Information still awaited on re-shipment of cargo ALAN PEAT IT WAS calm seas off Lyme Bay in Dorset, England last week – ideal for the salvors working frantically to off-load the oil and cargo from the stricken vessel, the MSC Napoli. The 275m (900ft), 62 000-tonne deadweight ship was carrying 2 394 containers, of which 103 went overboard – and probably more than 2 000 were bound for SA. But, although the first containers salvaged were bound for the nearby Portland harbour on Thursday morning, local cargo receivers were awaiting information from shipping line MSC about its plans for the re-shipment of cargo desperately needed in SA. The line has not as yet declared a general average and information is still awaited on how it intends to forward any undamaged containers to SA. “To date no plans have been made available,” said Andrew Robinson, director of the admiralty trade and transport department at Durban lawyers, Deneys Reitz. Robinson recognises that the salvage of the containers will be “an extremely tricky” and time-consuming task. This was confirmed by an FTW source in Smit Amandla – the local arm of the Dutch Smit operation that is handling the salvage of the vessel and its contents. Depending on the weather, he said, it would probably take over a month to clear the wreck of its cargo – but this could stretch to months if the weather goes sour. The Smit team is currently clearing deck cargo – and that’s the comparatively easy bit, according to our salvage expert. It’s only once they get the hatches off the holds that they’ll see inside the vessel – and this is likely to be when the fun begins, with the MSC Napoli listing by about 32 degrees, and the slot guides for the containers in the holds expected to be buckled and bent. The cranes on the specialised salvage barges attending the wreck certainly have more than enough lifting capacity for moving full containers – but there’s likely to be a lot of containers jammed in their slots, and that means all sorts of cutting and bending to free them. Meantime, Denys Reitz, working on the records of the last three major marine insurance “catastrophes” in SA, has calculated that the average value per container in these cases was US$35 000-US$40 000. Multiplying these figures by the current estimate of 2 000 SA-bound containers on the MSC Napoli, and Robinson rates the overall cost for local insurers and cargo owners to be “over R500-million”.
