Damaged merchant ship may prove headache for Mumbai:

What began as a scare for Mumbai's iconic sea link has now turned into a 9,000-tonne headache for Mumbai. The merchant ship that ran aground off Mumbai's Juhu coast may be too damaged to be moved from its present location.

In fact, sources suggest that the ship is likely to be grounded there for several days and with India's record of not be able to remove grounded ship from the coastline, this could well become a 145-metre eyesore for Mumbaikars.

One of the options could be to dismantle the ship on the spot. But environmentalists fear that this could prove hazardous.

The Directorate General of Shipping is probing the incident, while the Coast Guard continues to closely monitor the situation.

The ship in question - MV Wisdom - drifted dangerously close to the Bandra-Worli sealink.

The ship was headed for the Alang shipbreaking yard in Gujarat from Colombo. As it approached the Bombay dockyard, it was being tugged away by another ship.

However, due to rough weather, the rope holding the tug and the ship snapped and Wisdom began drifting towards Mumbai. It finally ran aground barely a few metres off the Juhu beach.

The options

A team of coast guards is expected to inspect the stranded ship to assess the damage and decide the next course of action.

If the ship is damaged at the bottom, the coast guard may decide to wait for at least a week as regular high tides of more than four metres are expected over the next seven days, which would make towing the ship highly dangerous.

If, however, the damage is minimal, they could try to tow the ship during a high tide. The coast guard can even look at dismantling a few parts of the ship to reduce the weight to make towing simpler.

However, if there is considerable damage to the ship, it might have to be completely dismantled on the spot.

Harmful materials

Breaking a ship is a specialised task that requires heavy cutting equipment and other infrastructure.

Grave concerns have been raised in the past over health and environmental hazards caused due to dismantling of ships. Harmful materials may include asbestos, poly chlorinated biphenyls, lead, chromite, mercury, fumes, radiation and balast water. MV Wisdom might have onboard several hundred litres of heavy fuels, including compressed gas cylinders, organic and firefighting liquids, capable of causing a huge ecological disaster off Mumbai's coast.

About Wisdom

The ship that has run aground off Mumbai's Juhu-Chowpatty beach is decommissioned merchant vessel MV Wisdom.

Commissioned in 1985, the Singapore-owned container vessel is owned by Al United Maritime Business Pvt. Ltd.

The 9,000-ton vessel was being towed by the MV Seabulk Plover from Colombo to Gujarat's Alang shipyard to be broken down for scrap. The ship is 147 metres long and 22 metres wide.

What went wrong

The owners of MV Wisdom had hired the MV Seabulk Plover to tow the 9,000-ton container vessel from Colombo to Alang in Gujarat to be broken down into scrap. The ship departed from Colombo late on Thursday.

On Saturday afternoon, the tether connecting the two ships snapped in rough weather while the ships were about 12 nautical miles South West of Mumbai.

Unmanned and unpowered, the massive vessel began to drift. With a north-easterly bearing without power, it became slave to wind and ocean currents. The Coast Guard put its vessle ICGS Sankalp on alert to monitor the runaway tanker.

If its drift remained unchallenged, the MV Wisdom would have sliced into the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, a disaster for the city.

 Thankfully, as the ship drifted closer and closer to the coast, it was stopped in its tracks by the sea bed. It ran aground just three km off the Taj Lands end around 8PM on Saturday. Three-km is a mere nothing in nautical terms.

What the world does

By no means is the grounding of a ship, even a large container vessel, unheard of and as Indian maritime agencies try to get their heads around pushing out the 9,000-ton MV Wisdom from off Mumbai's Juhu-Chowpatty, it's worth considering how the world deals with these maritime nightmares.

A handful of private firms in Europe and the US provide specialised salvage services especially for large ships that have run aground. Teams attempt to refloat the ship using various techniques at high tide and then tow it out to sea with 'supertugs', anchors and the ship's own propulsion if possible.

But refloating a behemoth of a vessel is easier said than done. Refloating it involves an against-all-odds process of coaxing every bit of dispensable weight out of the vessel and squeezing every bit of buoyancy out of its hull.

While this may be completely out of the question for Indian agencies, the US Navy SEALS once salvaged a grounded American submarine from off the coast of San Diego in a classified operation that involved using underwater explosives to free the submarine from rocks that had wedged it in.

Ships that have run aground

The 9,000-ton hulk sitting off Mumbai's Juhu-Chowpatty might seem like a curse, but the truth is large vessels have run aground across the world fairly frequently. So India's maritime agencies can take comfort that they at least haven't been singled out for this huge headache.

In June 2007, the Panamanian heavy carrier MV Pasha Bulker, almost nine times the bulk of the MV Wisdom, ran aground off the coast of New South Wales in Australia. It was successfully refloated and towed to Japan by a specialised salvage team.

In August 2008, a Hong Kong-owned container vessel MV New Delhi Express ran aground right outside the Karachi port while it was en route to India. Three tugs managed to successfully refloat the vessel and tow it back to deeper waters.

India had a recent brush with a cargo vessel running aground. In August last year, the Nand Aparajita cargo barge hit rocks and was stranded off the Lakshadweek coast. After strenuous efforts over months by the Coast Guard and Navy, the ship was finally salvaged.

However, there is reason to be concerned. There are at least three ships off the coast of Goa and Vizag that ran aground many years ago, but remain unsalvaged.

Source: India Today. 13 June 2011

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