OSLO (Reuters) – Emergency response teams stepped on Tuesday to prevent a Dutch cargo ship adrift in the North Sea from sinking and causing an oil spill off the coast of Norway after the crew had of being evacuated in stormy weather.
Images released by the Norwegian Rescue Coordination Center showed that some of the twelve crew members jumped into the sea on Monday afternoon from the bad Hendrika Eemslift list before being rescued by helicopter. Others were hoisted directly from the deck.
All were rescued, but the ship has continued to drift ashore. It is currently located about 74 km from the Norwegian coast.
The wind is expected to gradually move the ship towards a course parallel to the coast, which will give more time to the recovery operation, Hans Petter Mortensholm of the Norwegian Coastal Administration told Reuters.
“Our calculations now indicate a window of opportunity to act, which extends until shortly after noon on Wednesday,” he said. “The risk of pollution is our main concern.”
The Hendrika has about 350 tons of heavy oil and 50 tons of diesel in its tanks, the Coastal Administration said.
Smit Salvage, a subsidiary of Dutch marine services company Boskalis, told Reuters he had been hired to try to save the ship and was mobilizing a team to send it to Norway later Tuesday.
If safety allows, Smit would try to get his own crew aboard the Hendrika and link the ship with the so-called anchor handling tug, a powerful ship built to move platforms for the oil industry.
“Bringing it to a tow line and a quieter place is the goal,” Smit Salvage spokeswoman Martijn Schuttevaer said.
A Norwegian Coast Guard boat is waiting in the area and could also be used for towing, the Coast Administration said.
Built in 2015 and registered in the Netherlands, the 116.6-meter (366-foot) Eendlift Hendrika is a yacht transport boat that carries smaller boats on its deck, according to Starclass Yacht Transport, based in Monaco. , which markets the services of the ship.
One of the smaller boats tied to the deck fell in the storm, the Coast Administration said.
Reports by Terje Solsvik in Oslo and Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam; Edited by David Goodman, Gareth Jones and David Evans