After two cargo ships collided in the North Sea near Helgoland, the search is on for the freighter’s four missing sailors Verity been set. The accident command in Cuxhaven assumes that they are no longer alive. Several sea rescue cruisers from the German Society for the Rescue of Shipwrecked People (DGzRS) and other official ships had previously searched for the missing people.
The weather conditions deteriorated slightly during the night, said a spokesman for the accident command. With rain showers and wind force six, the waves were between two and three meters high. The North Sea has a water temperature of around twelve degrees at the site of the accident.
After one of the freighters sank as a result of the collision on Tuesday morning, rescue workers were able to rescue two sailors from the water. One sailor was recovered dead.
The freighter accident Verity and Polesia occurred around 22 kilometers southwest of the offshore island of Heligoland and 31 kilometers northeast of the East Frisian island of Langeoog. How this came about is still unclear. The accident site is one of the busiest sea areas in the world. According to the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH), two internationally established shipping routes run in an east-west direction in the German Bight.
The one flying the Great Britain flag is 91 meters long Verity According to the accident command, it had loaded so-called steel coils, i.e. rolls made of large sheets of metal. The ship from the British-Dutch shipping company Faversham Ships was on its way from Bremen to Immingham, a port on the English North Sea coast. The other freighter, the larger one at 190 meters long Polesia, was flying the Bahamas flag on its way from Hamburg to La Coruña in Spain. The freighter was able to travel to Cuxhaven under its own power.
The sunken freighter Verity had around 130 cubic meters of diesel fuel on board. “We have to assume that fuel has leaked,” said the accident command spokesman on Tuesday. According to Allianz, collisions have been the second most common cause of shipping incidents in recent years. Last year alone, 280 collision accidents involving larger ships were reported. In 2022, they accounted for around one in ten of the more than 3,000 shipping incidents reported worldwide, making them the second most common cause of such incidents after machinery damage or failure.
If you look at the past ten years, from 2013 to the end of 2022, almost 3,100 collision events with ships were reported. Even during this longer period, collisions were the second most common cause of ship accidents worldwide after machine damage or failure.