The salvage operations on the container ship Rena, which sank on 5 October last year off the Astrolabe Reef in New Zealand, were completed in the middle of June, after more than 8 months of work by the salvage teams. It took 254 days to remove the pollutants and the containers from the wreck. This period could have been halved if the ship had been equipped with Fast Oil Recovery Systems (FOR Systems), one of the major technologies of the maritime passive safety industry.
When pre-installed on board ships, those safety system circuits enable the holds used for transporting goods and the fuel tanks to be secured in order to standardize salvage operations. Thanks to the plans and diagrams that show the details of these circuits and the connectors placed directly on the deck, salvage teams can easily access the tanks and remove pollutants, and thus refloat the ship more quickly.
FOR Systems therefore help to save considerable amounts of time and money.
Gilles Longue`ve, General Manager of JLMD Ecologic Group stated, “The risk of accidents at sea has never been so high: the size of ships is increasing and traffic is becoming even denser. Given the situation it is essential that shipowners, shipyards, insurers and regulators take into
account the aftermath of an accident. Today there are simple solutions. If the Rena had been
equipped with maritime passive safety equipments such as FOR Systems, managing the consequences of the emergency would have been significantly easier. It would have avoided New Zealand having to experience its worst ever pollution and saved the authorities and the owners of the Rena the tens of millions of dollars they had to spend on complex salvage operations.”