperately the crew of the Smolninsky turned to with axes to try and chop off the ice accretion. As a last resort the master turned the ship towards the icefield, some thirty miles distant, where there would at least be some shelter from the waves and spray, even if the temperature would not be any higher.
Painfully, steaming into the weather at some 2.5 knots the vessel made her way northwards towards the ice, in a desperate battle to reach shelter before the last remaining positive stability was lost, the crew fighting the ice quite literally for their lives. A supply boat, one of the powerful ice-strengthened craft serving the Sakhalin oilfields was standing by. Eventually, a helicopter took off some of the reefer’s passengers – fishermen who had already been rescued from the storm. And finally, with the list down to 25 degrees, the reefer made her way into the shelter of the ice, where, at least, frozen spray would no longer come aboard.
This incident, reported last week, had a happy outcome, but should remind us that for all the blithe talk about high latitude navigation, these can be terribly dangerous places for ships and men.
There are more of us going up in to polar waters, in the search for oil, gas and bulk minerals, but there is also insufficient real ice experience to go round the available tonnage. You cannot manufacture ice extertise out of thin air, while simulators are of limited use. We are still determining optimum design criteria for these specialist craft, with specialist icebreaker tonnage exceedingly limited in availability, and the fleet ageing. The safety implications are, it would seem, quite obvious.
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February 8th, 2010 @ 4:25 am
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