This time things went well in the North Sea, a drama with a happy ending, so to speak. The car freighter Fremantle Highway, which caught fire off the Frisian island of Ameland last week, has not broken apart. The heavily damaged ship was towed to the Dutch port of Eemshaven on Friday without incident. The environmental catastrophe feared by many in the Wadden Sea did not materialize.
But once again the question arises as to whether the ecologically important Unesco World Heritage Site can be better protected. Neighbors have long been demanding that freight traffic be kept further away from the coast. From their point of view, it is only a matter of time before something happens again. Because the German Bight is one of the busiest areas in the world.
What is a risk ship? A definition is not easy to find
The freighter was still burning when Lower Saxony’s Environment Minister Christian Meyer (Greens) called on the federal government to require certain ships to use a route further from the coast. Especially in bad weather, the risk of an accident and an environmental disaster is great. “Consequences must finally be drawn from past accidents,” said Meyer Hanover general. “Lower Saxony has placed this demand in Berlin several times, but the federal government has still not implemented any concrete measures.” The accident of Fremantle Highway have again demonstrated the danger of a possible oil spill for the Wadden Sea, he added in an interview with the German Press Agency. “That’s why we demand that high-risk ships in particular sail much further away.”
What a risk ship is, however, would first have to be defined. The question isn’t easy to answer: is it all about size and draft because gigaships are harder to manoeuvre? Is it about the type of load? Or should every ship be considered a risk that carries large amounts of heavy fuel oil on board as fuel?
There are two important, internationally recognized shipping routes off the German and Dutch coasts. On each of them there is one eastbound lane and one westbound lane. The coastal route is officially called “Terschelling German Bight”. The deep-water route “German Bight Western Approach” runs further north – a good 40 kilometers from the Wadden Sea.
So far, only tankers transporting oil, gas or chemicals and of a certain size (roughly 140 to 150 meters long and 22 to 25 meters wide) are required to take the offshore route. This route is recommended for other large ships in bad weather, but is not mandatory.
In recent years, following two serious accidents, it has been particularly vehemently questioned whether traffic on the coastal route should be more restricted than in 1998 Pallas crashed in a part of the German Bight further to the north-east and at least 140 tons of oil spilled into the sea. The Pallas was not a tanker, but a timber freighter, and only had oil as fuel – but even that led to an oil spill that killed thousands of animals. Then in 2019 the giant container ship MSC Zoe on the “Terschelling German Bight” near the coast in rough seas and lost more than 340 containers, the Dutch parliament demanded that this route be closed to large ships. Almost three years passed before the then Minister of Transport, Barbara Visser, reported to the MPs that the wish could not be implemented. There is no support from neighboring countries for such a blocking, neither from Germany nor from Denmark.
In 2019, the Federal Council also appealed to the federal government to review the shipping suitability of the coastal route. At the time, this followed the view of the CSU-led Ministry of Transport: “The legally binding relocation of large, shallow container ships to the traffic separation scheme ‘German Bight – Western Approach’ is currently not considered necessary.”
On the coast and on the North Sea islands, many see things differently. The mayor of the fire Fremantle Highway Imminently threatened island of Ameland, Leo Pieter Stoel, said last week: “The further away the ships go from the Wadden Sea islands, the more time we have if something goes wrong.” The head of the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park, Peter Südbeck, said almost exactly the same thing in a “Tagesschau” interview: “The shipping routes must run far outside the national park so that there is enough time for countermeasures in an emergency.”
The shipping industry reacts cautiously to such demands. A spokeswoman for the Association of German Shipowners (VDR) refers to the accident of the Fremantle Highway that the specified use of the route further from the coast could also have disadvantages in the event of similar incidents. For firefighting, the way for the emergency services would be longer and more difficult, “in these cases, the material used has to be transported mainly by helicopter”. Deletion would take longer. For the day-to-day business of the shipowners, it is particularly important that the same rules apply internationally to all competitors as to which route may be traveled.
Hamburg is against longer routes in the North Sea – out of self-interest
A new regulation would most likely have greater effects on port operations: if ships have to make longer detours, ports that are further inland become less attractive. And the port of Hamburg is already difficult to reach due to the long journey through the Elbe. Correspondingly skeptical tones come from the economic authority of the Hanseatic city. “For the reliability of the flow of goods and in order to always have possible alternative routes available, restrictions on the routes through further specifications do not make sense from Hamburg’s point of view,” said a spokesman. The Port of Hamburg is going through difficult times anyway, in the competition with Rotterdam and Antwerp it has fallen further and further behind in container handling in recent years. Most recently, Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG even issued a profit warning for the current year in view of the poor economic situation.
In the discussions that have flared up again and again in recent years, the Federal Ministry of Transport has mainly withdrawn to legal reservations: Although part of the coastal route is in German sovereign territory and the other in the so-called “exclusive economic zone”, Germany cannot do as it sees fit control the traffic. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a subsidiary of the United Nations, must set regulations. Germany only implements these rules in its own “Startup Conditions Ordinance”. As far as changes are concerned, the federal governments saw little chance of success in recent years. As long as political pressure comes exclusively from the directly affected coastal region, there will probably be no advance at the IMO from Berlin.
A few more tractors would be something
There was at least one small change after the accident of the mega container freighter MSC Zoe However, from 2019 it did, again at the instigation of the Netherlands: In November 2019, the coast guard there began to recommend the deep-sea route to captains of large ships in bad weather. Germany has also been sending out such recommendations as nautical warnings since 2020. Both countries are currently waiting for these warnings to become an official part of the route descriptions and thus also be noted on nautical charts. A Dutch-led working group with Germany and Denmark had applied to the IMO in 2021.
What else could one do? The German North Sea Coast Protection Association, an association of municipalities and environmental groups, calls for so-called escort tugs, regardless of the route, which could take ships on a leash in severe weather conditions. And in addition, more emergency tugs are needed, which can quickly get to the unfortunate ship in the event of an accident.