One Person Missing After Oil Tanker
and Container Ship Collide in the North Sea
A container
ship hit a stationary U.S.-flagged oil tanker on Monday, causing explosions on board
and forcing the crews to abandon ship.
·
The Stena Immaculate, a 600-foot long oil tanker, was anchored in the North Sea when
it was struck by a container ship called the Solong
·
Ernst Russ, a Hamburg-based
shipping company that owns the Solong, said in a
statement that both ships had sustained serious damage
·
Stena Immaculate was anchored
just off the coast of the mouth of the River Humber, near Hull, when it was
hit, while the Solong, sailing under the Portuguese
flag, was on its way from Scotland to the Netherlands.
·
The area had been foggy on
Monday morning, which may have contributed to visibility issues.
·
The Solong
was carrying mixed cargo that included alcohol and 15 containers of sodium
cyanide
·
Sodium cyanide, a white powder,
is a highly toxic material that can be a deadly poison but also has variety of
industrial uses, including in mining, metal extraction and chemical
manufacturing.
[ABS News Service/11.03.2025]
One crew member
from a container ship was missing after the vessel collided with a U.S.-flagged
oil tanker off the northeastern coast of England on Monday, causing multiple explosions
and forcing the crews of both ships to abandon their vessels.
The Stena Immaculate, a 600-foot long oil tanker, was anchored in the North
Sea when it was struck by a container ship called the Solong, according to
Crowley, the Florida-based company that
manages the tanker.
The collision
caused a cargo tank containing jet fuel to be ruptured and “fuel was reported released,”
the company said in a statement. “The Stena Immaculate crew abandoned the vessel
following multiple explosions onboard,” it said, adding that “all Crowley mariners
are safe.”
Ernst Russ, a Hamburg-based shipping company that owns the Solong, said in a statement that both ships
had sustained serious damage and that one of its 14 crew members
was missing.
“Efforts to
locate the missing crew member are ongoing,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Later on Monday
night, Britain’s coast guard said in a statement that “after an extensive search for the missing crew member,
sadly they have not been found and the search has ended.” It added that both vessels
remained on fire.
Tracking data
from Marine Traffic, a website that monitors the movement of vessels, showed that
the Stena Immaculate was anchored just off the coast of
the mouth of the River Humber, near Hull, when it was hit, while the Solong, sailing under the Portuguese flag, was on its
way from Scotland to the Netherlands.
The incident
happened during daylight hours, raising questions about how the two ships had collided.
Graham Stuart,
a local lawmaker, said in a video statement that one person had been hospitalized but said he believed that the remaining
crew members from both vessels were safe.
He noted that
if the jet fuel leak was able to escape from the tanker in large quantities, “it
could have a devastating environmental impact.”
“I’m calling
for a unified command structure to be brought in to make sure there is proper accountability
for both the human and ecological impacts of this collision,” he added.
Initial images
shared by the BBC showed fire and thick black smoke rising from the ships, and local
authorities said that in the immediate aftermath, a number of people had been taken
to area hospitals.
The British
coast guard said it was “coordinating the emergency response to reports of a collision
between a tanker and cargo vessel off the coast of East Yorkshire,” and that an
alarm was first raised at 9:48 a.m. local time.
Rescue helicopters
and lifeboats were deployed, as well as vessels with “firefighting capability,”
the coast guard said in a statement.
The coast guard
added that it was assessing “the likely counter pollution response required.”
Martyn Boyers,
the chief executive of the port of Grimsby East, spoke to Sky News, a British news
channel, and said that the area had been foggy on Monday
morning, which may have contributed to visibility issues.
“This morning,
it’s been very foggy, and the fog has never lifted,” he added.
Crowley, a U.S.-based
logistics, marine and energy company, serves both government and commercial contracts.
The tanker had been previously
approved to be chartered on a short-term basis to serve U.S. government operations. The Solong was carrying mixed cargo that included alcohol
and 15 containers of sodium cyanide, according to Lloyd’s List intelligence,
which provides shipping insights. The size of those containers was not immediately
clear.
A spokesman
for the East Midlands Ambulance Service, which covers the local area, said that
36 patients were assessed at the Grimsby port by its ambulance crews and that “none
required transporting to hospital.”
Jonathan Roach,
a container shipping analyst at Braemar, a London ship broker, said that the Solong was a relatively small ship — 140 meters, or around 460
feet long — doing short runs from Rotterdam down Britain’s east coast in the North
Sea.
The Stena Immaculate
was in a well-known anchorage off Hull, and in a situation like that, the rule of
the sea is “the vessel not at anchor has to give way,” he said, because it is much
more difficult for the anchored ship to avoid a collision. He noted that the area
was relatively busy with a variety of ships, including ferries, adding, “We have
to be thankful no one was killed.”
Experts who
are looking at the potential environmental impact of the incident noted that it
was too early to fully understand the fallout from the crash.
David Slater,
an honorary professor in the School of Engineering at Cardiff University, said that
if jet fuel had leaked from the Stena Immaculate, that made it more likely that
the crash site would catch on fire.
“The upside
is it’s less of an environmental problem than black crude oil,” he said in a statement.
“In some cases like this, it’s better to leave it to burn,
but that depends on how much fuel is leaking.”