Difficult, but sorted out – oil on board the wreck of Finnbirch

In my research on intact stability the loss of the ship Finnbirch has been an example of the urgency of balancing operational and design stability measures in order to increase the safety at sea, in Swedish waters, but also internationally. Read more here and here.

The wreck was also high on the Swedish list of wrecks that needed to be drained of oil in order to avoid further environmental damage (see also earlier post on the environmental risk from wrecks off Sweden). However, the work of draining the vessel of oil was not straight forward. This because Finnbirch is located at a depth of almost eighty meters.

Now in the summer of 2020 the wreck is drained of 88 cubic meters of heavy oil (see article in Swedish here). According to the Danish company tasked with the work it has it has been cold - and sometimes too poor visibility. In order to get the thick oil out, they have had to heat it with steam. The divers could only be down at the wreck for about 25 minutes and then it took at least two hours to get them to the surface.