Most of us got our crash course in ship salvage from the Ever Given. That’s the 1,300-foot container ship that jammed itself sideways across the Suez Canal and spent about a week as the internet’s favorite meme. Crews dredged sand from around the hull, waited for a high tide, and a small fleet of tugboats pulled it free after six days.<\/p>\n
The MSC Baltic III isn’t getting that kind of ending. It’s been stuck in a cove on the west coast of Newfoundland for 19 months, and it’s leaving in pieces. On September 9, the first real chunk of the hull itself came off: a big section of the bow, which crews then dragged up onto the shore to be cut into scrap.<\/p>\n
It’s a pretty strange thing to see happen to a ship this size. The Baltic III is 679 feet long and was built to carry 2,478 TEU. TEU stands for twenty-foot equivalent units, which is basically a way of saying the ship had room for 2,478 of those standard 20-foot steel boxes you see stacked on trains and truck trailers.<\/p>\n
It got there the hard way. The ship was running from Montreal to Corner Brook when it lost power in a winter storm, about 12 nautical miles outside the Bay of Islands. Its crew couldn’t get an anchor to hold, and the ship was driven ashore in Cedar Cove, just west of Lark Harbour. (The Coast Guard’s own paperwork also calls it Wild Cove, which feels about right.) A Canadian search and rescue helicopter airlifted all 20 people aboard that same day.<\/p>\n
You’d think a few big tugs and a good high tide could do for the Baltic III what they did in Suez. The catch is what the ship is sitting on. Within a week, a dive team found about 75% of the hull resting on the seabed, and a few days later the Canadian Coast Guard confirmed significant holes in it. Before the month was out, the Coast Guard had said flat out that the ship couldn’t be safely refloated.<\/p>\n
Then it got worse. Bruce English, a senior response officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, told CBC this spring that a rock about 14 feet tall was sticking up through the engine room. So the Ever Given was stuck in sand and clay, and the Baltic III has a boulder in its basement. Storms over the last winter also cracked and buckled the hull on both sides, and by December the stern had settled deeper into the water.<\/p>\n
The first year or so went into getting the nasty stuff out. The ship had roughly 1,760 tons (1,600 metric tons) of heavy fuel and marine gas oil aboard, and the heavy fuel had to be heated before it would even pump. The bulk of it was off by that first summer, shipped out on other MSC vessels calling at Corner Brook, but some residual fuel is still in the holds. The Coast Guard reported a slight sheen (basically a thin film of oil on the water) outside the wreck this month.<\/p>\n
The 472 containers took even longer. A lot of them were below deck and underwater, and some were packed with food that had been rotting in seawater for months. The Coast Guard’s updates politely mention hydrogen sulfide gas and “an unpleasant smell,” which I’m going to go ahead and translate as a cove that smelled like rotten eggs. By July 16, crews had 471 of the containers off. The last one’s too damaged to move, so it’s riding the wreck in.<\/p>\n
Very slowly. MSC hired Resolve Marine, a salvage company out of Fort Lauderdale, to take the wreck apart, and the Coast Guard reviews the plan and watches for pollution. Crews started cutting in June with everything on top of the hull: hatch covers, deck cranes and machinery, and the deckhouse with the bridge in it.<\/p>\n
Then came the chains. Mara DuVernois, Resolve’s salvage naval architect and project manager, told local radio station VOCM the plan was to run three-inch anchor chain, the stud-link kind, out to the ship and hook it up to twelve hydraulic chain pullers rated at 300 metric tons (about 330 tons) each. Stud-link chain is the heavy stuff with a little bar across the middle of every link to keep it from kinking or tangling, and it’s what big ships hang their anchors from. The pulling started on July 31.<\/p>\n
Timing is the trick. Crews pull during high tides, when the water gives what’s left of the hull a little extra buoyancy, and every chunk of steel they cut off makes that buoyancy count for more. The Coast Guard calls the job of taking weight off the wreck “lightering,” which basically just means making the ship lighter. “Each time they continue to chop off more weight, the vessel comes ahead,” English told CBC News<\/a>. If you’ve ever dragged a swamped kayak up a beach, you get the idea. Dump some water, pull, repeat.<\/p>\n By September 9, the wreck had moved about 174 feet (53 meters) toward shore. If my math’s right, that’s a little over four feet a day on average since the pulling started. Frankly, that’s a painful pace for a ship, but it’s arguably the only option when the ship won’t float. Moving a big ship even a short way is a bigger job than you’d think, too. It took about a year of planning to nudge the battleship Wisconsin four feet off her pier in Norfolk<\/a>, and that ship was actually floating.<\/p>\n Which brings us to the bow.<\/p>\n According to the Canadian Coast Guard’s latest update<\/a>, a big part of the bow section came off on September 9, and crews pulled it up onto the shore, where it’ll be chopped into smaller chunks. The Maritime Executive<\/a> thinks charges were used for the final separation, going by the sound on the Coast Guard’s video. The Coast Guard’s own update doesn’t say how the cut was made, and I haven’t found anyone from the salvage team confirming it, so I’d call the explosives likely but not confirmed.<\/p>\n The Coast Guard also hasn’t given a length for that section, so I can’t tell you exactly how much of the original 679 feet is sitting on the beach now. What I can tell you is that the ship’s in two pieces. “It’s simply amazing\u2026 the stern piece has separated from the bow,” English told VOCM.<\/p>\n That same September 14 update puts the total removed at about 6,280 tons (5,700 metric tons), close to half the ship’s total tonnage. The previous update, on September 9, had it at about 4,630 tons (4,200 metric tons), or roughly 40%. It’s all headed for a metal recycler in Stephenville, by barge or by truck.<\/p>\n So what’s left in the cove?<\/p>\n Mostly the stern, still aground, plus that one damaged container. English told CBC on September 12 that the contractors will keep working into the fall until the weather stops them, then put the site into caretaker mode for the winter and pick it back up in the spring. Given what last winter did to this hull, I’d be a little surprised if the stern went anywhere before then.<\/p>\n The wreck has also turned into a bit of a tourist attraction, according to CBC, with people hiking down the trail near Cedar Cove to get photos. If you’re tempted, the Coast Guard is asking the public to stay away from the work site, and it’s had a one-nautical-mile emergency and drone restriction zone around the ship. So no, you can’t fly your drone over it either.<\/p>\n The salvage company expects the whole job, shoreline restoration included, to run into 2027, according to The Maritime Executive. Todd Schauer, Resolve’s director of projects, told CBC in May that it could wrap up as early as summer 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of us got our crash course in ship salvage from the Ever Given. That’s the 1,300-foot container ship that … <\/p>\nThe stern is staying put for now<\/h2>\n